Seth Finnegan

Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users Class-action lawsuit alleged that Google's voice assistant illegally recorded and shared private conversations with advertisers.

Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"?

Well, it happens they were doing exactly that.
www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...

Colleagues, especially those in CA and in the California State University, please sign this petition. I know you've all heard the bleak news stories about our AI debacle (because people are always bringing the stories to me)!

This is the U Penn donor who helped push the President out, pushed to eliminate arts & science offerings, and drafted Trumps "compact" with universities.
People like Rowan repeatedly claimed the moral high ground to impose their agenda on students and faculty.

Some jawdropping CBP crime statistics here...

U.S. citizen injured by federal agents in Salem who demanded to see “papers,” union says - Salem Reporter A home care worker and union worker was pulled from her car and injured by federal agents Thursday according to a statement by SEIU 503. To comment on this story, use the form at the end of the repor...

4 federal agents pull over an elderly US citizen for the suspected crime of being brown, break her car window, throw her to the ground, then drive off after they find her US Passport in her purse. The Salem Police, when called, say there’s nothing they can do. www.salemreporter.com/2026/01/31/u...

This single payment is ~66x the total amount of “Biden family” revenues that the GOP and right-wing media spent years frothing over.” www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ano...

Half the Battle | Thom Sliwowski Wikipedia is one of a few bazaars of open-source internet idealism left, and LLMs mean it might not be left standing for long.

Wikipedia’s web traffic has plummeted in recent years, thanks in part to the AI chatbots and search engines that scrape its pages for information—while straining server bandwidth. Private companies profit from a public act of collective knowledge.

Federal paramilitaries running up on the rooftops to fire irritants and flash bangs down into a peaceable assembly full of little kids

The California State University system spent $16.9 million last year giving ChatGPT to all students, faculty, and staff. We are asking the CSU chancellor not to renew the contract with OpenAI when it expires.

Anyone can sign the petition — link below!

What we found is bleak. Attorneys told us they’re struggling to get information in to or out of ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities, which are holding nearly 69,000 people this month. And detainees often are forced to choose between remaining in crowded, squalid conditions or leaving the country immediately. Judges in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have ordered the government to facilitate attorney-client communications at Homeland Security buildings. But attorneys say that doesn’t always happen. Even if detainees get the option, some worry they’ll be punished if they take it.

Lawyers can't reach clients in ICE detention. I've heard it anecdotally, but scale of issue is horrifying.

Bloomberg Law is a legal trade pub so many may miss this. Screenshot from their CA newsletter summarizes "bleak" situation for justice and rule of law.

news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/l...

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

ICE Expands Power of Agents to Arrest People Without Warrants

Scoop: Federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

The very well-accepted term for "stripping the legal protections of a minority group and then sending a paramilitary force to carry them away" is "ethnic cleansing."

They are planning to ethnically cleanse Springfield, Ohio.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

The senators voting to repeal the additional $75 billion in ICE funding represent a 54-46 majority of the American people, but the vote fails thanks to malapportionment and the filibuster
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Grant Opportunities — Paleontological Research Institution

The Paleontological Research Institution invites applications from undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers for the 2026 John W. Wells Grants-in-Aid of Research Program who want to visit PRI collections
www.priweb.org/collections/...

Deadline is March 2, 2026.

That witless piece is actually emblematic of a pretty common attitude: America is the Freedom™️ place, it would never elect a fascist! So that must not be what’s happening.

Paleotemperatures through the Phanerozoic and the variation of measurement densities through time.

I'm glad to share our new study on the nature of distributions of gaps in empirical geochronologies of geological section as a function of time scale. Measurements of proxies are highly uneven if measured through time.
1/5
 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

🧪 #Geology ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Trump Sues IRS, Treasury for $10 Billion Over Tax-Return Leaks President Donald Trump sued the US Treasury and Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over an unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns during his first term in office.

He's going to order the Treasury to pay him billions for actions it took under his authority.

What is the difference between this and just looting money directly from taxpayers?

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Radley is so on the mark zeroing in on this: the creation of new "privacy" rights for federal police. The right to be anonymous to the public. The right not to have anyone know why they shot someone and tried to hide the evidence. "right to privacy" fascism addition.

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."
--Homan in February

"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."
-- Tom Homan in March

"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"
-- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

Trump’s Twin Cities onslaught feels a lot like the British tyranny in Colonial Boston Centuries-old dispatches show how his administration has betrayed our founding principles.

“If the 4th Amendment permits the government to tear down your door with nothing more than an administrative warrant, the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist.” @radleybalko.bsky.social on the framers’ fear of just what is happening in Minneapolis and historical echoes with colonial Boston under the British:

Of the biggest scandals in US history just this week, I think I’d rank them:

1) Federal paramilitaries invade US city based on racist lies, murder US citizens

2) Slush fund for the president from stolen foreign resources held in Qatar

3) Whatever FBI and DNI are doing re: 2020 election in Georgia

Ossoff: "This is a seismic event. This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County Elections office ... This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020."

It is wild to me that a military incursion to steal another country’s resources so the president can have a personal slush fund in Qatar is like the 5th most scandalous thing currently happening.

ICE Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force—It Is One, and That Makes It Harder To Curb This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and...

ICE Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force—It Is One, and That Makes It Harder To Curb talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/ice-is-...

Scientists warn of ‘regime shift’ as seaweed blooms expand worldwide A new study links the rapid growth of ocean macroalgae to both global heating and nutrient pollution.

Over the past two decades, seaweed blooms have expanded by a staggering 13.4 per cent a year in the tropical Atlantic and western Pacific, with the most dramatic increases occurring after 2008, according to researchers. www.nationalobserver.com/2026/01/28/n...

Donald Trump Is Frightened Trump wants to appear eager to minimize out-of-control clashes between government militias and protesters. But he doesn’t want to stop the things causing those clashes in the first place.

I'm calling bullshit on the media narrative that Trump is "pivoting" and "deescalating" on his ICE raids. The threshold is this: As long as the military occupations and the treatment of US cities as enemy territory continue, there's no pivot. ICE out. 1/

(New piece)
newrepublic.com/article/2057...

Half the Battle | Thom Sliwowski Wikipedia is one of a few bazaars of open-source internet idealism left, and LLMs mean it might not be left standing for long.

Wikipedia is one of the internet’s last outposts of open-source idealism. AI companies want to mine it into incoherent oblivion, and right-wing authoritarians are cheering them on. Thom Sliwowski describes this historical battle over knowledge writ large.

Under EPA’s Zeldin, Pollution Enforcement Dying a Quick Death Department of Justice Civil Pollution Settlements Plummet to Record Lows

The Trump administration has “virtually stopped enforcing the Clean Air Act,” lodging just one consent decree in a relatively small case since Trump’s inauguration, compared with 26 in the first year of Trump's first term, & 22 in Biden’s first year. peer.org/under-epas-z... 1/