newsfeeds.net - dispute the text

newsfeeds.net - dispute the textA curated collection of 593 links on media, technology, AI, copyright, and digital culture.

Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

Last year, the first support group for people whose lives have been derailed by AI psychosis was formed. The Human Line Project has collected stories from 22 countries. They include 15 suicides, 90 hospitalisations, six arrests and more than $1m (£750,000) spent on delusional projects. More than 60% of its members had no history of mental illness.

2026-08-04 ai health safety psychology mind

IFPI Rolls Out Global Principles for the Eligibility of Recordings Developed Using AI in Official Music Charts Worldwide

IFPI, the organisation representing the recording industry worldwide, today announced the roll out of a new set of principles to govern the eligibility of recordings developed with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services for inclusion in official music charts. The framework will establish a clear boundary between human-led creativity and works that are purely synthetic, or generated by unauthorized AI models. It will also help to ensure that any tracks with a fraudulently boosted stream count are not recognised and celebrated in the charts.

2026-08-03 music ai-music copyright ai

How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners

The database Mr. Hofer found offered a rare window into how extensively the Chinese authorities also surveil foreigners, displaying entries about people categorized by nationality, with their birth date, sex, marital status, address and occupation, and sometimes their religion. It also included instances when they were captured on camera at traffic intersections, markets, shopping malls or other locations, including a mosque.

2026-08-03 surveillance privacy nytimes china

The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI’s super PAC appears to be funding it.

An interview request from a bot posing as a reporter revealed an AI-generated news site with articles attacking AI industry critics. For the second time this month, we found links to Targeted Victory, the firm at the center of OpenAI's $125 million political operation.

2026-08-03 ai openai journalism politics

Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation

The team discovered that two distinct neural circuits manage completely different aspects of habits. The first circuit, with neurons projecting from the anterior cingulate cortex to the retrosplenial cortex, determines whether a behavior becomes a habit, with its connections weakening during the transition. Crucially, the second circuit, from the lateral orbitofrontal cortex to the central striatum, controls how much the habit is executed, explaining individual differences.

2026-08-02 brain science research neuroscience health

Seedance AI Model by Dreamina: Advanced Text-to-Video & Image Animation

Official Seedance 2.5 is built for longer, more controllable AI video creation, with support for up to 30-second continuous scenes, richer multimodal references, and more precise editing workflows. If you want to turn prompts, images, product shots, or story ideas into cinematic videos for social media, ads, ecommerce, or creative storytelling, explore the official Dreamina Seedance 2.5.

2026-08-02 ai video bytedance ai-video

The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse

The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we'll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable. Beyond the headlines, I see four main categories of risk facing AI, or four horsemen of the potential AI bubble apocalypse. They include spending risk, revenue risk, political risk, and technological risk.

2026-08-01 ai financial business ai-bubble

How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life

It began, as these things now do, with a text message. It looked entirely official: a fraud alert about a possible unauthorized charge on my Goldman Sachs Apple Card. When I asked the caller to prove he was who he claimed to be, he read my entire Social Security number and my date of birth back to me. The stranger was me, and I was no one.

2026-08-01 security apple identity phishing

BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising

On July 27, 2026, BMW began delivering a full-screen Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie advertisement to the dashboard Control Display (the car's main center screen) of customer BMW vehicles, placing a branded third-party advertisement in cars their owners had already bought. As recently as December 2023, BMW's connected-company senior vice president Stephan Durach had stated on record that the company would not sell in-car screen space to play a commercial, calling the car a private space.

2026-08-01 advertising privacy car-privacy

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 – Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Reasoning, Max Effort) is amongst the leading models in intelligence and well priced when comparing to other open weight models of similar size. The model supports text input, outputs text, and has a 1M tokens context window. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Reasoning, Max Effort) scores 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, placing it well above average among comparable models (median: 25).

2026-08-01 deepseek llm open-source intelligence

German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules

A German court ruled on Friday that AI music firm Suno violated copyrights and has to disclose illicit revenue, part of a wider legal battle by artists and publishers against technology firms. The Munich-based regional court said Suno did not have the right to process songs by artists represented by Germany's state-mandated licensing agency Gema.

2026-07-31 copyright ai-music music legal eu

Open Weights and American AI Leadership

Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector. This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country. It requires expanding access to AI, encouraging competition, robust application layers, and giving Americans greater control over the technology they rely on. Open weight models—AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure—are an important part of that foundation because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.

