Technology

ChatGPT’s crawler GPTBot, which spiders the internet to capture information and turn it into knowledge, is the most-blocked bot on the internet, according to Cloudflare’s 2025 year in review. Meanwhile its biggest rival, Google, is the No. 1 most-allowed crawler. And perhaps even more interestingly, while ChatGPT is the most-blocked bot, it’s actually Anthropic’s Claude AI engine that is the least reciprocally beneficial service for website owners.

Alex Karp, the CEO of controversial tech company Palantir, raised eyebrows during a recent live interview with the New York Times. In a viral video of the discussion, Karp defended his company to the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, gesturing dramatically with his arms, bouncing up and down on his chair, and struggling to make his point.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

“The UK government wants technology companies to block explicit images on phones and computers by default to protect children, with adults having to verify their age to create and access such content,” the FT report said. “Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/55094411

Last year, Meta had to reckon with an ugly conclusion about its Chinese advertising customers: They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users worldwide.

Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, will acquire all of iRobot’s shares.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit on Monday against Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense, claiming in a press release that they “have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition ("ACR”) technology.”

Data colonialism on the African continent has moved from abstraction into formal state policy through binding agreements signed without public consent, parliamentary scrutiny, or meaningful legal protection for citizens. Nigeria’s memorandum of understanding with France on tax administration data, alongside healthcare data-sharing agreements signed by Kenya and Rwanda with United States agencies, reflects a pattern of external control over sovereign information systems. These arrangements represent a transfer of strategic national assets rather than technical cooperation. Historical experience across former colonies shows that control over taxation, health records, and population data has always preceded deeper forms of domination, even when formal sovereignty remained intact.

An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly straightforward purchase of an Apple gift card.

Grok has repeatedly misidentified video of the Bondi Beach shooting and the hero who disarmed a gunman.

“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”

for your enjoyment

Thousands of contracts and documents outline the contours of DHS’s surveillance capabilities: geolocation, facial recognition, DNA testing, eye scans, spyware, licence plate cameras, credit reports and more. AI tools cross-reference datasets, while mobile apps give field agents information at their fingertips.

It’s wild just how much they’re trying to shove AI down our throats.

Self-hosting anything that is deemed “content” openly on the web in 2025 is a battle of attrition between you and forces who are able to buy tens of thousands of proxies to ruin your service for data they can resell.

Quilter, which has raised more than $40 million from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Coatue, used its physics-driven AI to automate the design of a two-board computer system that booted successfully on its first attempt, requiring no costly revisions. The project, internally dubbed “Project Speedrun,” required just 38.5 hours of human labor compared to the 428 hours that professional PCB designers quoted for the same task.

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

"Three-year deal lets users create AI videos of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, and more."

Big tech showing its true colors.

After reading about this on hacker news, I get why they do it. Its to make people upload identification documents, to get them prepped to authenticate for using the internet. Now the world makes sense again. I was wondering why they would do something positive. But now I get it.

https://www.404media.co/man-charged-for-wiping-phone-before-cbp-could-search-it/

The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve’s Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations.

https://archive.is/uCWNB

Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.

https://status.tailscale.com/

A gadget you throw away when the battery runs out is a very dumb idea if you ask me.

On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media.

Prefacing with: Yes yes yes, we know, you hate AI. You are truly unique and that joke about removing all previous instructions is just as funny today as it was two years ago.

When it can be assumed that you are being surveilled while expressing negative opinion about the federal government, it’s probably best to go ahead and make the assumption, particularly during the punitive heights of the second Donald Trump administration. New reporting from the Associated Press this weekend detailed some aspects of not only United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) latest anti-immigrant and deportation campaign in New Orleans, but also some interesting insights into how both the federal and state law enforcement agencies involved have been engaged in online surveillance campaigns to track public sentiment toward that crackdown. The story paints a chilling profile of a United States in which dissent against the regime’s campaign of immigrant-targeted cruelty is being carefully compiled, filed away for the potential of future use against American citizens. Not that any of this should be a surprise for any of us.

TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.

A must-read on the humanization of LLMs / chatbots

Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA’s Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he’s working on “a potential key to unlock a huge power source that’s rarely utilized today,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.

How do an artist, a videographer, a musician and a copywriter feel about generative AI?

The plaintiffs’ brief alleges that Meta was aware that its platforms were endangering young users, including by exacerbating adolescents’ mental health issues. According to the plaintiffs, Meta frequently detected content related to eating disorders, child sexual abuse, and suicide but refused to remove it. For example, one 2021 internal company survey found that more than 8 percent of respondents aged 13 to 15 had seen someone harm themself or threaten to harm themself on Instagram during the past week. The brief also makes clear that Meta fully understood the addictive nature of its products, with plaintiffs citing a message by one user-experience researcher at the company that Instagram “is a drug” and, “We’re basically pushers.”

As someone who has been in Internet, e-commerce and the all around development of the web almost since its inception, this article makes me feel very, very old.