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BoingBoing – “Boing Boing’s publisher Jason Weisberger recently jailbroke his Amazon Kindle because he doesn’t like being told what he can and can’t do with the hardware he owns. I feel the same way. But I feel even saltier about companies ‘selling me‘ digital content and then f****** with that purchase. Sure, sometimes changes to …
The Verge – “Hundreds of publishers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Verge parent company Vox Media, are running an ad campaign this week urging the government to protect content from AI. The campaign, called Support Responsible AI, is run by the News/Media Alliance trade association and consists of …
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 5, 2025 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and …
Society of Authors: “Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programmes. Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has …
TechCrunch: “Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it …
The Atlantic – no paywall: “…Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen …
404 Media: “Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move …
Contents 1. Introduction 2. Surveillance Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 Facial Recognition Technology Border Search and Immigration Surveillance Surveillance Tech at the Border and the Virtual Wall Reproductive Justice and Digital Surveillance 2. Encryption and Cybersecurity End-to-End Encryption Client-Side Scanning and Other Recent U.S. Attempts At Encryption Backdoors Government Cybersecurity 4. Consumer Privacy Consumer …
Social Security News. A service of Hall & Rouse, P.C./© Charles T. Hall. Includes primary documents from DOGE and OPM, emails and chats from/to Social Security employees, author commentary, and articles from reliable media reporting on the fast moving actions to fire, using illegal terminations, as many staff and leadership as possible, around the country. …
Siobhan Haimé, Birkbeck, University of London (with thanks to Tristan Smith for copyediting assistance) (See also the news item here) In a rather seismic announcement, Clarivate has announced the phase-out of perpetual access purchases for print, eBooks and digital collections by the end of 2025. Described as a supposedly transformative “subscription-based strategy”, this approach is …
Ars Technica: “Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by using news articles to train its large language model. “Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power …
Ars Technica: “Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the “most damning evidence” yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books. Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But …