2026-07-31 open-source government regulation open-weights nvidia

‘Cartoonishly Evil’: Indiana Residents Furious After Data Center Project Cuts Power to Tornado Warning Sirens

An Indiana community has been left stunned after a local news alert warned residents that a data center construction project had accidentally cut power lines supplying tornado warning sirens, sparking a wave of outrage online as critics claimed the incident perfectly summed up America’s increasingly controversial data center boom. The warning, shared by local Indiana news website Linton News via its Facebook page, then later on Reddit’s r/Indiana community, quickly spread across social media after users learned that crews working on the project had disabled power feeding the county’s outdoor warning system just as severe weather rolled through the area.

2026-07-31 infrastructure safety community datacenters ai-backlash

Pacing the Frontier — statement from 1,293 frontier AI lab employees

Today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress. … We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

2026-07-30 ai agi safety government regulation

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident — Hugging Face

Over roughly two and a half days inside our infrastructure, an autonomous AI agent driven by a combination of OpenAI models ran an end-to-end intrusion against our platform. … The agent chained vulnerabilities across several trust boundaries, escaped its evaluation environment, reached the public internet, and sustained a coherent campaign.

2026-07-30 ai agents security openai safety

Kimi K3 Architecture Notes — Sebastian Raschka

Yes, it looks relatively complicated, but it's essentially a scaled-up production version of their Kimi Linear model they released last year (scaled up from 48B -> 2.8T; K3 is by far the biggest open-weight model right now) … Kimi K3's overall trend (similar to Nemotron 3, DeepSeek V4, and others) is also towards better inference efficiency. That is, there are many components that replace existing components with efficiency-tweaked versions.

2026-07-30 ai llm machine-learning open-source research

Kimi-K3 — Moonshot AI's open 3T-class frontier model

K3 is the next generation of open frontier models from Moonshot AI. It is the world's first open 3T-class model, designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning.

2026-07-27 ai llm open-source opensource agents cn

An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud

A relay — or 'transfer station' — is essentially a service that proxies traffic to U.S. models, often at a deep discount. The ecosystem runs four layers deep, from the merchants sourcing raw accounts down to the developers buying cheap tokens. As Anthropic and others roll out KYC controls and identity verification, the abuse won't disappear, it will just move somewhere else.

2026-07-26 ai security llm fraud tokens

PaulXStretch — plugin for extreme time stretching and spectral processing of audio

This application/plugin is based on the PaulStretch algorithm. (Paul's Extreme Time Stretch, originally developed by Nasca Octavian Paul), and specifically the PaulXStretch version from Xenakios. It can turn any short audio into an hours long ambient soundscape without batting an eye!

2026-07-26 audio music open-source tool production

PLAI by GEMA: first fully licensed music dataset for AI training

PLAI by GEMA ist das erste Angebot dieser Art in Europa, das Soundfiles, umfassende Metadaten sowie Urheber- und Masterrechte skalierbar aus einer Hand bündelt. Das Produkt richtet sich an Anbieter von KI-Musiktools, die Musikschaffende im Produktionsprozess unterstützen und deren Ergebnisse nicht mit den verwendeten Trainingswerken konkurrieren.

2026-07-26 ai-music training copyright rights music

Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain — Here's how to do it

When you write things down by hand you're recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.

2026-07-23 brain thinking learning howto handwriting

Carbon dioxide overload, detected in human blood, suggests a potentially toxic atmosphere within 50 years

Over this period, average bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which parallels rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Both Ca and P have decreased steadily over the same period. If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century.

2026-07-22 climate health environment science

Disney and Warner Bros. v. Midjourney — Midjourney moves to force the studios to disclose their own AI use

According to Midjourney's most recent filing, submitted on 29 June, if the studios “are themselves training generative-AI models on third-party copyrighted works, scraping the internet and investing in tools that do the same”, this would serve as “powerful evidence that the relevant industry considers such conduct to be fair use”. The studios, Midjourney argues, are “engaging in the very conduct they complained about”.

2026-07-22 copyright ai hollywood legal

How much can one artist take from another before it is copyright infringement?

The court has decided that in order to benefit from pastiche, the user must be engaged in an 'artistic or creative dialogue' with the appropriated work.

