Joris van Hoboken

Today is the day 🎁

The #dsa regime for researchers to get access to platform data to study societal impact and risks starts TODAY.

This has been a loooooong time coming. And the proof of the pudding will be in the eating …

#dataaccess #commsky

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/new-...

That's great. Congrats @chinmayiarun.bsky.social!

"What is your story? You never even told me about a story."

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Screen cap from linked article, with heading Significance and then text: Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs. Sentence starting with "While models often" is highlighted in blue.

I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Honoured to be part of the new advisory board of @cdteu.org, and excited to get involved in this and learn from the other members and the CDT Europe team

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

In Israeli prisons, hunger and torture are ever-present Le Monde has collected the accounts of three civilians from the West Bank who were detained for months without trial or judgment and subjected to food deprivation and regular beatings. Two years after the beginning of the war against Gaza, more than 11,000 Palestinians remain incarcerated in Israel.

In Israeli prisons, hunger and torture are ever-present

Congratulations!!

This is a professor at Rutgers who teaches a class on the history of anti-fascism. He also teaches about human rights. He has received multiple death threats and been doxed. He is relocating to Europe for his safety. This is where we are in the US now. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

The Inventor of the Future - Boston Review The autobiography of anticolonial luminary Andrée Blouin captures her era’s euphoric highs as well as its tragic denouement.

I wrote for the @bostonreview.bsky.social about the extraordinary Andrée Blouin, along with Lumumba, Cesaire, Fanon, and the anticolonial revolution that could have been.

Robby Starbuck is a far-right activist. Meta putting him in the position of being a "bias advisor" for its chat bot is insane.

Very happy to announce brilliant new paper on AI by the wonderful @atoosakz.bsky.social , Phillip Hacker, and er, me, on systemic risk and how it is confusingly differently interpreted through the EU AIA, the DSA and its origin, financial regulation.

Paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17878

This is a REALLY GOOD piece on the challenges of today's attention economy.

Lefty pundits suffer from the same problems and would do well to read it.

‘We took the gloves off’: ex-IDF chief confirms Gaza casualties over 200,000 Retired general Herzi Halevi says ‘not once’ had legal advice constrained Israel’s military decisions in the strip

ex-IDF chief confirms Gaza casualties over 200,000

That’s 10% of the entire population of Gaza in 2 years

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Postdoc Impact of Computational Infrastructures on Public Institutions and Administration of Justice Postdoc Impact of Computational Infrastructures on Public Institutions and Administration of Justice

Interested in empirically and critically studying how computational infrastructures (clouds+end devices) expand into public organizations?

Then please consider applying to this 2 yr postdoc position within the algosoc project and situated at TUD:
careers.tudelft.nl/job/Delft-Po...

The Supreme Court Just Gave the OK to Racial Profiling The court’s ruling allowing ICE to resume its indiscriminate round-ups of LA’s Latino residents can only be described as one thing.

Here’s my write up on the most racist decision to come out of the Supreme Court in a while. The court approved of Trump’s racial profiling of Latinos with Brett Kavanaugh saying being harassed based on the color of your skin is “common sense.”
My latest in @thenation

‘I escaped a Russian prison — only to end up in an American jail’ Dozens of Russian dissidents have been expelled from the US and forcibly returned to Russia with the co-operation of immigration authorities

BREAKING: ICE is sending Russian dissidents back to Russia. When the dissidents arrived in Russia, the Russian authorities were given documents relating to their asylum applications in the US which under US law are confidential. This seems to be part of a secret agreement between Trump and Putin.

Incredible clip of tech CEOs fawning over Donald Trump. Someone store this clip in the underground archive vault

at some point international lawyers need to stop pointing out that this is illegal (of course it is) and start asking if the US still considers the UN Charter to be valid law

Exclusive: Google set to face modest EU antitrust fine in adtech investigation, sources say Alphabet's Google is set to face a modest EU antitrust fine in the coming weeks for allegedly anti-competitive practices in its adtech business, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Disastrous news if true. The European Commission has been talking about a Google adtech breakup since 2023, and could now throw it all away in a pointless effort to appease Trump – at the cost of its credibility, sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.

www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine...

Serve your country! Defend your culture!

Just in case it’s not already clear that ICE is a white supremacist thug army, Homeland Security is recruiting with a “defend your culture” slogan.

The manmade famine in #Gaza has been largely shaped by the deliberate attempts to replace the UN coordinated humanitarian system through the politically motivated “GHF”.

Full statement by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini: www.unrwa.org/newsroom/off...

It’s worse than “Gaza is being starved and destroyed and no one cares.” It’s that hundreds of millions *do* care and are powerless to stop it. We need a world where that can never happen, where the masses actually have political power.

Beneath the Howl of Hunger “And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.” – Alaa Alqaisi

And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking. arablit.org/2025/07/23/b...

Gikii 2025 Amsterdam programme GiKii 2025 Technology in its Villain Era?  11 – 12 September 2025 Institute for Information Law (IViR) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands Day 1 (11 September 2025) 12:00 – 13:00: Lunch…

And the program is out ! <beating the tin drum, cuing AI generated beats, drowning them out by our favourite analog claps...🥁🤖👏> www.gikii.org/gikii-2025-a...
Thank you to all the applicants and many congratulations to the selected participants, we hope to see you there in Sept.....

In this piece for Tech Policy Press, @dscheykopp.bsky.social , @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social, @claesdevreese.bsky.social and I argue that it's time for regulators, researchers, and platforms to fulfil their roles and standards set by the delegated act on data access.

Immigration Officials Used Shadowy Pro-Israel Group to Target Student Activists

It’s long been suspected that Rubio and Noem were targeting foreign students based on info supplied by these fanatical, sinister groups. This is the first time the government has acknowledged it in open court. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/u...

The DMA has a provision that allows end-users to consent individually to anticompetitive behaviour, using a GDPR-style popup. It's nonsense.

When we brought the problem to @aschwab.bsky.social he said it would be fine because it would be stringently enforced.

Where's that enforcement?