Have humans passed peak brain power?: ‘Data across countries and ages reveal a growing struggle to concentrate, and declining verbal and numerical reasoning’.

The World’s Most Invasive Apps: I’m not particularly convinced by the methodology, but, even so, hardly a surprise Meta apps come out as particularly terrible for keeping your personal data private.

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds: ‘…it is very scary to make yourself 100% dependent on the goodwill of the American government merely because it is convenient’

Automattic’s “nuclear war” over WordPress access sparks potential class action

Damon Albarn, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and over 1,000 artists release silent album to protest UK copyright AI laws 

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.