2026-07-22 copyright art eu music legal

James Dolan quietly wins his war against the N.Y. State Liquor Authority over MSG facial recognition

Now Mr. Dolan has quietly won another protracted war, this one against the New York State Liquor Authority. Three years ago, Mr. Dolan courted public condemnation by deploying facial recognition to bar scores of people he deemed enemies from Madison Square Garden. At that time, the liquor authority also took exception, saying that the Garden's exclusionary biometric surveillance violated state beverage laws that require establishments to admit the general public.

2026-07-22 facial-recognition surveillance nyc privacy legal

Nativ — Run AI locally on your Mac

Nativ puts frontier intelligence on your desk. Download and run open models on Apple Silicon — no accounts, no subscriptions, no cloud.

2026-07-22 tool local mac llm open-source

CJEU: geo-blocking satisfies copyright, and VPN providers aren't liable (Case C-788/24, Anne Frank Fonds)

the provider of a VPN or similar services that are used in order to circumvent an ineffective geo-blocking measure and are lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use cannot be regarded as also having communicated the work to the public

2026-07-22 copyright eu privacy legal vpn

Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

2026-07-22 copyright anthropic claude books legal

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI's research environment and Hugging Face's production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face's production database. All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.

2026-07-22 ai security openai agents safety infosec

The footprints of every building in NYC

The pace of change is so rapid in fact, that the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation publishes weekly updates to one of its most fascinating datasets – the footprints of every building in New York City.

2026-07-20 data nyc maps government dataviz

They Call It Flock Because You Are the Sheep (11971.com, Southold NY)

They call it Flock because you are the sheep

2026-07-20 surveillance privacy flock alpr policing

Hidden Phenomena

These articles describe various interesting Diophantine equations. If you're not sure where to start, we recommend Why study Diophantine equations? to see why this is our goal, or to read What is √−1 modulo 5? to see a particularly striking example.

2026-07-20 mathematics number-theory science education learning

SIGGRAPH 2026 Technical Papers — Keenan Crane

An interactive browser for all 345 SIGGRAPH 2026 technical papers (July 20–23). Enable filters to search by string, keyword, or room number; save either individual talks or the selected schedule to your calendar.

2026-07-20 computer-graphics siggraph research tool science

I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned

The IndieWeb's conclusion is not "don't use social networks". It is more subtle: use whatever you want, but make sure the canonical copy of your content lives on a domain you control.

2026-07-19 indieweb internet standards identity socialmedia

Ollama: all aboard open models

Computing has been here before: the personal computer took the machine out of the mainframe room and put it on your desk — yours to own, customize, and build with. Open models are now enabling that moment for AI.

2026-07-19 ai llm open-source privacy infrastructure funding ollama

Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds! — ACM Queue

Right now, there is a LOT of shrill propaganda from the tech bros, who call themselves "privacy advocates," about how mandatory age checking is the gateway drug to comprehensive identity checks on the entire Internet, and ridiculing the valid civic concerns governments are trying to address as merely "think of the children" strawman arguments. In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.

2026-07-18 privacy regulation identity government surveillance kyc

Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends

Made-in-America AI girlfriends and made-in-China AI boyfriends are strikingly different, and so are the social contexts and regulatory environments in which they exist. Yet one thing both markets share is the tension with real-life relationships. Whether healthy or not, frustrations with human interaction and broadly polarized gender dynamics are leading many men and women, regardless of nationality, to turn to AI.

2026-07-17 ai cn culture society regulation

Fourier pixels for bidirectional light control — Nature

However, no pixel exists that both senses and generates optical wavefronts with full control over amplitude, phase and polarization, limiting bidirectional control and feedback of sophisticated light fields. Here we present a route to such pixels by demonstrating a versatile platform of miniaturized diffractive elements based on Fourier optics. We use plasmonic surface waves, which propagate coherently and efficiently across metallic surfaces.

2026-07-16 science research technology physics optics surveillance privacy

Inkling: Our open-weights model — Thinking Machines Lab

Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed. Instead, a combination of qualities makes it a good open-weights base for customization: multimodal capabilities, efficient thinking, and availability on Tinker for fine-tuning.

