Technology

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051

Meta acquired Manus (Butterfly Effect) for ~$3B. The startup was founded in China, relocated to Singapore to dodge US investment bans. Now the US Treasury is investigating the VC who invested pre-relocation, and China is probing whether the startup needed an export license. Meanwhile, the product runs on Anthropic Claude — a competitor's model. And customers are leaving over Meta's data practices.

The researchers suggest that policymakers should focus on design elements with an eye on psychological needs, “discouraging agency-reducing features like autoplay and infinite scroll,” rather than implementing broader rules on screen time or on social media regardless of platform. Beyond this, politicians and regulators would be wise to follow the authors’ lead and embrace the complexity of the relationship between adolescent social media use and mental health by paying attention to regulations’ impact on minorities, divergent psychological effects, and the constant flux in platform features and how they are used.

original, saw this somewhere else too. ddos stuff. this one blames ru for archive.today mess. sounds about right. didn' intend it to look like an announcement here. it kind of did. post based on ars story, apparently. who knows

The use of automatic license plate readers has exploded across the country in recent years. The cameras on roads and freeways that take images of the back of passing cars are popular with police for solving crimes.

But as President Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated in recent months, residents of various American cities are urging local leaders to stop using these cameras, citing fears of mass surveillance and concerns that local data could be aiding a federal deportation dragnet.

Many of the grassroots campaigns have targeted cameras made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Some cities have grappled with the issue and decided to keep their cameras due to public safety, but in a number of places, the pressure has worked.

The liberal college towns of Flagstaff, Ariz., Cambridge, Mass., Eugene, Ore. and Santa Cruz, Calif., are among a list of at least 30 localities that have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025 – with much of the activity happening in just the last three months.

"We are seeing a lot more momentum," said Will Freeman, a Colorado-based activist who opposes the cameras and runs the DeFlock.me website, which through crowdsourcing has mapped the locations of more than 76,000 license plate readers across the country. "I expect there to be more cities dropping Flock."

Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.

As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.

At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel joined Chen among the ranks of tech leaders who are setting strict limits on screens. Thiel said he only lets his two young children use screens for an hour-and-a-half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience.

Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel. And finally, Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children.

Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years, the private behavior of the world’s most powerful tech figures stands in contrast to what they’re promoting and building

The Israeli and US plans aiming to transform the Gaza Strip into an economy lacking financial sovereignty are extremely concerning. The plans suggest abolishing cash currency and enforcing a transition to a digital economy managed by external entities aligned with Israel.

This would change access to money and basic transactions from a fundamental right into a revocable privilege, making food, medicine, and shelter dependent on security decisions and military assessments. It reflects a coercive restructuring of daily life aimed at pushing the population toward poverty and displacement, managed through technology.

If you want to donate: https://republik.social/@republik_magazin/116096708108187775

A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who have lower English proficiency, less formal education, or who originate from outside the United States. The models also refuse to answer questions at higher rates for these users, and in some cases, respond with condescending or patronizing language.

The world’s largest-ever AI summit took place in India this week, with hundreds of thousands of people, including world leaders and CEOs of AI companies, descending upon New Delhi for six days.

It was the fourth in a series of summits that were initially designed as a place for governments to coordinate global action in the face of threats from advanced AI.

India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at least 70 signatories were expected to commit to what has been dubbed the "Delhi Declaration" on AI at the summit. Few details were available about that declaration, except that it pledged that “AI's promise is best realised only when its benefits are shared by humanity,” according to a European Union press release. Vaishnaw said the final draft would be released on Saturday, along with a full list of signatories.

China, the world’s second largest AI power and India’s strategic adversary, was all but absent from the summit, which fell on the same week as Chinese New Year.

And the White House made it clear in Delhi that the U.S. would reject any attempt to regulate AI at the global level. “We totally reject global governance of AI,” White House official Michael Kratsios said on Friday.

Official “frontier AI commitments” released during the summit made no overt mention of previous summits’ attempts to coordinate government action on addressing AI risks. Instead, a set of voluntary commitments announced by the Indian government emphasized the importance of sharing data on real-world AI usage and building mechanisms to improve AI in under-represented languages.

“Full global consensus on how to govern AI is a far cry from reality,” says Isabella Wilkinson, a research fellow at the British foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House. “The core issue is how to incentivize countries and companies to get around the same table … despite fragmented geopolitics, intense competition, and the drive for ever-more powerful and -profitable AI. None of this is particularly conducive to global cooperation.”

Archived copies of the article:

• ghostarchive.org
• web.archive.org

Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.

Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.

App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.

Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.

The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.