Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Hearing AI Voices and 'Undervolting'
This week, we discuss PC woes, voice deepfakes, and mutual aid.
News
ICE Is Buying Mobile Iris Scanning Tech for Its Deportation Arm
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.
News
Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity
America’s scandalous president is teaming up with its most disreputable AI company to make a search engine.
Flock
Home Depot and Lowe's Share Data From Hundreds of AI Cameras With Cops
Home improvement stores are finding ways to share data from their Flock license plate reader cameras with law enforcement, according to public records.
archiving
Constitution Sections on Due Process and Foreign Gifts Just Vanished from Congress' Website
Part of Article I Section 8, and all of Sections 9 and 10, which address things like habeas corpus, nobility, and militias, are gone from Congress's website for the Constitution.
The Abstract
Million-Year-Old Evidence of Epic Journey Near ‘Hobbit’ Island Discovered by Scientists
Stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi reveal a long-lost population of human relatives; their identity, and how they crossed the sea, is a mystery.
art
Watch This Guy’s Interactive Wooden Pixel Machine Make Art in Real Time
Kilopixel by Ben Holmen turns a CNC machine and a thousand wooden blocks into pixel art.
Podcast
Podcast: Google Is Exposing Peoples’ ChatGPT Secrets
Shared ChatGPT indexed by Google; how Wikipedia is fighting AI slop; and the history of how we got to Steam censorship.
age verification
Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law
The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Florida's law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.
News
ICE Is About To Go on a Social Media and TV Ad Recruiting Blitz
Contracting records reviewed by 404 Media show that ICE wants to target Gen Z, including with ads on Hulu and HBO Max.
News
Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles
“The ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we don't have a way to delete it just as quickly.”
News
Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google
A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.
Steam
The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago
Keywords and tags have never been a useful metric for distilling nuance. Pushing for regulations based on them is repeating a 30-year history of porn panic online.