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Card Catalog – Hana Lee Goldin: “The verification tricks that would make fact-checkers weep with joy. Last Tuesday, a client sent me their “thoroughly researched” white paper on workplace automation. It had 47 citations. Looked bulletproof. Every claim backed by a study, every statistic sourced to a journal. I was impressed for exactly three minutes. …
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 20, 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 …
Android Headlines: “DuckDuckGo has introduced a new AI image generation tool that emphasizes privacy, anonymizing prompts and storing images locally on users’ devices. While it faces stiff competition from Google and OpenAI, the tool could appeal to users who want AI image generation without giving up personal data. It seems like everyone is launching their …
Ars Technica: “There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These instances raise serious questions about the quality of peer review in some journals—how could anyone let a figure with terms like “runctitional,” …
Evolving State Legislative Efforts to Censor Public School Libraries – “Thousands of books removed from schools out of fear of state governments nationwide. Judy Blume’s Forever… banned from every Utah public school; To Kill a Mockingbird and 39 other titles pulled from a Texas school district that used AI to review materials; a list of …
“The Trail Status Program Report, obtained by The Washington Post, [no paywall] concludes public lands are deteriorating quickly after the Trump administration cut staff. Trails maintained by the U.S. Forest Service nationwide are being “abandoned” and deteriorating rapidly, threatening visitor safety, after the Trump administration cut staff, according to an internal report obtained by The …
Ars Technica: “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL. These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office …
Follow up to Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich and Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term Jeffrey Epstein Fallout Friendship With Trump Epstein’s Grand Jury Records Maxwell’s Grand Jury Materials How Epstein Got Rich Files to …
Indicator: “Just because it’s “intelligent” doesn’t mean it’s always right. Errors are a wonderful thing. That may be a strange thing for a former fact-checker t/o write in a newsletter about digital deception, but bear with me. Errors are often funny, because – like good jokes – they subvert meaning in unexpected ways. I recently …
The Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA) has released the first edition of its Climate Policy Database, providing unprecedented detail on how governments are tackling climate change through policy action. With validated data covering 38 out of 60 countries so far, and around 1 600 carbon mitigation policy instruments, the Database offers granular insights …
Anne Applebaum – “I needed several days to absorb the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, to re-read it, to listen to reactions, to compare it to the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in 2017. My conclusion, published in the Atlantic (gift link here), is that it isn’t really a strategy document at all: …
This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, Kyle Chayka argues [no paywall] – The New Yorker – This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment. “The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, …
