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The Guardian – “From mass firings to unprecedented influence…Musk’s role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Never before has the world’s richest person been deputized by the US president to cull the very agencies that oversee his businesses. Musk’s attempts to radically dismantle government bureaus have won him sprawling influence. His team has …
Grant Watch is a project to track the termination of grants of scientific research agencies under the Trump administration in 2025. We currently are tracking terminations of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Our data on terminated NIH and NSF grants are collected from submissions from affected …
“OSINT Tools and More – Editor’s note: Happy fifth anniversary to Jeremy Caplan’s excellent Wonder Tools Substack newsletter. He started his newsletter a couple of months before I launched the Toolbox newsletter. If you’re not subscribing, you should!. I took a fact-checking and OSINT tools course from the Knight Center for the Americas last month. …
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has launched an ongoing secrecy news database, which they are calling The Classified Catalog, to keep track of all secrecy-related news during the Trump administration. Reporters, FOIA requesters, and the public can use it to chart stories about FOIA news and litigation, disappearing messages, information being taken down from …
Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration. WSJ – no paywall, April 28, 2025. Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. Leaders of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities have assembled a private collective to counter the Trump …
TechDirt: “We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does …
“Records reviewed by WIRED [no paywall] show law enforcement agencies are eager to take advantage of the data trails generated by a flood of new internet-connected vehicle features. Automakers are increasingly pushing consumers to accept monthly and annual fees to unlock pre-installed safety and performance features, from hands-free driving systems and heated seats to cameras …
The Atlantic – no paywall: Experts fear what comes next. “If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government …
New database tracks canceled N.S.F. research grants, The University Daily Kansan. April 25, 2025. A crowdsourced database is helping researchers at the University of Kansas and other institutions in the U.S. make sense of contradictory information put out by news agencies and the National Science Foundation after the federal government began canceling N.S.F. research grants …
Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. WSJ – no paywall, April 28, 2025. Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. Leaders of some of the nation’s …
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its latest annual report. The 2024 Internet Crime Report combines information from 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crime and details reported losses exceeding $16 billion—a 33% increase in losses from 2023. The top three cyber crimes, by number of complaints reported by victims …
“Today, the U.S. Copyright Office released the Copyright Registration Toolkit, a comprehensive resource designed to help creators, small business owners, advisors, and others navigate the copyright system. As part of the Copyright Office’s Copyright for All initiative, the toolkit is a visual breakdown of copyright, including essential information about copyright law, how to prepare for …
