“Company destroys two million books” is not a headline that generates sympathy. – ISBNdb
The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an a[lgorithmic] system for pre-crime policing…just as [the Trump regime shifts] its focus…from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent…
Politicians are increasingly brazen in their attempts to circumvent the Constitution:
A federal court has slapped down an attempt by the town of Johnston, Rhode Island, to [keep the poors out by stealing] a vacant lot slated for affordable housing development…[After] a [federal] judge [previously returned the deed to its owners and blocked politicians from taking any action to steal the property again]…the town passed a resolution creating its own…eminent domain [process that it declared superseded state and federal law]…but the district court was having none of it. “A municipality is not in and of itself a sovereign,” wrote [Judge Melissa] DuBose…
Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to [chatbot pushers] for [LLM] training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service…[tried to spin its scheme to feed millions of books to the shoggoths as] “a test of market interest”…[and barfed the buzzword] “pivot” [in reporters’ faces]…In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for [LLM] training…because they [are slop-free], and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse…In January, book authors filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, revealing internal documents that showed Anthropic planned to obtain and scan millions of printed books and destroy them in the process…
Scenes from the early days of a dark age:
Since October…Trump c[rony] Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of [propaganda items] on behalf of Israel…The key intended audience of these sites is not…humans…Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower [Psycho], created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to…[poison] chatbots…Parscale has made his…LLM poisoning…explicit…And it is working, according to disinformation experts…meaning tens of millions of [intellectually-lazy] Americans…are increasingly likely to receive…Israeli [propaganda]…
This was all predicted eight years ago; politicians simply didn’t care:
The UK’s Online Safety Act [i]s a problem…it has enrolled millions of British adults in mandatory identity-check systems run by third-party vendors with documented histories of data breaches…[now] Parliament is asking…[how to “]fix[“]…an…in[nate feature]…of…the kind of [universal surveillance] the Act was designed to produce…[while] fail[ing] to [achieve total censorship of anything politicians dislike while magically allowing things that would embarrass them when inevitably censored]…The consequence that those drafting the Act [intentionally ignored to shove their evil through]: the vendors…used to perform these checks [routinely] suffer…data breaches….[which] are not incidental to the law’s compliance mechanism — they are its structural risk…Ofcom [wants] zero-knowledge proofs…[a] cryptographic method…to confirm that a user is over 18 without learning who the user is…[but that will not happen] because the vendors who provide [age verification] have an economic interest in…[selling people’s] data…
Cops will abuse warrantless surveillance until it no longer exists:
A [North Carolina cop named]…Seth Elliot [has been charged for using] the Flock S[urveillance network to stalk women, but he was also rewarded with a]…paid [vacation]…
These antisocial things need to be banned entirely:
M[ark Zuckerberg]’s [pervert] glasses have quickly [been embraced]…by all kinds of charlatans and brutes to harass strangers, from pickup artist “manfluencers” filming themselves [harass]ing [women] to juvenile pranksters recording [people]…without their consent. Consequently, the backlash…has reached a fever pitch, with owners choosing to leave them at home to avoid embarrassment. Sensing a threat to its bottom line, [Facebook] has slowly started treating the issue with [a minuscule] degree of seriousness. Now it’s vowing to crack down on creeps…using [the] glasses…as…the[y were designed to be used]…two large pickup artist accounts on Instagram have been…banned for posting harassing content filmed with the glasses…yet [Facebook still believes it can] control the narrative about…its fashy glasses…
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
