Notices by Dan Gillmor (dangillmor@mastodon.social)

Suggestion to journalists: Contact and interview the clients of crap lawyers who use "AI" to "research" and compose bullshit-ridden legal briefs. https://www.404media.co/judge-learns-lawyers-on-both-sides-of-case-used-ai-cancels-trial-kicks-everyone-off-the-case/?ref=weekly-roundup-newsletter

(At least the judge in the case fined all of the lawyers and kicked them off the case.)

Excellent piece in the Hollywood Reporter about a scheme -- funded by the 0.01% -- to discredit journalism they don't like: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/peter-thiel-tribunal-journalists-trial-1236617579/

The HR often does noteworthy reporting about our increasingly bizarre media culture, and this is an example.

Thunderbird email client (Linux) displays ridiculously different font sizes in message bodies -- sometimes too small to even qualify as fine print -- that I've decided to display text-only. VERY ugly but at least I don't have to keep resizing...

Even for Google, a monopolist that is working to turn the open Web into a closed-off system of surveillance and corporate control, its "Web Environment Integrity" push is anti-user control-freakery at its most arrogant and disgusting. @pluralistic explains:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/

America's fascist secret police get their massive funding, and we are in for a world of pain in coming years. As usual, Big Journalism treats this as just another normal day, rather than what it is: another giant step toward right-wing dictatorship. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-funding-trump-congress-republicans-c395a434f47fa41a7131369847091910

This is an important development -- a new tractor company selling machines that encourage repairs by the people who use them, rather than expensive control by a corporate monopolist.

https://www.404media.co/demand-is-booming-for-ursa-ag-new-no-tech-repairable-tractor/

We need to make this a trend, not an exception.

The Trump regime destroyed federal cyber-security and then tried to rebuild it with idiots, and one result is this breathtakingly bad data leak of things that you definitely don't want the bad guys to know about.

Security journalist Brian Krebs has the grim details:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/05/cisa-admin-leaked-aws-govcloud-keys-on-github/#more-73607

I wish a media critic with clout would ask the New York Times if it is still employing the reporter who did this -- read the "Editor's Note" attached to the end of the story; screenshot here -- and, if so, why.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/world/canada/election-carney-liberal-party.html

has Cloudflare has lost its corporate mind? Now it's giving the worst people a way to automate their worst behavior. https://blog.cloudflare.com/agents-stripe-projects/

The public increasingly hates Flock, the odious surveillance operation, but public officials don't care. They pretend to dislike the grotesque abuses of privacy, but they keep renewing (and starting)contracts with the sleazy company. If it's in your town, raise hell.

https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-in-childrens-gymnastics-room-as-a-sales-pitch-demo-renews-contract-anyway/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

MIT's Technology Review takes a comprehensive dive into the energy/climate consequences of AI, and the news is terrible for everyone but the corporate bosses and billionaires in charge of it all. Grim, grim stuff here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

If Ed Zitron -- the best journalist/analyst I've encountered in the AI bubble world -- is right about this, Larry Ellison's Oracle is toast. If so, he'll still be ultra-rich but a LOT of other people will lose an unbelievable amount of money.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-openai-kills-oracle/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter

Surveillance and data-manipulation giant Palantir was a CIA-funded creation and has become one of the planet's most powerfully evil companies. It is vital that the general public understand the danger -- and then work to root it out of our lives.

https://www.thenerdreich.com/how-to-purge-palantir/?ref=the-nerd-reich-newsletter

Open-source software is in existential danger -- and the ramifications of that are grim for everyone but the opportunists who'll make a few bucks from its demise.

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Yet again the Associated Press normalizes the most corrupt presidency, by far, in American history. This story about Trump's kabuki-theater shakedown of the government he controls barely mentions that until the very end.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-treasury-irs-lawsuit-tax-whistleblower-c710244db618b066f3070a65e75820a5

All corruption in Trump world, all the time.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@LauraRBelin/116400356606528496

I had to go to the House website to find out the party affiliation of this ethically challenged representative. (Republican)

Should have been in the story...

That supposed $1 billion Disney investment in "Open"AI was a mirage all along, as so many things related to the AI industry have come to be.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-set-discontinue-sora-video-platform-app-wsj-reports-2026-03-24/

The gambling industry has successfully persuaded journalists, pet economists, captured regulators, and wholly owned politicians to use its preferred labels, e.g. "gaming" and now "prediction markets" -- and as always, people who should know better go along with it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/02/prediction-markets-iran-strikes-khamenei.html

"Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're *amazing* at producing corruption."

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) on the Trump-connected "markets" that take gambling to new depths of depravity.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/

Google's profound contempt for journalists is on display as it rewrites publications' headlines in search results, sometimes altering the meaning and intent of the original. https://www.theverge.com/tech/896490/google-replace-news-headlines-in-search-canary-coal-mine-experiment

The company calls it an "experiment" -- as if that makes it OK.