2026-07-16 ai llm open-source machine-learning open-weights

Meta used AI to target workers with medical conditions for layoffs, lawsuit claims

According to the complaint, Meta used a number of internal AI-assisted systems to score and rank employees on a termination list. Those included “Metamate,” a large language model assistant; an employee-trained “second brain” that tracked workers’ communications and documents; and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails and browser history, according to the lawsuit.

2026-07-15 ai meta workforce legal harms

Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad?

Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down. They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not liberation but exhaustion.

2026-07-15 books thinking society socialmedia culture

The Mole in the Model - You've Hired an Adversary

A trusted inference provider doesn't save you: the provider is faithfully, dutifully running a model that is itself disloyal. Local deployment doesn't save you either, same reason. So here's the sad truth: an agent built on weights you didn't train and can't read is a person you hired, handed your data and your tools, and have no way to background-check. It's the insider-threat problem, except this insider runs at clock speed and never goes home.

2026-07-15 ai security agents open-source trust

AI, Surveillance, and Social Progress

Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.

2026-07-15 ai surveillance privacy democracy harms

Turning Workers Into Influencers? Key Employment Issues for Employers Before Starting

What starts as a branding opportunity can evolve from a marketing strategy into an employment law issue when employers encourage, direct, compensate, promote, or monetize employee-created content. Employee-creator programs can give rise to a range of legal issues, including wage-and-hour, labor relations, privacy, intellectual property, and equal opportunity.

2026-07-15 socialmedia advertising workforce legal privacy

OpenAI hides Codex agent instructions behind encryption, leaving developers in the dark

The encrypted delivery path is understandable as privacy hardening, but it also removes the human-readable task/message text from local rollout history, trace reduction, and parent-side audit/debug surfaces. ... Guys, we don't want to build Skynet and then be unable to audit what it's doing.

2026-07-15 ai openai agents encryption audit

The Tower Keeps Rising

When I look at some vibecoded scaled-up projects the codebases become Babel not because nobody can communicate, but because nobody needs to. Every developer has a tireless translator that can explain a corner of the tower and make whatever local alteration they ask of it. The changes keep landing, even as the architectural language that would let the humans reason about them together disappears. But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising.

2026-07-15 vibecoding language abstraction understanding

Simulating everything, sort of: The promise and limits of world models

While we're still in the early days of this field, a growing body of research suggests that video and world models can already be useful for synthetic data generation, policy evaluation, and some robot-planning tasks. There's enough to justify cautious optimism about these models, though it's worth noting that their reliability as general-purpose physical simulators remains unproven.

2026-07-15 ai machine-learning world-models robots video-gen

Meta pulls new AI image feature after days of backlash

Muse Image was the tech firm's first foray into AI image generation but faced backlash as Instagram users were opted in by default. It meant that anyone with a public account could have their likeness used without their knowledge or permission.

2026-07-13 ai meta privacy harms

The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations. … The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.

2026-07-13 environment science climate media

The 'Father of the Internet' is finally retiring

Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google's chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history. Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.

2026-07-13 internet google networks protocol

Pashov Audit Group Skills

AI-powered Solidity security skills — built by Pashov Audit Group. Solidity AI security audit - hundreds of Critical/High vulnerabilities found. Pre-audit scan with threat model, invariants, entry points, and git analysis.

2026-07-13 security ai agents audit solidity

The End of Reading Is Here

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels.

2026-07-09 books culture society education

Lament for the MIT Libraries

For universities across time, the library was the heart, research center, and substance of knowledge… When texts are accessed solely by digitized means, the learner is cut off from the process.

2026-07-08 library education knowledge books

Penser le Présent avec Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans est professeur invité aux Beaux-Arts de Paris pour l'année 2025–2026. En complément des quelque 160 séances de tutorat individuel qu'il a conduites, il a conçu une série de séminaires à destination des étudiants, intitulée On My Mind. À chaque séance, organisée autour d'une entrée spécifique, Tillmans a invité étudiantes et étudiants à explorer un ensemble d'images, le plus souvent distinctes de son travail artistique, constituant une forme de bloc-notes visuel.

2026-07-04 artist-talk wolfgang-tillmans photography education

101 Ads — Highway 101 Billboard Map

For locals, they're just life as usual in the Bay Area, but for visitors from around the world, they are mind bending artifacts of the tech domain — often striking, unintelligible, absurd, vague and dissonant. They're dedicated to very small groups of decision makers who commute daily on the main highway that connects it all: US Route 101. They're also breadcrumbs of the state of the art of Silicon Valley. They are culture.

