Jordan Taylor

tweet from @cliftonhowze on twitter Last night at the #DataCenters meeting in Claremore, Darren Blanchard, who has attended most of these meetings around NE Oklahoma & has some pretty impressive FOIA/ORA skills, was arrested after going over his 3 min. allotted speaking time. First arrest I've seen at one of these.

in america, if you go over your 3 minute allotment to speak, men with guns come to take you away.

Age Verification and Age Gating: Resource Hub Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious

Our Age Verification Resource Hub is the one-stop shop to answer all of your questions about online AV mandates. What’s at stake for users? How do we push back? What even IS age verification, anyway? Visit www.eff.org/age now to explore our resources and join the fight to protect the internet.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

“The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws.”

Excellent news. The British government’s continued attacks on the right to protest, especially on those who speak out against genocide, must be challenged.

Spike Lee’s cameo at the end of the Oakley Super Bowl ad saying “Hey Meta film this in slo-mo” really underscored that the main use case for these “smart” glasses is men filming people without their knowledge

UNC Admin Can Now, Officially, Secretly Record Faculty The new policy prohibits students from recording class without permission but explicitly allows administrators to surveil professors for any “lawful purpose.”

“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently rolled out a new policy that permits university officials to record classes without notifying the instructor. It’s a practice administrators have used in the past to investigate professors but have now formalized in writing.”

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

R1: No we're not hiring on the tenure track because our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track
R1: Our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track because we aren't hiring on the tenure track
R1: wtf our grad students aren't getting hired on the tenure track
R1: No one could know how this happened

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

i wrote about the pup-opticon

FAMU can't use the word Black on anything posted around campus related to Black History Month, to stay in compliance with Florida state laws against DEI. Black students can't use the word Black at their Historically Black College during Black History Month.

Many of my science colleagues are not speaking out-I suspect due to the fear Phil notes, that they'll targeted for loss of funding. I hope they read this account of what happened at a faculty meeting at Frankfurt University in 1933 as the Nazi's took control 🧪
www.facinghistory.org/resource-lib...

Bad design makes work worse

Pittsburgh airport has these new fancy bag scanners but they work so poorly each station has a stick they use to manually fish the trays through the machine or fish out items that fall off trays

Texas A&M University kills women and gender studies program Texas A&M University's crackdown on classrooms took another turn.

NEW: Here's my report on Texas A&M ending its gender studies program as part of its ongoing crackdown of teaching LGBTQ topics in the classroom (i also do not use the loaded phrase 'gender ideology' passively) www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Many UK Users Soon Won't Be Able to Access Pornhub Starting February 2, many people connecting from the UK will not be able to access the porn site and many others.

Starting February 2, many people connecting from the UK will not be able to access the porn site and many others.

Redditors Are Mounting a Resistance Against ICE A user from r/Minneapolis was among the first to share footage of federal agents shooting Alex Pretti. Following his death, subreddits about football, cats, and embroidery have all rallied against ICE...

I interviewed two of the mods of r/Minneapolis about their tireless work this month: “I just wanted a local subreddit to know what was happening in my city, and now all of a sudden, we’ve turned into this de facto hub of information for basically how to fight fascism.”
www.wired.com/story/reddit...

We need to document how this ownership change shifts the content. Would love to see scientists studying and reporting on this as it happens, as well as everyday people documenting the changes in their feeds with TikTok diaries or something similar. I’ll assume we won’t have much if any API access.

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

Map of state higher ed restrictions

The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing.
More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021.
From @penamerica.bsky.social
pen.org/report/ameri...

Grok Is Generating Sexual Content Far More Graphic Than What's on X A WIRED review of outputs hosted on Grok’s official website shows it’s being used to create violent sexual images and videos, as well as content that includes apparent minors.

New: Grok is generating far more graphic sexual content than on X.

Grok’s image generator, Imagine, has been used to create explicit sexual videos of celebrities and violent sexual videos, a review of public posts shows.

70 Imagine URLs appearing to depict minors were sent to regulators today

Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow We are experiencing world events like the kidnapping of Maduro through the lens of the most depraved AI you can imagine.

What have users done this week on X? Used Grok to generate AI visuals of

- Charlie Kirk with huge breasts and huge nipples
- Sexualize and “nudify” women and underage girls
- Generate an image of Maduro in a bikini

Welcome to the AI CSAM shitshow—it’s only going to get worse.

Online Safety Bills Are Fueling a New Wave of Internet Censorship State and federal bills seek to limit minors’ access to social media, but civil liberties advocates warn that the resulting online censorship threatens constitutional rights without delivering real safety.

Congress is debating the Kids Online Safety Act — an overbroad bill that risks censoring everything from jokes and hyperbole to useful information about sex ed and suicide prevention.

This isn't about safety, it's about control.

Normal Rockwell I believe man

Porn and erotica are important and societally valuable forms of speech, and the defense of them, in the face of state and church attempts at repression, is a necessary political act.

Silver lining: this outage made me put my research down for the night

Age Verification Is Coming For the Internet. We Built You a Resource Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online.

Our new age verification resource hub will answer all your questions about the dangerous new age-gating mandates sweeping the US and the world. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

well, archivists gonna archive. torrents remain undefeated

www.404media.co/archivists-p...

This is 404 Media's @jasonkoebler.bsky.social waving at himself through a Flock camera; one of 60 we learned was left exposed to the open internet. Not only could anyone with a link livestream it, but some admin portals were open with no login credentials required.

www.404media.co/flock-expose...

Monkey Sounds, “White Power” and the N-Word: Racial Harassment Against Black Students Ignored Under Trump Since Trump returned to office, the Education Department’s civil rights office has not resolved a single racial harassment investigation. It sends a message that “people impacted by racial discriminat...

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.

www.propublica.org/article/trum...

My professional artists peers! We got a survey request!

Researchers at the University of Carnegie Mellon is doing a research to see how generative Al has (or has not) impacted your work and/or sentiments in the industry. Folks in creative fields only, please consider filling this out 👇

Screenshot of a paper entry: Fictional Failures and Real-World Lessons: Ethical Speculation Through Design Fiction on Emotional Support Conversational AI Authors: Faye Kollig, Jessica Pater, Fayika Farhat Nova, Casey Fiesler (There are tabs with "abstract" and "summary" and "summary" is selected.)

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.