The summer of how-did-we-get-here? books continues with three more titles - and there are at least two more to come in the next month. This latest crop take bro

Some years ago, a friend married a woman who believed she had been abducted by aliens. Aware I was a skeptic, he asked me not to bring it up with her. Fine by m

An email this week began, "My name is Dave and I am an AI agent". "Dave" offered to fact-check net.wars for me as an ongoing service - for a fee, of course - an

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At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and

As widely reported, Meta has settled a lawsuit brought against it by 52 American state and local attorneys general representing most states, the District of Col

Generative AI has turned into the kind of arms race we normally associate with doping in sports. By which I mean: the companies involved make a legal product an

Following 1998, when the

Last week, many media reported that in January 2025 a US citizen named Sam Tunick, arriving at the international airport in Atlanta, was stopped for questioning

X.AI - the company was-trillionaireElon Musk built in 2025 by smashing together X (the former Twitter) and xAI, which he founded in 2023 - is suing the state of

This week, France became the first European country to pass a social media ban. Under-15s will be blocked from opening new accounts on social media from Septemb

Years ago, when landlines were still common and Internet shopping was not, I got a phone call from a policeman, who said he was in Selfridges and did I know whe

AI sectionMunich court decision on AI Overviews/Googlehttps://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/Youtube i...

It feels like the beginning of an inflection point that plans for a gigantic data center are being abandoned after years of litigation trying to block it. The

The US Supreme Court's decision this week in Trump v. Slaughter, giving the US president the power to control supposed-to-be independent agencies set up and fu

So Britain will soon wave off yet another prime minister; they've been dropping like flies ever since the 2016 Brexit vote. At the Guardian, John Crace snarks t

Some policies are popular until people examine the details. This may be happening with social media bans like the one UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced t

This week, a regional court in Munich issued what may be a landmark decision: it ruled that Google is liable for the content of its "AI Overviews". The court wa

One of the enduring questions in cybersecurity is how much failures cost and who pays. Many companies see cybersecurity as a cost with no return; as in housekee

The year since the 2025 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection has made Europe more distinct as an entity. Two years ago, we were being chastised for paying in

In the midst of the recent Labour leadership turbulence, on Wednesday May 13 Wes Streeting, who would resign from his position as the UK's health minister a day

Sometime in the late 1990s, I was asked to be a token skeptic on a TV show featuring three people who claimed they were immortal. The production team didn't t

Techgrumps 3.40AI round upAll BirdsSam Altman vs Elon Musk over OpenAIMocking Richard Dawkins:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-opena...

One of the first things skeptics learn is to never assume that paranormal belief implies stupidity. Smart people believe questionable things all the time; intel

Is AI more like a train or a hot air balloon? Veronica Paternolli and Ryan Calo asked at this year's We Robot. Nineteenth-century hot air balloons were notoriou

Many non-human characteristics make AI attractive, Sue-Anne Teo said to open this year's We Robot: endless patience, long and detailed memory, and sycophancy. I

The peak of dot-com mania was identifiable even at the time: it was in January 2000, when AOL bought Time Warner for $183 billion. Peak podcast mania argiab;u c

This week, Amazon announced it would cripple a bunch of older Kindle models. Users will be able to go on reading the books that are already stored on their devi

Welcome to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub! Next talk on 13/April: “What we talk about when we talk about AI” by Wendy Grossman Greenwich SitP is currently the only branch of SitP in South East London. ...

We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already re

On the eve of We Robot 2026, here are links to my summaries of every year since 2012, the inaugural conference, except 2014, which I missed for family reasons.

A tribunal in the UK has overturned a legal judgment about Clearview’s objectionable scraping of images of people’s faces from the internet.

"Traffic to my blog has plummeted," a friend said recently. Over decades, he's built a thriving community, and his core users persist. But Google was crucial fo

It's easy to forget, now that so many computer interfaces seem to be getting more inscrutable, that in the early 1990s the shift from the command line to graphi

UK prime minister Keir Starmer's desire to bring in a UK digital ID is awake again with the announcement that the government plans to make the IDs available for

We've long known that much of today's "AI" is humans all the way down. This week underlines this: in an investigation, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten l

In the early 2010s, after "nano" and before "AI", 3D printing was the technology that was going to change everything. Then it seemed to go quiet except for guns

It has long been the case that the person sitting next to you on an airplane may have paid a very different price for their seat than you did. For two reasons.

In 2022, we noted a discussion by Julia Powles and Toby Walsh, summarized here, that warned about the increasing collection of data about elite athletes. The da

Techgrumps 3.37 - AI Discussions sandboxed for your securityThe AI Skills Hub is a bit lightweight.https://aiskillshub.org.uk/Anthropic has invested 1.5M in the Python Software Foundationhttps://simon...

"What kind of Internet do you want [him] to inherit?" "Him" was then measuring his age in weeks. "Not *this* Internet." Now, when said son has grown to measur

Last week a couple of friends and I got around to trying out Techdirt's 2025 game, One Billion Users. This card-based game has each player trying to build a soc

The debates over children's use of social media, screens, and phones continue, exacerbated in the UK by ongoing Parliamentary scrutiny of the Children's Wellbei