In Mississippi, lawyers on both sides of a court case were caught using AI, essentially two LLMs arguing against each other. The judge dismissed all lawyers from the case and canceled the trial:
For weeks I have been desperately trying to ignore a $200k LEGO YouTuber legal drama but then the police dropped bodycam footage and filmed an insane video in The Matrix's white void room and I could no longer help myself:
Worth listening to this 404 Media podcast about this hacking campaign. Really explains well just how crazy this hacking campaign is, and how bad it is in the context of having AI do sensitive stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsAtXST87pk
And this point by Dino Dai Zovi is also very important:
A company that makes a no-tech, repairable tractor is having trouble keeping up with demand from farmers sick of John Deere's repair monopoly and simply want a tractor that turns on and works:
https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/
New: Google is quietly trying to buy code from Android developers to train an AI coding tool as part of a "confidential" program. Tells them it's a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for "helping society at large"
https://www.404media.co/google-is-quietly-buying-code-from-play-store-developers-to-train-ai/
New: Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email associated with the account they want to steal.
Shockingly easy, terrible flaw associated with offloading support to AI:
wrote about my new favorite topic: extremely bad billionaire vanity podcasts
https://www.404media.co/washington-post-make-it-make-sense-opinion-podcast/
I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet
Canvas hack is extremely bad, the "biggest student data privacy disaster in history" because it contains billions of messages between students and their professors, which can be extremely sensitive: "There's personal circumstances, medical circumstances, accessibility accommodations, disputes, sexual assault allegations, like all sorts of stuff would be getting reported to the instructor using Canvas."
Was so fun to go on Close All Tabs to talk about how farmers have fought for right to repair! Thought this episode turned out really great and the show in general is amazing:
https://www.kqed.org/news/12077465/to-hack-a-tractor-how-farmers-won-the-right-to-repair
What do pissed off farmers and broken McFlurry machines have to do with each other? More than you’d think. Both are part of the story behind the modern right-to-repair movement. In this episode, Jason Koebler, tech journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, explains how an unlikely alliance between Midwestern farmers and electronics repair technicians helped win right-to repair-protections across multiple states — and why the farmers’ fight to fix their own tractors is far from over.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
