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?

cute idea for a hot take but afaik there isn’t evidence that ai systems can, uh, effectively record and codify tacit knowledge in institutions.

AustLII www.austlii.edu.au (1995 - ) and the other LIIs in the Free Access to Law Movement still stick to the ideals of the 90s, survive and sometimes thrive.

The Oxford "partnership" is certainly part of a concerted international effort by openAI to sweeten up the sector through exemplar agreements with high prestige institutions openai.com/index/introd...

TL;DR A plea for @ofcom.bsky.social to address some difficult but basic questions of scope and compliance responsibility in the #OnlineSafetyAct.

We also still have First Monday.

Will Oxford disclose how much it paid (or did not pay) for this? Surely a sweetheart deal (has research money thrown in!) so OpenAI can plaster Oxford over its marketing and raid other unis’ fees, library budgets to throw into the sector’s massive inference funding chasm.

there are often big panics around terms and condition changes that go viral, but this one seems to have distinguished itself by clickwrap contract permission to *take academics’ literal voices and use them to market the platform?*

is this right? our unwritten constitution is, I thought, entirely transmitted by bards moving from town to town, teaching songs to the local folk in the squares and parks. i believe they are called the bailiffs of the chiltern hundreds.

The AI Act, which many of these authors got behind with fanfare, literally prohibits member states from regulating such systems domestically, even as policy experimentation.

The economic benefits are hypothetical, indirect and insecure, a pinky swear that London will be considered for some offices for researchers. Don’t worry creatives, maybe they’ll go to the theatre a couple of times!

No — they may be at an informational advantage (although not so different from a phone in your pocket), but they may be at a cognitive disadvantage, with their thinking atrophying.

Oxford University Press is introducing an AI summarisation & quizzing asst. into their law textbook ‘trove’: it took considerable effort from our Fac+Library to have them engineer in a license-level off switch (they initially refused!). They did not clock how important the skill of summarisation is.

this article is quite misleading. wikipedia retains the ability to bring a challenge when they are actually designated in which case many of the issues the court procedurally refused to consider here will be possible to consider on the merits of eg human rights law.

A lovely tribute from Áras an Uachtaráin to mark Professor Conor Gearty's passing: president.ie/en/media-lib...

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

But really genAI are massively individualising tools - it absolutely makes sense that individuals can shave time off tasks using assistive tools, but the gains created by that are really tough to scale in an environment that doesn't have repeatable, systematised workflows and a low agency workforce

We already had a fifth freedom, the Freedom of Movement of Non Personal Data. What, you hadn’t heard?

Really impressive presentation from @michae.lv on use of AI in law schools. Incredible work by UCL Laws on this and an inspiring/encouraging commitment to the integrity of the academic process.

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

UK government report based on internal civil service trial finds Copilot doesn’t increase productivity, and indeed makes Excel take longer and with more errors, and requires Powerpoint users to have ‘corrective action’ applied to their outputs. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

so inference costs are to rocket but it’s all ok as chatgpt revenues will multiply tenfold+ (& users threefold), = profit? assuming inference doesn’t eat that, internet users pay for incrementally better models (lol) or watch $$$ inference-compensating ads forever the-decoder.com/openai-has-r...

something odd w this story as PA eyewitness says it was coming from westminster (www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx...) but 24 is visibly listed as going the other way (Heath) & doesn't go past allington st if coming from W'minster (to pimlico). if it was from W, it would have to miss turning & swerve right

Strong words in this joint statement of Germany's 17 state-level DPAs about the national law implementing the EU AI Act, accusing the Federal Government of weakening fundamental rights protection.

"I can pinpoint the moment when my brain refused to take in any more of Nick Clegg’s new book, How to Save the Internet."

Looks from the press release like the CJEU set the most stupid parts of the General Court judgment aside.

Google et Shein sanctionnés : la CNIL inflige des amendes colossales pour non-respect de la législation française sur les cookies et la protection des données

Some quick thoughts on problems I see in the General Court case upholding EU data transfers to the US that came down today (Latombe). 🧵

will need to see the full judgment to make sense of this and what it omits and what it deals with explicitly. it’s of course still very possible that this goes to the CJEU on appeal.

#EUGeneralCourt dismisses the action seeking annulment of the new framework for transferring #PersonalData between the #EU and the #US 👉 curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo...

#EUGeneralCourt dismisses @Zalando’s appeal against the designation of its platform as a very large online platform #DigitalServicesAct 👉 curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo...

New CJEU GDPR art 22 automated decision-making case from Austria. Does a credit check at a retailer to see whether you can pay in instalments meet the significance threshold even though if auto-denied you can still pay normally? Qs in German (not on Curia yet) www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokumente/Ju...

I don’t like to say “never” but this is one of the predictions of the AI sector that seems most off to me. People like experiencing the same culture as their friends; “personalised”, beyond the level of a game, seems like a dead end

Close call at 39,000 ft. On the perils of 'vibe coding' through BA WiFi while flying to Nairobi ...

Did you know that LLMs fail at around 70% of all typical office tasks like generating a report on something from a spreadsheet? The Agent Company is a simulated office environment for benchmarking LLMs - I wrote a blog post about the paper here (with links and a rant): jilltxt.net/llms-fail-at...

Incredible scenes as the University of Warwick refuses to answer an FOI on the cost of an advertorial photo feature on their chief marketing officer in Vogue Singapore because it is a 'trade secret' www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost...

Anyway, what's most interesting to me about this "SoS spoke to Sam Altman about a national pro license" story is that it even exists and wasn't just allowed to be one of those things that stays in the room and evaporates. Someone seems to think someone will look cool if everyone knows this detail?