Author archives

CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers

Wired [no paywall] – “Russell Vought, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to more tightly regulate the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal data. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has cancelled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about …

Subjects: E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Privacy

Deep Research with AI: 9 Ways to Get Started

Wonder Tools – “The AI search landscape is transforming at breakneck speed. New “Deep Research” tools from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity autonomously search and gather information from dozens — even hundreds — of sites, then analyze and synthesize it to produce comprehensive reports. While a human might take days or weeks to produce these 30-page …

Subjects: AI, Education, Internet, Legal Research

Group of former Big Law associates seeking to unseating firm managers from board position roles

What You Need to Know [American Lawyer – no paywall] A group of ex-Big Law associates who quit over their firms’ handling of scrutiny from the Trump administration launched an email campaign targeting firm management committee members. In provided form letters, the group asked members of the public to request that nonprofits and law schools …

Subjects: Censorship, E-Mail, Financial System, Free Speech, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

The New York Times – no paywall “A new wave of “reasoning” systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why…Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data. They do not — and cannot — …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

CensorTrace

CensorTrace – “Following the 2025 U.S. presidential inauguration, changes were made to the content available on certain public government websites and platforms. This website is an automated tool designed to monitor the removal of webpages from major U.S. government websites. It uses publicly available data from the Internet Archive to compare sitemaps from before and …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Climate Change, E-Records, Education, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

The ‘Modest’ Ruling That Could Kneecap Our Legal System

The New York Times – no paywall: Stephen I. Vladeck,professor of law at Georgetown and writes the One First weekly Supreme Court newsletter. It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Courts, Government Documents, Legal Research

American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show

404 Media: “Soon after ChatGPT was released, I [Jason Keobler] filed 60 public records requests with states and school districts around the country to get a sense of how they were thinking about the technology. Because of the way public records work, it often took years to get anything back. I got busy, and there …

Subjects: AI, Education, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Read History’s Best, Anytime, Anywhere

The Purpose of the Library of Short Stories – This website is an endeavour to make the best of history’s short stories easily accessible to read online at all times, for everyone, for free. Thousands of works have been formatted, from the mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe, to the horrors of H.P.Lovecraft, the adventures of …

Subjects: Education, Libraries

What has Elon Musk’s Doge actually achieved?

FT.com no paywall: “It was never meant to be $2tn. Elon Musk’s vow last year to cut almost a third of the annual federal budget, made in front of a frenzied Maga crowd during a Trump rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, came as a surprise even to the event’s organisers. “The deal was …

Subjects: Censorship, Climate Change, Courts, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Defense, E-Records, Economy, Education, Energy, Environmental Law, Financial System, Government Documents, Legal Research

Elon Musk’s apparent power play at the Copyright Office completely backfired

The Verge no paywall: Ripping off content to train AI wasn’t going to fly with either MAGA populists or MAGA media. What initially appeared to be a power play by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take over the US Copyright Office by having Donald Trump remove the officials in charge …

Subjects: Copyright, Government Documents, Legal Research

Most Americans don’t earn enough to afford basic costs of living

CBS News: “The gap between what Americans earn and how much they need to bring in to achieve a basic standard of living is growing, according to a new report. The analysis, from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), looks beyond whether people can afford daily necessities like food and shelter to consider …

Subjects: Economy, Food and Nutrition, Health Care, Housing, Medicine, Poverty