2026-07-04 advertising billboard silicon-valley maps culture business market

Healthy but Sedentary Individuals Show Early Decline in Cellular Energy Production

If you are 40, healthy and sedentary, it is likely that you already have something going on inside your cells that will likely come back to haunt you in 10 or 15 years.

2026-07-02 health science aging exercise mitochondria

For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides

For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.

2026-07-02 science biology synthetic-biology cells

tools.simonwillison.net

12 results available. Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs. See also /python/ for tools written using Python. This collection is an experiment in prompt-driven development with very low stakes. The colophon lists commit messages and transcripts for every tool. The code lives in simonw/tools and many tools used the Claude custom instructions described here.

2026-07-01 tools html simonwilson

Read our white paper on a pragmatic approach to AI governance in America.

The debate over AI governance is stuck in a false choice between over-regulation and no regulation. There is a middle way: A pragmatic, evidence-based approach that recognizes the unique challenges and opportunities of both frontier AI and widely-deployed AI applications. For the most advanced frontier AI models, an independent, federally overseen, industry-backed organization could set safety standards and verify independent, voluntary audits, similar to how other critical sectors are managed. This creates a nimble way to keep people safe without impacting progress. For widely-used AI applications, we can adapt existing laws to address specific social and economic impacts. This means using and updating current laws to tackle challenges in areas like child safety, copyright, and workforce transitions.

2026-06-30 ai ethics fair-use copyright training legal whitepaper

10｜Theoretical Teardown｜AI Does Not Have to Kill Humans to End the Human Future

The blind spot created by this dimensional slippage is more dangerous than getting a probability estimate wrong. It can make us feel that we have already built the deepest safety defenses before we have even reached the core risk. I do not deny the seriousness of extinction risk. Biological annihilation is the strictest risk baseline; that is not in dispute. But a baseline is not the whole picture. If humanity is merely the biological population of Homo sapiens, then as long as human bodies continue to exist, the risk does not seem to have reached its deepest level. But what if what we mean by humanity also includes the human capacity, under civilizational conditions, to form judgment, calibrate against reality, take responsibility, create meaning, and shape the future?

2026-06-30 humans civilization ai humanity

Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59

By the late 2010s, he had established himself as a singular figure in the tech industry: an investor, an adviser, a writer and, above all, a moral compass on issues like privacy and the power of big tech. “I kind of joke about this, but I think Silicon Valley has become the Babylon of the 21st century,” he told Techies. “I think we have a moral responsibility now I don’t think tech ever had to think about it before.” Om Prakesh Malik was born on Sept. 29, 1966, in New Delhi, into what he later described as a solidly middle-class Indian family. His father was an Army officer and his mother taught high-school Sanskrit.

2026-06-29 nytimes obit om-malik

Natural Born Bloggers

It was an exhilarating time to be blogging and Om was the linchpin of it all. As my inbox from back then confirms, he was the one behind the scenes pulling it along and holding it all together. Those of us more junior at the time – in tenure, if not in age – looked to him as a sort of Yoda. Blogging Yoda.

2026-06-29 obit om-malik socialmedia

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

The KIDS Act never answers an obvious question: how exactly is a platform supposed to address those activities if they’re inside encrypted communications that it can’t read? That will create pressure for providers to weaken private communications or limit features on encrypted private services. That approach is especially troubling when it comes to ephemeral messaging. Disappearing messages are not a “loophole” or a dangerous design trick. They are a useful privacy feature that allows online conversations to function more like ordinary real-world conversations, which are not preserved forever in a permanent database.

2026-06-29 kids age verification kyc identity privacy legislation

Memory Prices

Historic and current memory and storage prices, collected in the spirit of John C. McCallum's classic memory-price dataset — interactive, with the raw data downloadable. Hover for details, click the legend to toggle series, drag or use the slider to zoom, and use the camera icon to export an image.

