“‘For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year’

…

US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.

Worldwide, democracy has receded to its lowest levels since the mid-70s. ‘The world has never before seen as many countries autocratising at the same time’

…

A record 41% (3.4 billion) of the world’s population currently resides in countries where democracy is deteriorating, the report claims, adding that Washington is leading this global turn away from democracy.”

The very fucking *least* you can do right now is not comply in advance.

Yes, I’m looking at you, tech folks.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-aiming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

#fascism

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

Oh do fuck off.

“Reuters says it moved forward with the piece, having concluded that “the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse.”

#Banksy https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/banksy-real-name-reuters-investigation-graffiti-artist-true-1236529947/

Banksy's real name is revealed, yet again, for about the 20th time in the last 20 years with another 'EXCLUSIVE!' report. And surprise, surprise it's the same guy it's always been.

Can we now just forget we know again and carry on enjoying the work. The idea we don't know who it is is a major part of the concept.

We listen to Banksy when he's Banksy not when he's XXXXXX so forget you know so the magic isn't broken.

#banksy #streetart #ukart #anon

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116205343316077705

Oh no, again? Who could have seen it coming?!

Narrator: anyone could have seen it coming.

Also, this is a new thing, not the old thing reported on a few weeks ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/20/amazon-cloud-outages-ai-tools-amazon-web-services-aws

#AI #Hype #AWS

RE: https://vmst.io/@vmstan/116200819973767850

A venture capitalist, you say? How surprising.

OpenAleph, the FOSS tool for investigative journalists that i work on with @darcdataresearch just released version 5.2

i've published two technical deep dives into the things we spent most of our energy on with this new version:

* translating documents using deterministic machine learning tools (no genAI bullshit here): https://openaleph.org/blog/2026/03/in-platform-translation-for-sensitive-documents/38401cf3-2455-4b0f-a8ea-95e38b97b2f2/

* parsing e-mails to extract even more information and properly handle malformed headers and attachments: https://openaleph.org/blog/2026/03/when-emails-get-complicated-5-2-handles-it/64dac929-6e82-493e-af84-c0afc8783239/

#DARC #openaleph

Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on the official Copilot discord, then locks the server

lol

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/03/02/microsoft-gets-tired-of-microslop-bans-the-word-on-its-discord-then-locks-the-server-after-backlash/

An ad questioning mass surveillance was rejected from UK TV. Meanwhile, Europe debates scanning private messages and expanding surveillance powers. This is why it deserves attention. 📢

@mullvadnet
#mullvad #andthen