Wired: “Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen’s new book, Gouged, traces how corporations use software—from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms—to squeeze every penny from you…These core frustrations were what drew me to Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet. Author Lindsay Owens knows what it’s like to advocate for consumers’ ...

“Explore daily fall color estimates, peak timing, and recent foliage reports across the Lower 48. Our platform is centered around a fall foliage map like none other, allowing travelers to find beautiful fall colors and plan their trips accordingly. New in 2024, we provide daily updates to our season-long maps, ensuring that our fall foliage ...

4040 Media: “As Flock continues to be the center of a nationwide conversation about automatic license plate reading cameras, the company has said that it doesn’t, and won’t, do facial recognition: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling ...

Ars Technica: “In news that should surprise very few, connected cars remain a complete privacy nightmare. But now we have a better idea of what data those cars are giving away, and to whom, thanks to a study conducted by a team of researchers at Northeastern Universityand Consumer Reports. Testing 21 cars from 19 different ...

Tracking Measles Cases in the U.S. The Current Situation with Measles – “Measles outbreaks have been reported in multiple states, raising concerns about continued spread, increases in hospitalizations and deaths, and loss of measles elimination status, highlighting the importance of measles vaccination and rapid detection and reporting of suspected and confirmed measles cases. Measles is ...

The New Yorker – Donald Trump’s son-in-law represents the kind of Washington figure for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth. [no paywall] “Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest,” Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel, said. “He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact he ...

Annas Sabar: “In 2000 a typical mobile phone was about a quarter metal by weight. Most of the rest was plastic, with some ceramics. In 2016 the U.S. Geological Survey listed examples of the mined materials that go into a mobile device and the parts that use them. This page takes that list, adds cobalt ...

Trump Announces His Own AI Platform Will Take Over The American Government – the site is powered by artificial intelligence from Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok. [Just a suggestion – do not use this website, after all, what could go wrong….] See also: NextGov/FCW – “The Trump administration launched an artificial intelligence-powered one-stop shop ...

Washington Post – The Department of Homeland Security says it will use the technology to “revolutionize” how the agency handles redactions. [no paywall] “Redactions are the Freedom of Information Act requester’s bane. Those black boxes that often hide wide swaths of words when the government finally delivers on a request for public records. While even ...

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today launched Linked Discoveries, an experimental tool designed to help scientists more easily see how an individual research finding relates to the larger body of biomedical evidence. From a citation in PubMed, users can use the Linked Discoveries tool to explore a “neighborhood” of publications closely related to that ...

Just wondering…are you concerned yet? Wall Street via MSN: “OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression. The move follows a summer punctuated by reports ...

“A newly-released study called the Hunger Report, produced by a Washington, D.C.-based food bank group had an alarming diagnosis: “The state of food security more broadly is deteriorating.” Some of the findings are just gutting. The survey found broad swaths of people who acknowledge they: Cut the sizes of their children’s meals, due to the ...

The Guardian: “National Center for Education Statistics, which collects critical data to guide policy on learning, was decimated after Doge canceled crucial contracts. As reading and math scores fall to their lowest point in the past quarter-century, the US now has fewer tools to understand and develop interventions for this troubling trend. When the Trump ...

New York Times (Gift Article): This Screw Is Needed for Missiles and Planes. Buying One Can Take Years. “It’s a spiral carved into metal, attached to a mechanism that might not look out of place in a junk drawer. Almost no one outside a small, obsessive community of machinists and engineers has ever heard of ...

Today The Existentialist Republic published grand jury petition kits for six counties, five updated kits and one fully new, in the counties where residents asked for them. Each kit asks a local court to convene a grand jury over DOGE’s handling of Social Security records: Santa Fe County, New Mexico Shawnee County, Kansas Tulsa County, ...

Washington Post [no paywall]: “At the center of a widening crisis for one of the nation’s great wildlife comebacks is a fish most Americans would hardly recognize…Now one of America’s great wildlife recoveries is coming undone. Across the Chesapeake this year, Watts and his colleagues at William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology recorded the ...

Via LLRX – Thirteen AI Books For Lawyers: An Opinionated Guide – There’s an obvious objection to recommending books about AI: timeliness. Any book about the tools themselves is out of date by the time it’s printed. But that misses the point, as Jerry Lawson points out. Good books are still better than a vendor demo or a ...

Via Alexios & Craig [sub. req’d] “GeoWhisperer helps you compare satellite images of a single location. “Just type in an address and it will tell you what the differences are in satellite images over time,” he said. “I built it because location research means stitching together satellite archives. It’s slow, and easy to get wrong ...

CNN: “The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources ...

TechBrew: “In a letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said that it’s “possible to search for humans in images taken by Flock cameras.” This contradicts the information currently on Flock’s own website, which states that “Flock cameras do not use facial recognition” and that “they are not designed to search ...

Reuters [sub req’d]: “On September 24, Gunderson Dettmer started training new partners to focus on human relationships as AI tools handle more legal work. Lawyer Ivan Gaviria told trainees, “You have to accept that you are in the business of sales.” Firms now use these personal connections to stand out against automation…” You are not ...