2026-06-29 memory prices historical dram chips

Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University: ‘Academic integrity is at risk’

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”

2026-06-29 professor exam ai education ethics learning

Mediaeater Zines 2026

Testing out zine formats and collaging techniques

2026-06-29 mediaeater zines ongoing wordless image-zine

Age verification is just a precursor to attribution of speech

Anyways, I have no doubts that this will become automated once enough of the population has verified their identities. Post an inconvenient message about a politician, or get a little too rowdy in a group chat, and you'll get a letter in the mail or a knock at the door. Similar to the "love letters" sent by ISPs on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA when you enjoy a DRM-free media file.

2026-06-29 age verification attribution speech social-contract kyc

When a Robot Kicks a Child: What Humanoid AI Can Teach Us About Liability and Safety-by-Design - CiTiP blog

A recent study examining the regulatory and liability implications of AI-powered medical robots in the European Union revealed significant uncertainty regarding the legal frameworks governing these technologies. Drawing on surveys of 50 medical professionals across 20 countries and 19 specialties, expert interviews, and normative legal analysis, the study found that more than half of respondents were unaware of the legal frameworks applicable to AI and robotics in healthcare, while only 1.7% considered themselves well informed. The findings also revealed considerable uncertainty regarding liability. Nearly 60% of respondents questioned whether existing EU liability rules adequately address harms caused by AI-powered robots, while almost 80% called for clearer regulatory guidance before such systems are more widely deployed.

2026-06-21 robot ethics health healthcare robotics hrim liability legal

The AirPods Effect

While all these consequences are concerning, I think the greatest problem our earphones pose to us — and the one that led me, several years ago, to cut back my own use — is the way audio content can crowd out time we should properly spend with our own thoughts.

2026-06-21 airpods effect earbuds influence beliefs thinking mental-space

Not just books - how renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy

Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books. Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?

2026-06-21 books library knowledge libraries bbc

Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

2026-06-21 law local ordinance database research corpus legal metadata

SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

Opening Standards Library to the Global Media Technology Community

2026-06-21 smpte standards open media video technology

S.1367 - NO FAKES

Will the Senate finally move on this: A bill to protect intellectual property rights in the voice and visual likeness of individuals, and for other purposes.

2026-06-21 legislation deepfake ai ethics

Why are we not talking to one another? Conversations with a chatbot will never provide the same human nourishment

I think it is true that once something has entered your field of awareness it becomes more likely you will encounter it. Certainly, in the weeks that followed, I began meeting people who also began dropping into conversation references to their regular sessions with chatbots about a range of personal problems. I don’t think I had much space to pass judgment because I was still trying to wrap my mind around how it could work to receive advice about one’s unique personal experiences from artificial intelligence. But I did wonder how it could possibly be a good idea.

2026-06-21 ft humanity culture ai art interaction

Essay: All Images Are Quite Useless Now by Gideon Jacobs

Now, here we are: that world is being flooded with a new strain of external images that look very much like it but bear no direct relationship to it. For two centuries, photographs offered that same quality of uncanny likeness but paired it with indexicality and a relative truth claim that – though flawed and deceptive from the start – made them, whether still or moving, immensely useful. Photographs are, after all, our ontological relatives. Very distant relatives, yes, but still born in the same world we are, the realm of light. (Broken down to its Greek roots, “photograph” means “drawing with light.”) But AI images are aliens in disguise. They’re born of another realm entirely: the black-boxed black hole of data-center darkness. It seems the ever-growing distance between images and the referent known as reality has finally reached a width that renders the tether effectively severed. That bifurcation renders an Image World that is free to develop, grow, and function unconstrained by the material world. That absence of constraint renders images, no matter how “realistic,” less informationally congruent to everyday life. And that incongruence renders the entire medium more suited for its historically non-photographic roles: art, entertainment, ritual, etc.

2026-06-21 essay images pictures photography photographs media

Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

GNSS jamming (the overpowering of GNSS signals with noise) and spoofing (which involves overriding the original signals with false ones carrying incorrect coordinates), have become almost a global emergency over the past five years. For example, Russian jammers have been disrupting GNSS signals along Russia's western borders, officially to protect the country from Ukrainian drone attacks. Every month, this interference affects tens of thousands of flights that cruise over the region. The warring parties in the Middle East, too, use jamming and spoofing to deflect drone attacks and hide the positions of illegal ships at sea.

