Day archives: March 19th, 2025

‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE

“WIRED [ublocked] talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the first six weeks of the new Trump administration turning the federal government upside down. It has moved from agency to agency, accessing sensitive data and payment …

Subjects: Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

Privacy-Respecting European Tech Alternatives

Privacy Guide: “There is a growing sentiment that the US shouldn’t be relied upon for the technologies that many people and businesses use every day. Lately, the US has been unilaterally cutting off access to critical technologies to European countries, prompting calls for “radical action” to bolster European tech stacks from EU lawmakers. At Privacy …

Subjects: E-Mail, E-Records, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy

Toolu

Toolou is a collection of privacy-first small tools for formatting, converting, and generating data. Includes: LinkedIn post date finder; JSON Formatter; Word to markdown converter (for ChatGPT); Word, character, paragraph and sentence count Essential web tools – with data privacy.The tools you were looking for with no tracking, no ads, and no data collection. The …

Subjects: AI, E-Records, Internet, Privacy

AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Realit

404 Media unlocked: “Any of these Reels could have been and probably was made in a matter of seconds or minutes. Many of the accounts that post them post multiple times per day. There are thousands of these types of accounts posting thousands of these types of Reels and images across every social media platform. …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

AI in Finance and Banking, March 18, 2025

Via LLRX – AI in Finance and Banking, March 18, 2025 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Emails Reveal Top IRS Lawyer Warned Trump Firings Were a “Fraud” on the Courts

ProPublica: “On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance. Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. …

Subjects: Courts, Government Documents, Legal Research

Adapted Semantic Search

“At Free Law Project, we believe in transparency and sharing our innovations. Today we’re excited to announce our latest development in semantic search: our embedding generation tool and the underlying machine learning model that we will be using in our new semantic search engine. While semantic search might sound complex, we’ve focused on making it …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

History Professor Answers Dictator Questions

Via Wired YouTube Channel: “Professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research, Recommended Books