Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
A draft opinion for Moyle v. US — a still-undecided abortion case — was briefly published to the Supreme Court website today. According to Bloomberg, the draft would allow emergency abortions in Idaho.
The court is behind schedule with ten decisions left to go, including the NetChoice cases.
That’s the ol’ internet axiom that ran through my head as I read this New York Times roundup of T&C changes that have quietly occurred over the last year, coinciding with the need to feed the hungry AI machines with more and more data. The piece does a good job of showing the before and after language using images like this one for Google:
The Department of Justice announced that, as expected, the WikiLeaks founder entered a guilty plea today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
At today’s proceeding, Assange admitted to his role in the conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act and received a court-imposed 62-month time-served sentence, reflecting the time he served in U.K. prison as a result of the U.S. charges. Following the imposition of sentence, he will depart the United States for his native Australia. Pursuant to the plea agreement, Assange is prohibited from returning to the United States without permission.
Some of the biggest players in the music industry are suing generative AI music startups Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In the lawsuits, plaintiffs include examples of AI songs that sound a lot like human artists — and some are pretty blatant.
APRA seemed like the most promising privacy bill in a while when it debuted in April. But the latest version, which a House committee will reportedly consider on Thursday, is getting panned.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law says:
“By removing previously agreed upon bipartisan language that would address data-driven discrimination and require AI impact assessments, the new draft of APRA fails to address the core purpose of privacy: to ensure that who we are cannot be used against us unfairly.”
With electric vehicle investments, that is, according to this nifty visualization by Bloomberg. Of $206 billion in federal funding for environmental projects, 80 percent is going toward EV and battery manufacturing. And the vast majority of those projects — $161 billion — will be located in Republican districts. It puts Republicans in a weird — one could say intensely hypocritical — place of rallying against EVs while quietly raking in the investments and jobs.
TikTok, like other social platforms, has become part of the political fabric: politicians campaign on TikTok and groups attempt to spread propaganda via influence campaigns.
In the lead up to the UK general election, TikTok is surfacing videos from journalists and fact checkers. It’s also sharing tips for spotting fake news and definitions for things like disinformation.
Here’s chairman Richard Yu feeling a bit full of himself at the launch of the company’s HarmonyOS NEXT beta on Friday, according to Nikkei:
“We have seized this opportunity to overtake [the others] on a bend by building an operating system that is self-controllable and secure. In just over a decade, we have achieved some milestones that the Western countries took three to four decades to achieve.”
Something something great artists steal.
The American Privacy Rights Act looked like it had a real shot; now it may become yet another victim of House GOP internal drama. I suppose aside from the communist plot to sap and impurify all of our precious personal data, Congress simply does not care about privacy?
The Belgian presidency postponed a decision on the legislation, which proposed scanning encrypted messages for CSAM. This doesn’t mean the proposal is gone for good — an EU diplomat tells the Belgian news outlet HLN that “it remains a key priority for the Council.”
This time from the Department of Justice, after the Federal Trade Commission said it was referring a complaint to the agency based on an investigation involving a children’s privacy law. The FTC said it doesn’t usually make this kind of referral public, but believed it in the public interest. TikTok said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations and said many of them are outdated.
[Federal Trade Commission]
In a statement published yesterday, Stanford University denied it was shuttering the prominent research center studying abuse and disinformation online. In recent months, key staff have departed and others have been told to look for new jobs.
The Internet Observatory is, however, looking for money: Stanford says “founding grants will soon be exhausted” as the center moves under new leadership.