Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests: Amongst those from other regimes, autocratic and otherwise.

Never Forgive Them: A long and eviscerating read from Ed Zitron on how and why the tech industry is making our lives substantially worse than they need to be - basically their incentives are no longer aligned with us, their users.

Is it okay?: Robin Sloan considers the ethics of generative AI models needing to slurp up the entirety of the internet to exist.

Is OpenAI’s Operator, a new AI ‘agent,’ ready to help in the real world?: A reporter’s very expensive AI inadvertently buys them very expensive eggs.

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study: The 100% AI-written psychology essays weren’t detected as such by the graders, and they typically scored higher than the human ones.

DeepSeek Fails Researchers' Safety Tests: The hot new AI bot appears to be up for discussing pretty much anything, irrespective of harm.

‘I lost 10 years of my life’: how UK betting giant’s unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked: A particularly dark example of the perils of letting companies surveil, extract and exploit the trail of data modern life requires we generate.

‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot: Open-source chatbot DeepSeek can apparently do more AI with less resources.

Björk Says Spotify Is “The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Musicians”: ‘The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.’

The Emptiness Of Zuck’s Promise To Move ‘Biased’ Trust & Safety From California To Texas: Zuckerberg’s ridiculous ‘we’ll move the remnants of our trust and safety team to Texas because that’ll make them magically less biased’ stunt is even sillier when it turns out many of them already live there.

How to survive being online: You can use the internet without being Very Online, as they say.

Trump inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk seated in front of cabinet picks: Remember the good old days where it wasn’t the done thing for political leaders to make their chumocratic oligarchy fantasies quite so obvious.

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives: ‘Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.’

Smartphones Are Hot: A decade-old take on ‘What would Marshall McLuhan make of the smartphone?’

Google Maps turns 20, adds AI features, new countries to beat Apple: Next month sees Google Maps' 20th year anniversary; it is kind of hard to imagine life without this type of software.

People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics: Hard to know how much of the decline is ethical concerns vs it’s simply not a very good experience for many people.

Lawsuit: Allstate used GasBuddy and other apps to quietly track driving behavior: Allstate taken to court for covertly using data from apps to track drivers and adjust or cancel their car insurance.

Meta surrenders to the right on speech: A good summary of Zuckerberg’s awful announcement about the future of moderation at Meta.

A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media: Looks like I’m not the only person kinda terrified about Zuckerberg’s latest pronouncement.

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South: Due to new state-level age verification laws.

Meet Gem the cocker spaniel – the face of UK pet cloning: It’s illegal to clone animals for commercial purposes in the UK, but companies are working around this by sending samples of rich people’s pets overseas.