you can’t build democracy on a tech stack that is fundamentally anti-democratic

heatmaps from the report showing tracking

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning.

And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep.

Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones.

No warrant required.

Our @citizenlab.ca investigation + how to protect yourself 🧵/1
citizenlab.ca/research/ana...

Utter Madness ... On why I won't join hands with "anti-AGI" pro-extinctionists, and why I think the AGI race is extremely dangerous even though we're nowhere close to building AGI. (1,800 words)

New article on why I won't join hands with "anti-AGI" pro-extinctionists like Yudkowsky, and why I think the AGI race is extremely dangerous even though we're nowhere close to building AGI. Check it out! www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/utter-madn...

The far-left hippy loonies at the... er... European Central Bank *cough* are saying that fossil fuel dependency is a major threat to the EU. It calls for the Bloc to meet its clean energy targets and "Transition now – or pay more later". Lefties, eh 🙄

www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/d...

"a term popularized by Palantir" we are cooked

As a lady who has done years of therapy & writing about trauma & the self & politics & social science, it is ONLY through the *struggle* of writing that anything new is ever born. The notion that you give AI all your files and it will "know you" and "develop" your ideas makes me profoundly sad.

Yes, I think that is 100% correct: so-called elites are happy to chug (and regurgitate) the Kool-Aid while the rest of us are like, “can’t you see the emperor is naked? And also trying to make our labor obsolete so he can let us starve?”

I’m also amazed at how poorly even HKS elites understand the basics: 2hrs into the symposium, I was the 1st to point out that “AI” isn’t a thing, it’s an umbrella marketing term that encompasses LLMs, SLMs, ADMSs, expert systems, computer vision, transcription tools, translation tool, etc etc etc

🤢

Cannot like all the posts in this thread enough!

We should be weary of patchwork solutions that will end up creating a bigger mess, like weakening encrypted communications or undermining our privacy online demanding that everyone is 'verified' against their offline identities.

The New Mexico Department of Justice already stated their goals quite clearly in a press release. They will make their case for "enacting effective age verification (...), and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors." nmdoj.gov/press-releas...

It's going to be crucial to follow these (and other) cases closely as they shape the paths to determine how certain design decisions and features need to be fixed. And how regulators use these cases as inspiration to propose laws that may take us in the wrong direction.

As always with splashy news, there are so many hot takes about the court cases that found some Big Tech companies liable for deceiving users and for harmful design of its services. While I understand the need to savor the moment and feel vindicated, we must not lose sight of what comes next.

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content “In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

New: Wikipedia has officially banned AI-generated content. After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of LLMs, volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia

www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

This is a sign of fear, knowing slop is a real issue and forced to make it sound like they don’t make slop when they’re in the business of providing slop making technology. Keep calling it slop keep calling out slop when you see it and keep coming up with catchy words like DLSSlop.

I think this is a depressing approach to the production of knowledge

Over the last few years, American tech oligarchs have become the greatest argument against their own existence.

The sheer scale of their erratic behavior and political interference proves that extreme wealth concentration is a structural threat to society

The weeks-long investigation, details of which have not previously been reported, uncovered no records indicating censorship, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “There is no evidence that Member States of the European Union are overreaching the DSA to censor and criminalize online content,” they wrote in conclusion.

So... the actual story reported here is that the administration set up a dedicated task force to document EU censorship and THEY COULD NOT FIND ANY.

Not that you'd know that from the headline.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Headline: "At SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg says metaverse is 'Holy Grail' of social experience"

I don't really feel like the press coverage of the metaverse implosion honestly captures the access tech press' role in propping up Mark Zuckerberg's fake innovation mythology

if you go back and read "journalism" from this era, 97% was indistinguishable from advertorial

One lap and then it starts again. On March 13, at 10:35 a.m., amidst the waves, Arthur (not his real name), a young officer in the French Navy, was out for a run, circling the deck of the ship where he worked. To record his performance — a little over 7 kilometers covered in thirty-five minutes-he used the smartwatch on his wrist. The data collected was then uploaded to the internet. Because Arthur has a profile on the sports app Strava, and it's "public": anyone can view it. The young man has therefore just reported, almost live, the exact position in the Mediterranean Sea of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its escort, northwest of Cyprus and about a hundred kilometers from the Turkish coast, as Le Monde has observed .

truly incredible that strava leaks are still happening after all this time

Europe Is Looking To Water Down AI Protections. It Should Reinforce Them. As the omnibus proposal moves toward trilogue negotiations, decision-makers must not lose sight of the AI Act’s goals and effectiveness.

The EU is pushing ahead with AI Act changes that weaken protections for high-risk systems and leave no meaningful path to redress, even as evidence of harm mounts, write CDT Europe’s Laura Lazaro Cabrera and Magdalena Maier.

No regime under any circumstances should be given the benefit of the doubt to shut the Internet on its own people.

I wouldn't give the regime the benefit of the doubt. The track record of network shutdowns and communications disruptions in Iran span more than two decades.

Please read the "Manifesto for a Free Internet" by the Iranian Women’s Coalition for Internet Freedom docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Tell Meta: Keep Encryption for Instagram Messages Meta has quietly said it will end support for encrypted messaging on Instagram in a matter of weeks. Encryption helps ensure that what your messages stay between you and the person with whom you're communicating. When end-to-end encryption is enabled, no one – not even Meta – can snoop on you. Right now, hundreds of millions of people use Instagram to message friends, family, and communities. Privacy should be a default feature of the technology we rely on every day – not an optional extra, and not something that quietly disappears. That's why we're asking Meta to reverse its decision and continue to support encryption on Instagram.

Instagram is about to lose its optional end-to-end encryption feature. Without it, Meta can view every DM on Instagram. Mozilla has a petition to push the company to reverse this decision. [external petition link] www.mozillafoundation.org/en/petition...

Human lawyer legal advice > LLM legal advice

I've been seeing chatter about someone using ChatGPT to cure their dog's cancer, so decided to go find out what that was actually about.

Short 🧵>>

COMMENT 02 February 2026 Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.

Nature published another pile of trash

i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields

1/

Making this opt-out is not nearly good enough. According to LinkedIn info, Grammarly actually has product staff focused on "responsible AI" and privacy.

Please don't tell me, in 2026, that these issues are "hard to get right"...

AOC came out swinging against age verification legislation and somehow the entire tech press seems to not have noticed?