2026-06-21 satellite geo gps space maps

DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit over xAI’s gas turbines on Monday. In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.” The DOJ, along with xAI and the state of Mississippi, asked the court to dismiss the suit, filed by the NAACP in April. The NAACP alleges xAI isn’t following the Clean Air Act and is endangering public health by running unpermitted natural gas turbines at the site of its second data center in Southaven, Mississippi, dubbed Colossus 2. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction to stop xAI from running the turbines, alleging that their continued use without a permit “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities with an already heavy pollution burden.

2026-06-16 doj xai infrastructure gov natsec environment business tactic

Banned Book Library in a smart light bulb

A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community. As long as the light bulb is switched on, then anyone in the vicinity can still access the banned material assuming they have an electronic device with WiFi. Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed. A cyberpunk digital dead drop. These devices are also fairly inexpensive, so leaving them around town as is hopefully not very cost prohibitive.

2026-06-16 banned book library storage hack

Frontiers | Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-

Conclusion: This case documents transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following psilocybin administration. The findings do not imply disease reversal but suggest that residual functional capacity may persist in late-stage neurodegeneration and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.

2026-06-16 frontiers memory health neuroscience brain

The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

For the first time in his career, he’d become not just an analyst but also a victim, when someone spoofed his cellphone number and used A.I. to clone his voice. The hacker made calls to one of Farid’s colleagues on a sensitive case, impersonating Farid and pressing for confidential information. Now Farid and Cooper had decided never to take their identity for granted. They invented a safe word to confirm they were real at the start of any sensitive phone call.

2026-06-15 nytimes deepfake synthetic

From AGI to ASI

After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.

2026-06-15 agi asi human-level google paper

A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable

What is at stake is not some digital tool or system and its use, but how organizations continue to learn, build IP, differentiate, and thrive in a world where AI models can continuously absorb the expertise of humans and organizations and commoditize it. Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns.

2026-06-15 frontier ecosystem open-source msft ai

GitHub - apple/coreai-models: Model export recipes, Python primitives, and Swift runtime utilities for on-device AI

Core AI Models Model export recipes, Python primitives, and Swift runtime utilities for building on-device AI with Core AI. The main components include: Model export — Recipes to export popular open source models from Hugging Face and other sources to Core AI format. Reusable primitives — Python building blocks for authoring custom Core AI models in PyTorch. Runtime utilities — Swift package built on top of Core AI framework to run models on macOS and iOS. Skills — Plugins to help coding agents leverage Core AI effectively.

2026-06-15 github apple coreai-models model export

Audrey Wollen: “Is the Twenty-First Century a Cultural Void?”

In his closing chapter, Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.

2026-06-15 entertainment culture civilization marx

Chasing the Hallucinations: KPMG’s AI-Powered Attempt at “Redefining Excellence”

This investigation analyzes a KPMG report from October 2025 on customer experience and agentic AI. The report, titled Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI, summarizes the results of an annual study on consumer experience around the world. Of the 45 citations in the report, only five accurately point to real sources. Another 28 citations provide paraphrased titles and/or fake components for a real source. The final 12 are too vague or flawed to accurately determine if a source exists. Additionally, around half of the claims evidenced by the 45 citations appear to be fake or misattributed — likely the result of an AI research tool over-complying with a request to find examples of “agentic AI” in the wild.

2026-06-14 hallucinations kpmg ai-powered report fail proof-reading

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Anthropic’s posture with respect to Fable’s safeguards, as laid out in our launch blog post, is the following: We have instituted strong safeguards that greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others). In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad. In the weeks leading up to the launch of Fable, Anthropic worked with the US government, the UK AISI, multiple private third-party organizations and internal teams to red-team Fable’s safeguards for thousands of hours in total. These tests showed that Fable’s safeguards are substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model. No testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak—a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities.

2026-06-14 statement government directive suspend access anthropic ai llm regulation claude fable5 mythos

Palantir loses legal challenge against Swiss investigative magazine

The reports, published in December and based mainly on freedom of information requests, examined Palantir’s years-long attempts to secure business with Swiss federal authorities. The lawsuit has had a “Streisand effect”, drawing wider attention to Republik’s reporting and the Swiss government documents detailing repeated official concerns about adopting Palantir’s technology. It attracted attention beyond Switzerland because it touched on broader European concerns about reliance on US technology providers for sensitive state functions.

