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scholars are watching Carpenter’s case closely because it may require the supreme court to address the scope and continuing relevance of the “third-party-records doctrine”, a judicially developed rule that has sometimes been understood to mean that a person surrenders her constitutional privacy interest in information that she turns over to a third party. The government contends that Carpenter lacks a constitutionally protected privacy interest in his location data because his cellphone was continually sharing that data with his cellphone provider.

Privacy advocates are rightly alarmed by this argument. Much of the digital technology all of us rely on today requires us to share information passively with third parties. Visiting a website, sending an email, buying a book online – all of these things require sharing sensitive data with internet service providers, merchants, banks and others. If this kind of commonplace and unavoidable information-sharing is sufficient to extinguish constitutional privacy rights, the digital-age fourth amendment will soon be a dead letter.

“Awareness that the government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. Left unchecked, he warned, new forms of surveillance could “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society”.

The vast majority of the company’s content is apolitical—and that is certainly the way the company portrays itself.

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia

the video gives a heavily sanitized version of Josef Stalin’s time in power and, bizarrely, suggests that Alaska was given to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev

During the entire history of America, the US has not been at war for 17 years. That's incredible, mainly because if you talk to people who maybe aren't that much that interested in history, they would say, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about? There’s no war.”

Our relationship with war and how our country functions in the world is so warped and twisted. Every time the word “war” is introduced into the cultural discourse, you know that it is already corrupted. That's why it’s paired here with “back to normal,” because it's another combination of phrases that stood out…Everybody keeps talking about things getting back to normal. Then the pronouncements that this is a war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. It just seems so disturbing really because what that means is that we're about to start doing things that are ethically questionable. To me, what was happening is that the pronouncement was made so that anything goes, and there's no culpability, nobody will be held responsible for making any decisions whatsoever because it was war and things had to be done.

if I think about how “war” has been used strategically in this context of COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like rhetoric that was raised to be alarmist, but almost to be comforting. That this is a familiar experience. We have a handle on it. We are attacking it like a war. War is our normal.

There is probably no technology more beaten down, more discarded by “innovators,” and yet more irreplaceable and urgent today than RSS.

In an age of user feeds, everyone insist on becoming the one channel to rule your life, into a tyranny of algorithmic centralization. In a crafty and much needed mesh of open source standards and open-mindedness, RSS understood the human spirit will seek after freedom and choice at every turn.

democratized syndication

Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.

Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.

Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”

What I find so creepy about OpenAI’s bots is not that they seem to exhibit creativity; computers have been doing creative tasks such as generating original proofs in Euclidean geometry since the 1950s. It’s that I grew up with the idea of a computer as an automaton bound by its nature to follow its instructions precisely; barring a malfunction, it does exactly what its operator – and its program—tell it to do. On some level, this is still true; the bot is following its program and the instructions of its operator. But the way the program interprets the operator’s instructions are not the way the operator thinks. Computer programs are optimized not to solve problems, but instead to convince its operator that it has solved those problems. It was written on the package of the Turing test—it’s a game of imitation, of deception. For the first time, we’re forced to confront the consequences of that deception.

a computer program that would be sociopathic if it were alive

Even when it’s not supposed to, even when it has a way out, even when the truth is known to the computer and it’s easier to spit it out rather than fabricate something—the computer still lies