Category «Internet»

Selling Surveillance as Convenience

Privacy Guides: “Increasingly, surveillance is being normalized and integrated in our lives. Under the guise of convenience, applications and features are sold to us as being the new better way to do things. While some might be useful, this convenience is a Trojan horse. The cost of it is the continuous degradation of our privacy …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

Judge Orders Google to Share Search Results to Help Resolve Monopoly

The New York Times no paywall – “In a landmark antitrust case, Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled on Tuesday that Google must hand over some of its search data to rivals but did not grant the government’s biggest requests. Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but will not …

Subjects: AI, Courts, E-Commerce, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines

ICE granted access to spy tool that can hack phones and read private messages

National Post: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on track to gain access to controversial spyware designed to hack phones and read private messages after the Trump administration jettisoned a Biden-era order. The Trump administration reactivated an ICE contract for spyware from Tel Aviv-based Paragon on Saturday that had previously been blocked due to a …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, E-Records, Free Speech, Internet, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Scientists breathe new life into climate website after shutdown under Trump

Guardian: “Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.The website offered years’ worth of accessibly written material on climate science. The site is technically still online but …

Subjects: Climate Change, E-Government, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

The Register: “With AI’s rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Trusted news sites may benefit in an internet full of AI-generated fakes, a new study finds

NeimanLab: “An economics paper found subscriber retention and daily visits both increased after readers were confronted with a difficult quiz with AI-generated images. Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted …

Subjects: AI, Climate Change, Education, Environmental Law, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests

The Guardian: “A ChatGPT model gave researchers detailed instructions on how to bomb a sports venue – including weak points at specific arenas, explosives recipes and advice on covering tracks – according to safety testing carried out this summer. OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 also detailed how to weaponise anthrax and how to make two types of illegal …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Defense, Internet, Search Engines

How the audiences of 30 major news sources differ in their levels of education

The Pew Research Center finds that “American audiences of 30 prominent news sources vary dramatically in their levels of education“. The American audiences of 30 prominent news sources vary dramatically in their levels of education, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Roughly six-in-ten U.S. adults (62%) who say they regularly get news from …

Subjects: Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Top AI models fail spectacularly when faced with slightly altered medical questions

PsyPost: “Artificial intelligence systems often perform impressively on standardized medical exams—but new research suggests these test scores may be misleading. A study published in JAMA Network Open indicates that large language models, or LLMs, might not actually “reason” through clinical questions. Instead, they seem to rely heavily on recognizing familiar answer patterns. When those patterns …

Subjects: AI, Education, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Medicine, Search Engines