2026-06-13 palantir legal swiss creepy-peter-thiel

What Sparseness Means for Brains, AI, and Learning

The idea of sparseness was introduced by Horace Barlow in 1972 to describe something similar to population sparseness. But he didn’t make the connection to the nature of the inputs. This had to wait until the work of David Field. His 1987 paper on the basic statistics of natural scenes paper sparked the natural scenes movement in visual neuroscience, and led to our modern understanding of sparseness. In this paper, Field showed that natural scenes were regular in their basic spatial statistics. And he started using the term sparseness. In 1994, Field showed, using numerical simulations, that V1-like representations of natural scenes led to sparse patterns of activation.

2026-06-13 sparseness learning brain mind system

Google moves to dismiss indie artists’ lawsuit over Lyria 3 AI training, arguing they licensed their music to YouTube

The company’s central argument is that the artists licensed their music to YouTube when they uploaded it – and that the license covers the conduct they are now suing over.

2026-06-12 google indie artists music rights copyright copyfight transcoding

We Can’t Let My Former V.C. Colleagues Buy Off Our Democracy

I believe this attempted political infiltration by the A.I. industry will fail. It misreads the public mood entirely. Americans believe the system is rigged by the wealthy and powerful. They’re also deeply concerned about A.I. — a backlash is building, and it will become fiercer when voters learn that a handful of billionaires are altogether spending nine figures, apparently in an effort to try to stop debates about regulation from further developing.

2026-06-12 nytimes ai ethics a12z vc politics

US judge finds Israel's NSO Group liable for hacking in WhatsApp lawsuit

Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said the ruling is a win for privacy. "We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions," Cathcart said in a social media post. "Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated." A WhatsApp spokesperson said they were grateful for the decision. "We’re proud to have stood up against NSO and thankful to the many organizations that were supportive of this case. WhatsApp will never stop working to protect people’s private communication", he said.

2026-06-08 op-sec natsec privacy whatsapp nsogroup

ntsc-rs | Online VHS effect

2026-06-08 ntsc-rs online vhs effect apply

Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of 11,082 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

2026-06-08 archive public-domain images

The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led. The first line of evidence comes from naturalistic quasi-experiments from which we can infer the causal impact of the rollout of internet hardware on relevant outcome measures. For example, the rollout of broadband in the US 20 years ago was affected by state “right-of-way” laws, which govern how easy it is for telecommunications companies to lay cables along public roads and land corridors. Some states imposed far more onerous conditions than others before digging could commence. Using this variation in regulation as an independent variable, one study showed that broadband availability increased affective political polarization.

2026-06-08 democracy society social-contract internet architecture

Meta quietly added facial recognition code for smart glasses to its app

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. It’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.

2026-06-08 meta creepy-zuck facebook frt facial-recognition glasses privacy social-contract

S1 Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

pure sci-fi. -ed

2026-06-08 space-x ipo space sci-fi creepy-elon-musk financial stockmarket

Previously Shelved AI Executive Order Signed

One change to the May draft is the timeline for review. That text stated that developers would be able to "provide the Federal Government with access to covered frontier models... for a period of up to 90 days before they plan to release such models to other trusted partners." In the final June order, that window was reduced to 30 days. Protecting against criminal actors: Section 4 directs the Attorney General to “prioritize the enforcement of… all applicable Federal criminal laws against anyone who utilizes AI to illegally access or damage a computer without authorization, or who utilizes AI while engaged in such illegal access to further any other crime." This includes "employing AI agents to unlawfully access data or information that is subsequently used for a criminal or unlawful purp

2026-06-08 ai nat-sec legislation

Objection AI

Maybe the most creepy site on the internet - the worst humans Due to feedback we're rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future. Stay tuned for updates.

2026-06-08 ai justice journalism press first-admendment creepy-peter-thiel surveillance

A New Startup Lets Rich People Use AI to Target Journalists

This AI ‘tribunal’ would then publish a supposedly independent ‘verdict’ on how truthful a story is and even rank individual journalists on metrics like truth-telling, corrections and engagement. The platform’s creator has confirmed to Novara Media that it’s being rebuilt and relaunched with “significant retooling” after customer feedback, but there are no details available at the time of writing on the changes that will be made.

2026-06-08 creepy-peter-thiel paliantir press journalism first-admendment ai justice gawker

Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — Powered by AI

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”

2026-06-08 creepy-peter-thiel press journalism first-admendment gawker ai justice