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Follow up to The DOGE Has Arrived and The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers – see Reuters: “President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which …
Jeffrey Edmunds, TEDxPSU [YouTube] – “With the shift from books to ebooks, libraries have lost ownership of their collections. Knowledge is being privatized and monetized by multinational corporations. To correct this trend, we need to think of knowledge, especially the knowledge collectively funded and created at universities like Penn State, not as a private commodity, …
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 22, 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 …
The Indicator: “Two platform updates this week gave me a rare feeling of hope about AI slop. On Wednesday, TikTok announced it would pilot new controls to let users filter how much AI-generated content they see on their For You feeds. The platform already allows users to dial up and down certain topics like current …
Via LLRX – Teaching Legal Research in the Generative AI Era: When Source Blindness and Source Erasure Collide (Part 1) – Tanya Thomas raises the argument that we are training a generation of lawyers who rarely engage with the raw materials of their profession, and are increasingly consuming only the processed, pre-digested, AI-synthesized versions. Students are …
Do LLMs Truly “Understand” When a Precedent Is Overruled? September 2025. Abstract. Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows show promise for complex legal reasoning tasks, yet their ability to understand long legal documents remains insufficiently evaluated. Developing long-context benchmarks that capture realistic, high-stakes tasks remains a significant challenge in the field, as most …
EFF: “It’s no secret that 2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an …
MakeUseOf: “Chrome is fast, capable, and one of the best browser options when convenience matters. However, it’s not the most privacy-focused browser, and relying on Chrome alone isn’t enough for online privacy. So, I started using some extensions as part of my Chrome privacy setup. Each one addresses a different privacy concern, ensuring I stay …
Via Kottke – The Librarians – As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rights”. The Librarians …
Is Misinformation More Open? A Study of robots.txt Gatekeeping on the Web. Nicolas Steinacker-Olsztyn, Devashish Gosain, Ha Dao Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relying on web crawling to stay up to date and accurately answer user queries. These crawlers are expected to honor this http URL files, which govern automated access. In this study, …
MakeUseOf: Perplexity is often touted as the go-to ChatGPT alternative. “It is immensely popular, and the launch of Perplexity Comet, its browser, brought agentic AI browsing to many people for the first time. It was like a real look into the future of the internet.However, what if Perplexity is automatically downgrading your chats, prompts, and …
ACLU: “Who controls what you can do on your mobile phone? What happens when your device can only run what the government decides is OK? We are dangerously close to this kind of totalitarian control, thanks to a combination of government overreach and technocratic infrastructure choices. Most Americans have a smartphone, and the average American …
