Technology

A growing movement in digital identity research is exploring systems that could eliminate traditional usernames altogether. Technologies like Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Self‑Sovereign Identity (SSI), and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) allow users to control their identity cryptographically rather than through platform‑owned accounts.

These systems offer features that current platforms struggle with, including:

complete identity deletion

rotation of identities without leaving permanent traces

prevention of impersonation without burning usernames

user‑controlled data storage

platform‑independent authentication

Smaller privacy‑focused projects are already experimenting with these models, but large platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and X still rely heavily on usernames for moderation, analytics, and advertising. Transitioning to DID‑based identity would require major architectural changes and a shift in how platforms handle user data.

As decentralized identity standards mature, it raises an interesting question for the future of online platforms: Will the next generation of social systems move beyond usernames entirely?

• Ticket;
• Wikipedia;
• Forum;
• Hacker News.

A new organization launched to fight public corruption is suing President Trump and his attorney general, accusing them of flouting the law when they blessed the sale of TikTok's U.S. assets to White House allies.

The case, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses the Trump administration of ignoring legislation designed to stop the spread of Chinese propaganda — and instead helping to broker a partial sale to businessmen close to Trump.

• LessWrong;
• Lobsters.

This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic's leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI's direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to support it, and violating the fundamental promise the company was founded on. It also shares a few previously unreported details on Anthropic leadership's promises and efforts.

Anthropic has a strong internal culture that has broadly EA views and values, and the company has strong pressures to appear to follow these views and values as it wants to retain talent and the loyalty of staff, but it's very unclear what they would do when it matters most. Their staff should demand answers.

AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.

The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.

Wikipedia editors investigated how OKA was operating and found that it was mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South, and that these contractors were instructed to copy/paste articles to popular LLMs to produce translations.

For example, a public spreadsheet used by OKA translators to keep track of what articles they’re translating instructs them to “pick an article, copy the lead section into Gemini or chatGPT, then review if some of the suggestions are an improvement to readability. Make edits to the Wiki articles only if the suggestions are an improvement and don't change the meaning of the lead. Do not change the content unless you have checked that what Gemini says is correct!”

Lebleu told me, and other editors have noted in their public on-site discussion of the issue, that these same instructions previously told OKA translators to use Grok, Elon Musk’s LLM, for the same purpose. Grok, which also produces an entirely automated alternative to Wikipedia called Grokepedia, is prone to errors precisely because it does not use humans to vet its output.

“Following the recent discussion, we have strengthened our safeguards,” [OKA's] Zimmerman told me. “We are now rolling out a second, independent LLM review step. Translators must run the completed draft through a separate model using a dedicated comparison prompt designed to identify potential discrepancies, omissions, or inaccuracies relative to the source text. Initial findings suggest this is highly effective at detecting potential issues.”

Zimmerman added that if this method proves insufficient, OKA is considering introducing formal peer review mechanisms.

Using AI to check the output of AI for errors is a method that is historically prone to errors. For example, we recently reported on an AI-powered private school that used AI to check AI-generated questions for students. Internal testing found it had at least a 10 percent failure rate.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260303185619/https://www.wired.com/story/how-big-tech-is-powering-trumps-immigration-crackdown/

TLDW:

Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.

New York about to vote on a law that would "require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation."

In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.

Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

On an evening in late January, Emily was driving through her Minneapolis neighborhood doing something that had become part of her routine in recent weeks: patrolling for ICE.

Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. "And then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car," she says.

Emily says she decided to leave at that point, but the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask rolled down the window, leaned out — and addressed Emily by name.

As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman