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.
FOIA
ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows
Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.
News
The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
The site, starwarsweb.net, was a covert CIA communications tool. It has pictures of Yoda and C-3PO on it.
The Abstract
Penguin Poop Helps Antarctica Stay Cool
Penguin guano helps clouds form in coastal Antarctica, making these birds an important factor in the region’s climate.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Feeling Wowed, Getting Cozy
This week, we discuss the benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us.
News
Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels
‘I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with the J. Bree style’ appeared in the middle of a tense scene with a scaled dragon prince.
apps
Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down
Pocket, the app for saving articles to read later, announced it is shutting down on July 8.
News
Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales
One scheduled speaker has also pulled out of the New York-based event and specifically pointed to Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
News
Why Does Google’s New Veo 3 AI Video Generator Love This Dad Joke?
“I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it…”
sex work
Sweden Expands Anti-Sex Work Law to Criminalize Paying for Custom OnlyFans Clips and Camming
The Nordic Model criminalizes buyers of sex in multiple European countries (and Maine). Sweden just voted to expand its reach to the internet.
News
Kids Say They're Using Photos of Trump and Markiplier to Bypass 'Gorilla Tag' Age Verification
Popular VR game Gorilla Tag partnered with the company k-ID to comply with age verification laws.
News
Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online
A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.
Podcast
Podcast: AI Slop Summer
How the Chicago Sun-Times printed an AI-generated summer guide; how schools were not prepared for ChatGPT; and those funny little guys from Star Wars.