Fishermen in Tamil Nadu are reporting smaller catches of squid. Blog moderation policy.

In July, I wrote about my new book project on AI and democracy, to be published by MIT Press in fall 2025. My co-author and collaborator Nathan Sanders and I are hard at work writing. At this point, we would like feedback on titles. Here are four possibilities: Rewiring the Republic: How AI Will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship...

After retiring in 2014 from an uncharacteristically long tenure running the NSA (and US CyberCommand), Keith Alexander founded a cybersecurity company called IronNet. At the time, he claimed that it was based on IP he developed on his own time while still in the military. That always troubled me. Whatever ideas he had, they were developed on public...

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs’s privacy policy—available elsewhere in the app—allows for blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including: The...

Two students have created a demo of a smart-glasses app that performs automatic facial recognition and then information lookups. Kind of obvious—something similar was done in 201—but the sort of creepy demo that gets attention. News article.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994. It’s a weird story. The first line of the article...