Phone spammers caught me at the wrong moment and I built up enough of a head of steam to report them for #GDPR violations to both my telco provider and the government regulator.
The question now is whether anything will come of it. I hope I gave someone a datapoint to use in argument, at least.
The story about DuckDuckGo selling basic sunglasses to send up the Meta pervert-goggles was perfect, right up until this point:
“Yes, these are actually real,” DuckDuckGo had to reassure netizens in an official announcement on X.
On X.
On freaking X, the network for people who *like* the pervert goggles
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/duckduckgo-selling-anti-pervert-glasses
"If women wore smart glasses, they'd be banned." (soigomaa/X)
Think about it. If millions of women wore smart glasses, recording men's behaviour, conversations, comments, their driving & bar chats ... can you imagine the panic? Smart glasses would be regulated before you can say the word 'Meta'.
Time has started serving ads to #AI agents. Is this ad fraud, prompt injection, or just how things are going to be from now on? https://digiday.com/media/time-has-started-serving-ads-to-ai-agents/ #adtech
The wave of #AI #spam is real — and the spammers are setting up cut-out companies to avoid the blow-back. The separation may preserve their precious "deliverability", but I wonder how robust this approach would be against a #GDPR challenge? All of the spam messages in my inbox at least have no "unsubscribe" link, instead inviting the reader to reply with "no" or "stop" or similar words to end the conversation.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pr-firm-fake-ai-publicists
Replying would of course validate my address as being real, so I have no intention of doing that. I had been reporting them all as spam in the hope of getting the domains blacklisted, but it seems the spammers might be one step ahead here. Maybe one day I will be sufficiently annoyed to trace one of them back, report them for GDPR violations, and see whether that does something.
It's me, I am why #Substack is collapsing: there are basically no individual authors I would pay $8/month. I'd pay that much for a magazine that aggregates my favourite writers, but nobody offers that. Meanwhile I can't even keep up with the free content out there. Something has got to give, and I worry that when it does, the grifters running automated #AI newsletters will move on, while lots of real writers will find themselves in trouble.
https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is
I opened my laptop this morning and immediately declared tab bankruptcy. If there was something important in there, it'll come up again. Starting fresh with a mere two tabs — well, I guess this one counts — oh, and I just opened one… I may have a problem.
From now on, companies across the EU must be clear about their use of AI.
Providers and deployers of AI must:
✔️ AI-generated content must carry a machine-readable mark
✔️ Deepfakes and AI text on public interest topics must be visibly labelled
✔️ When you chat with a bot or virtual agent, it must make clear it’s not a human
✔️ When AI is actively analysing you, companies must tell you
️We've published guidance to help companies comply.
Transparency helps build trust 👇
📚 Finally cracked open The Bridge, by Iain Banks. I have actually owned this one for years, and never dared to start it, because it is the last one for me; after this, there are no more books to come.
10 pages in, and yes, this is why I waited.
So far we have been watching a mash-up of historical influences: the 70s oil crisis, the 80s Tanker War, the 90s Desert Storm — but cyber attacks that strike far behind the front lines are new. We saw a small amount of this sort of activity in Ukraine in 2022, but it was largely ineffective.
If the reported cyber attacks on water supplies in the US really are being carried out by Iran, that is a very unwelcome development, and one that I worry we are not at all prepared for. So far this has been a fairly old-school war, straight out of a 70s playbook, but that may be changing. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/us/politics/iran-cyberattack-water-systems.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2FA.Oz9l.UuoMXLuylFHn&smid=nytcore-ios-share
One of the questions about the #AI datacenter build-out is how long the infrastructure will be profitable — not just the physical building itself, but all the gear inside it, which becomes obsolete much faster. That’s why it’s so fascinating to hear how #AWS thinks about CapEx RoI. https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-73126-aws-capex
Now I am literally receiving #spam offering to deal with the spam in my inbox. Just stop. I can’t imagine the click-through rate even pays for the tokens here. I am so tired.
Chat is it good if people are paying $3 to detect whether anybody is using your product near them, presumably with a view to punching it off their face? https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/31/antizuck-ios-app-that-claims-to-detect-nearby-smart-glasses-tops-app-store-chart/
Happy #SysadminDay! I am still one of you in spirit, if no longer in job description, so I will wish you all a day free of pages, alerts, and other alarums, and since today is Friday, a seamless implementation of your plans for recovery over the weekend.
RE: https://social.openrightsgroup.org/@openrightsgroup/117002766943142672
At this point it is malpractice to design a service this way.
Yes yes, I get that for a certain cohort of people, denying asylum by hallucination is probably a feature — but have they considered the possibility that asylum might also be *granted* by hallucination?
RE: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/117003829554514911
An example of how Europe's regulations provide a safer environment worldwide.
'The new Chinese enforcement follows in the footsteps of the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), where the vehicle safety industry body mandated the inclusion of physical controls in cars from January 2026 onwards to obtain a full five-star safety rating.'
Europe is a powerhouse that places consumers first.
I just learned that Oracle, which is shoveling unbelievable amounts of cash into getting everybody to use LLMs, also has a policy forbidding contributors to OpenJDK from using LLMs to generate code, citing code quality, security, and legal concerns:
