Democracy is a Liability

Once you have no more earning potential, you’d think the advertising would go away. If you have no money, there’s no reason for people to pay to manipulate you to get you to give them some. Google and Facebook will die, and this evil sector of the economy will finally be destroyed.

the singularity is nearer

Bills Would Ban #Liability #Lawsuits For #ClimateChange

#Republican lawmakers in multiple states and #Congress are advancing proposals to shield #polluters from #climate #accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms -- even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount. It's the latest in a counter-offensive that has unfolded on multiple fronts,
#maga #Trump

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/2222200/bills-would-ban-liability-lawsuits-for-climate-change?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Bills Would Ban Liability Lawsuits For Climate Change - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms -- even as these harms and their associated costs cont...

Today Is...National Awkward Moments Day!
Accidents happen! That’s why we have insurance—to turn an "oops" into a "handled." 😬🛡️ #AccidentsHappen #Liability #InsuranceGuru
Today Is...Everything You Do Is Right Day!
Today, you can't go wrong! But for the other 364 days, having liability insurance is a good idea. ✅🛡️ #Liability #SafetyNet #NationalDays
EFF To Court: Don’t Make Embedding Illegal

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is respons…

Techdirt

@jenniferplusplus

You stated: <<What it actually says is "AI is _permitted_ to make mistakes; _you are liable_ for the results, whether you check them or not". Except "you" is generally not even the person building, installing, or even using the AI. It's the person the AI is used on.>>

Way back in the early 2000s, there was a system called "Dragon Dictate". The goal was to eliminate #human #transcriptionists with automated speech-to-text (sound familiar?) The system had to be trained on your voice and vocabulary. Once properly trained it could do a pretty good job, I'll guess 95-98%. It was better suited to output that was stereotyped (mostly the same), and structured (such as radiology reports and operative notes).

Regardless of how the note/report was generated, the professional who spoke the words had a obligation to at least scan the output and sign it (yes, with an ink pen!). Once signed it became part of the "legal medical record" open to misinterpretation, copying, lawsuits, etc. etc.

Once Dragon Dictate became routine (and they fired all the transcriptionists) I started to notice this little #disclaimer at the bottom:

"If portions of this note are confusing or indecipherable please feel free to call me with questions or concerns." Sounds a lot like #AI to me! I polite way to summarize this is:

👉 They were trying to force me to be their copy-editor. 👈

It cast the entire content in doubt.

Consider for a moment the difference between saying "The scan does not show cancer." and "The scan does show cancer." That "not" is doing a lot of work, and is very easy to miss when you're talking fast and never intend to read your own note ever again.

More subtle is the grammatical error in the first sentence. "This note was #dictated using Dragon text to speech recognition software." Either they changed their product name to "Dragon Text", in which case the capitalization is off. Or they transposed words and it should read "speech to text" or "speech recognition" with no text.

👉 In other words, they didn't even proof-read their own disclaimer! 😱

#MedicalRecords #Medicine #SpeechToText #Liability #Risk #SignalToNoise

Time for a reckoning: The lawyer taking on a US chemical giant over PFAS

" The solicitor accuses the American company of “having created a massive environmental problem before normalizing it....All polluters, not just 3M, need to acknowledge their liability. The time when companies can do whatever they want and put waste in our environment and bodies is over." >>
https://www.euractiv.com/news/interview-the-lawyer-taking-on-a-us-chemical-giant-over-pfas-pollution/

Victorian government blocked fire service from pursuing US giant over PFAS contamination >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-25/fire-rescue-victoria-pfas-3m-lawsuit-blocked-state-government/106044128

PFAS au:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/search?query=pfas
#PFAS #pollution #liability #litigation #PFASFoam #FirefightingFoams #water #ForeverChemicals #NSW #SyntheticChemicals #HealthHazards

New York's chatbot liability bill reaches Senate floor, threatening AI providers: New York Senate Bill S7263, placing liability on chatbot operators impersonating licensed professionals, reached the Senate floor calendar on February 26, 2026, moving closer to a vote. https://ppc.land/new-yorks-chatbot-liability-bill-reaches-senate-floor-threatening-ai-providers/ #NewYork #Chatbot #AIlaw #Liability #SenateBill
New York's chatbot liability bill reaches Senate floor, threatening AI providers

New York Senate Bill S7263, placing liability on chatbot operators impersonating licensed professionals, reached the Senate floor calendar on February 26, 2026, moving closer to a vote.

PPC Land

“Predatorgate" Greek spying scandal results in guilty verdicts by the Court of the EU against 4 defendants for “breaching the confidentiality of telephone communications,” “tampering with a personal-data filing system on a repeated basis,” and “illegal access to an information system or data.”

Nikos Androulakis, leader of the main opposition PASOK party in Greece discovered Predator software had been installed on his phone in 2022 leading to an investigation.

Defendants received combined prison sentences totaling 126 years. https://www.politico.eu/article/predatorgate-greece-court-sentences-predator-spyware-gang/ #Greece #Spying #Predatorgate #Privacy #DataPrivacy #PredatorSoftware #Guilty #MobilePhone #Liability #SpyWare

Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production?

How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for 13 hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era.

Medium