Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info: A Japanese government agency was phished.

A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power: ‘This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite.’

Don’t call it a Substack: Anil implores us not to refer to our writing using some other dubious entity’s brand name - ‘Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”’.

Bluesky and enshittification: The most well-intentioned service remains at risk of enshittification whilst there remains significant costs incurred when switching away from it.

The billionaires hedge their bets: Purely out of immoral and misguided self-interest, many of the tech billionaires are cosying up to Trump.

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal: The FTC makes certain types of fake reviews illegal, whether human or robots wrote them, in the US.

Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.

There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.

Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Even superstars are concerned about AI companies shovelling up the artistic output of humanity without constraint or compensation.

It’s not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: Researchers find that search engines are getting ever more flooded with nasty SEO product spam sites despite their best efforts.

Why changes to the block on Elon Musk’s X are driving users away: Musk doesn’t believe block buttons should block.

Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media: Is the Fediverse in need of better tooling around moderation?

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator: Inevitably the centralisation and lack of encryption around push notifications makes them a useful source of surveillance material.

Governments Are Using Spyware on Citizens. Can They Be Stopped?: Companies like the NSO Group are happy to sell commercial spyware to governments who will predictably use it for bad things.

The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.

Get Me Out Of Data Hell: The day Nikhil Suresh’s software engineering work pushed him so far into the pain zone that he has to quit there and then.

The Other Bubble: Why “Software as a Service” (SaaS) products - especially the enterprise-oriented offerings - often end up being so awful.

Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance: Researchers find the Pixel 9 phone transmits “location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry” to Google every 15 minutes by default.

Expensive sci-fi dreck: The title refers to Elon Musk’s latest robo-stuff of course.

TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show: All the social media companies either know full well the harms that using their product can bring or are wilfully ignorant of them.