Erika Hall has reminded me and every other millennial on the internet of David Rees’ clipart webcomic Get Your War On, a cultural document of a period that is suddenly seeming awfully relevant. This ran for almost eight years.
“Court documents unsealed Monday alleged Vance Boelter, 57, used online people search services to find the home addresses of his intended targets. Police found the names of 11 registered data brokers — or companies that gather and sell people’s information, including addresses, emails and phone numbers — in Boelter’s abandoned car after the shootings.”
Ron Wyden is on it; if only the rest of Congress was.
I couldn’t possibly single out the best of many perfect lines in Kerry Howley’s detailed and morbidly funny exposé of chaos at the Pentagon, where Signalgate was just the tip of the iceberg. But this part is pretty good:
Carroll encountered many people as he walked through the hallway, onto the escalator, off the escalator, through the mess hall, to the basement, where he was interrogated for an hour. On the way out, in the Pentagon lobby, he saw General Michael Guetlein.
“Mike,” Carroll said, “I got fired.”
“That’s really funny,” said the general.
[nymag.com]
Astute AI copyright observer Michael Weinberg raises some good questions about the Common Pile, an AI training dataset billed as being composed of only “openly licensed text”:
On one hand, this is an interesting effort to build a new type of training dataset that illustrates how even the “easy” parts of this process are actually hard. On the other hand, I worry that some people read “openly licensed training dataset” as the equivalent of (or very close to) “LLM free of copyright issues.”
[michaelweinberg.org]
The New York Times surveyed the ecosystem of disinformation around the LA anti-ICE protests, and the results are striking for looking... pretty much exactly like the pre-AI world: old recirculated photos, fabricated quotes, and a shot from an ‘80s action movie. The Washington Post did its own social media look-around and found mostly people supporting dueling narratives with real footage. There’s still time for generated fakes to cause problems, but at the moment, reality seems to be eye-catching enough.
Gail Simone — known for her stints writing Deadpool, Birds of Prey, and many other comics series — has now made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary thanks to her famous pre-comics-career essay about a noteworthy trend in comic book tropes, too:
fridge
verb | to kill/harm a character (in a movie, show, etc.) to motivate another
The National Guard arrived in Los Angeles earlier today in a move that hasn’t been seen since 1965, and protests are stretching into the evening. There’s a Bluesky starter pack of LA-based independent journalists providing text and photo updates, plus news outlets and streamer Hasan Piker live on the ground. And demonstrations in several cities are planned for tomorrow, pushing for the release of union leader David Huerta, arrested during the recent aggressive ICE raids.
We’re at the end of a day-long set of closing arguments, concluding with one final request to the judge from DOJ attorney David Dahlquist to “please seize this moment in time” and order Google to change how it runs search. Judge Mehta thanks everyone for dealing with a “challenging schedule” for the trial and says, “we’ll get back to you as soon as we can,” and with that, the remedies trial portion of US v. Google is officially done.
Thank you for staying, someone whispers right next to the conference line just before things go silent — pretty sure it’s not directed at those of us listening in, but I can always dream. For now, we’ll be awaiting a ruling later this year.
