newsfeeds.net - dispute the text
newsfeeds.net - dispute the text
A curated collection of 618 links on media, technology, AI, copyright, and digital culture.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility<br>Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.<br>2026-08-17 books training archive ai
Dancing with friends and enemies: boids' swarm intelligence<br>I had read somewhere that macro-scale behaviour of animal swarms (think of flocks of starlings or shoals of herring) is explained by each individual following very simple rules local to their vicinity, essentially 1) try to keep up and 2) try not to collide. I started trying to play with this idea in Mathematica, but it was rather slow to identify the nearest neighbours of each particle. So I wondered what would happen if each particle acted according to the locations of two other particles, regardless of their proximity. The rule was simply to move away from one and towards the other.<br>2026-08-17 code science dataviz emergence
A quick look at zero-knowledge proofs<br>The idea of a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is that there are two parties: the prover and the verifier. The prover asserts that it has a solution to a (generally NP-complete) problem. The prover can convince the verifier of this without sharing the actual solution to the problem.<br>2026-08-17 cryptography code python paper
This Is Your Brain on X<br>The shittiness of X is the point, so to speak. It’s a slag heap, a mental waste dump, a sewer. Currency exchange was the wrong metaphor; It’s some kind of industrial waste product recycling process. Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media.<br>2026-08-16 socialmedia media politics creepy-elon-musk
The Government is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts<br>In sum, the documents show that local, state, and federal law enforcement are monitoring anti-Flock activists and are trying to tie together people who politically oppose mass surveillance with vigilantes who destroy Flock cameras. 404 Media obtained the documents through a public records act request.<br>2026-08-15 flock surveillance policing socialmedia alpr
Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words<br>But remove whatever training has been applied to promote engagement and simulate literary style, and that's basically what Claude is doing here – predicting the next word in a sequence. Anthropic asserts that in most cases, the example sentence could be completed by either "cold" or "gray" and "the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way." The watermark gets generated by deviating from the predicted word to something else. A different source of randomness is used and that can be detected with a digital key.<br>2026-08-15 anthropic ai llm watermarking claude
Restaurants, pubs and theatres ban Meta’s ‘spy glasses’ over privacy fears<br>But those plans have hit a snag in the UK, where venues from elite restaurants to popular pub chains have banned the £359 glasses in order to preserve the privacy of customers and staff. Celebrated restaurateur Jeremy King, owner of London venues including Simpsons in the Strand, Arlington and The Park, said guests should not wear the recording glasses. He told the Guardian: “I would never knowingly allow any invasion of guest privacy other than with the eyes we were born with.”<br>2026-08-15 meta smart-glasses privacy surveillance social-contract
Everything is about to "go dark"<br>Over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs. Obviously I think this is great. But for law enforcement and offensive intelligence agencies, it's going to be a nightmare.<br>2026-08-15 cryptography security surveillance ai government
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct<br>The channel's attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS' data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.<br>2026-08-15 archive infrastructure data legal media
London Underground is trialing live face scanning as privacy groups say it 'treats the public like suspects'<br>However, as the BBC points out, scans of some 530,000 faces across UK railway stations...