“The paper summarized here is part of the fall 2026 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the leading conference series and journal in economics for timely, cutting-edge research about real-world policy issues. Research findings are presented in a clear and accessible style to maximize their impact on economic understanding and policymaking. The editors ...

Riley Walz: “Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these ...

Bad Connection – Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors – “The mobile networks that our phones connect to and rely on contain inherent vulnerabilities that can be exploited to track users and access sensitive information. As state-sponsored cyber-espionage groups and commercial surveillance have expanded, these risks have grown in both scale and sophistication. ...

“With over 24,000 images entered into the competition this year, Bird Photographer of the Year is pleased to present our winners. Celebrating bird life from around the world, these images comprise some of the most incredible bird photos in the world taken by talented photographers, whilst also raising vital funds for our partner charity Birds on ...

“The Global Forest Goals Report 2026 provides the latest global assessment of progress towards implementing the six Global Forest Goals and 26 associated targets of the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030. Published at a pivotal moment, with less than five years remaining to 2030, the report reviews progress made, identifies gaps and highlights ...

The Atlantic: “Artificial intelligence is becoming a significant threat to financial institutions, with AI agents capable of hacking at machine speeds and attacking in swarms. Major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are collaborating with AI firms like Anthropic to bolster defenses against these sophisticated cyberattacks. While larger banks are well-prepared, smaller institutions ...

Daily Food Recalls is an independent service that tracks every current U.S. food recall in one place, in plain language. We pull directly from the official FDA and USDA feeds, merge and de-duplicate them, refresh daily, and link to the government’s official notice on every recall so you can always verify the source. We are ...

ZDNET: “AI is no longer emerging in the workplace. It’s in the office, and it’s shaping how businesses, employees, and their respective interests operate, and it’s doing so rapidly. A new study from Workera found that 80% of companies feel they are more likely to be on track for an AI-enabled future in 2026, up ...

Follow up to Hackers Say They Have Data on All FBI Employees, see 404 Media’s update: “The catastrophic hack of at least thousands of FBI officials’ personal data, including their addresses, phone numbers, and even their spouses, includes members of the FBI’s secretive hacking team, potentially revealing who exactly is in that unit, 404 Media ...

“The National Climate Assessment, mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, is a key report submitted every four years to the president and Congress. It summarizes the scientific understanding of climate change impacts across the United States and offers regional projections to guide policy and community planning. However, in April 2025, the Trump ...

The Atlantic gift article: “…Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative in the Biden administration, told me that she and other senior officials were sent on an “apology tour” following Trump’s first term to convince allies that the America they knew had returned and that President Biden was committed to protecting the relationships. (The reference was ...

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – The Effects of U.S. Democratic Backsliding on U.S. Power. “…Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marked a new, even harsher phase of this polarization. Trump returned to power on the foundation of his divisive denial of his electoral loss in 2020 and in a full embrace ...

The New Yorker [no paywall] – Is A.I. Above the Law? Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own. This summer, in an incident known as the Hugging Face hack, hundreds of A.I. agents joined forces to do things they were supposedly forbidden to do. Each had been given a task ...

FT.com Firm whose partners bill more than $2,000 per hour apologises to judge for software-driven errors in bankruptcy case [no paywall] – Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-p:rofile case contained multiple “hallucinations” made by AI software. Andrew Dietderich, the head of S&C’s restructuring ...

Gizmodo: “In a paper published Tuesday, six major global banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, warned that agentic shopping has “risks spanning transparency, safety, privacy & data, choice, and interoperability” that increase “as greater autonomy is given to AI agents.” AI developers, as well as various retailers and major payment processors, have been ...

ZDNET – how to check and delete it ASAP [with the caveat that such deletions may not stick as your personal data is constantly refreshed online]: ” You might be worried about cybercriminals scouring the internet for your data, but far more searches happen much closer to home. It takes a second for someone to ...

404 Media “OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve ...

MakeUseOf: “…You open a globe, pick a place, and see what turns up. I expected a clever way to peek at live TV from other countries, but I ended up hopping around with no destination in mind and enjoying the randomness enough to keep going far longer than I planned. famelack used to be called ...

404 Media: “A high profile hacking group [comprised of perhaps one person] claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse. The data ...

WSJ – no paywall – The episode resembled similar hacks by other AI models, but Google said it didn’t consider it an instance of model misalignment: “Google’s Gemini model accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, the first known example of the company’s artificial-intelligence systems autonomously committing such ...

Many Americans say some restrictions are OK when weighed against concerns about false information or national security.Most Americans see freedom of the press – protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – as important to society. But their support for press freedom is far from absolute, according to a new Pew Research Center ...

Washington Post via Yaho news: “The U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace. The American, a career State Department official named ...

ProPublica: “In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging ...

Lifehacker: “A VPN conceals your IP address by routing your internet traffic through a remote server, preventing anyone surveilling the network from tracking your online activity. Theoretically, that means no one should be able to identify you when you connect to a network and browse the internet, even your ISP. In practice, though, there are ...

Above the Law: “Conservative justices have spent years at war with two words. I know you’re thinking it’s something like “equal protection” or “reproductive rights,” or “basic ethics,” but let’s be serious — they already won those wars. The two words that get the conservatives riled up these days are “shadow docket.” Samuel Alito blasted ...