Privacy
FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled
Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone's device. At least for now.
News
Balatro Ported to the Gameboy Advance’s e-Reader
A software engineer made a version of the game that runs off code printed onto a small card.
Podcast
Podcast: This Site Unmasks Cops With Facial Recognition
A tool that uses facial recognition to reveal cops' names, a big and complicated AI ruling, and the AI slop between Iran and Israel.
News
AI Models And Parents Don’t Understand ‘Let Him Cook’
LLMs are not familiar with “ate that up,” “secure the bag,” and “sigma,” showing that training data is not yet updated to Gen Alpha terminology.
AI
Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
A judge rules that Anthropic's training on copyrighted works without authors' permission was a legal fair use, but that stealing the books in the first place is illegal.
platforms
Massive Creator Platform Fansly Bans Furries
Blaming payment processor restrictions, Fansly—a platform creators flocked to after OnlyFans announced it'd ban sex—announced it's changing the rules for multiple types of content.
News
‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops
A free tool that allows anyone to upload a photo of an LAPD officer to get their name and badge number.
retro
This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read Via an Ancient Internet Protocol
New Session publishes poetry via Telnet, rejecting the internet’s fast-paced enshittification.
AI
Meta's AI Model 'Memorized' Huge Chunks of Books, Including 'Harry Potter' and '1984'
Researchers found Meta’s popular Llama 3.1 70B has a capacity to recite passages from 'The Sorcerer's Stone' at a rate much higher than could happen by chance.
FOIA Forum
Here's the Video for Our Sixth FOIA Forum: Massive Blue
Here is the video archive for our FOIA Forum where we explained how we got records about Massive Blue, a company selling AI personas to cops.
AI
'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community
Details about how Meta's nearly Manhattan-sized data center will impact consumers' power bills are still secret.
The Abstract
ChatGPT May Be Linked to 'Cognitive Debt,' New Study Finds
A preprint study found that participants who used an LLM to write essays performed worse “at all levels” than those who didn’t.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: The Omnipresence Is the Point
This week, we discuss Deadheads and doxxing sites.