A gadget maker used what sounds like an imperfect but passable AI imitation of Marques Brownlee to promote its products on Instagram. (We’ve reached out to the company but haven’t heard back.) Fake influencer endorsements seem like an inevitable use of AI tools — if you’ve seen anything similar, I’d love to hear about it.
A bandwidth-hungry tracking app is apparently kicking users with slow internet into a barely functional offline mode. Maybe rural broadband access matters after all:
The Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.
A preprint study confirms a widely held understanding: thanks to unusually harsh US laws for hosting pirated content, reporting nonconsensual sexual imagery as copyright infringement gets results.
All the images reported as copyright violations were removed within 25 hours, and the accounts that posted them received temporary suspensions. All images reported as non-consensual nudity were not removed from the site even after three weeks, and the accounts that posted them faced no consequences nor received any notifications from X.
The deadline for signing SB 1047 is September 30th. Kylie Robison laid out the stakes earlier this month:
Critics have painted a nearly apocalyptic picture of its impact, calling it a threat to startups, open source developers, and academics. Supporters call it a necessary guardrail for a potentially dangerous technology — and a corrective to years of under-regulation.
This time it’s Smartmatic settling with Newsmax, which it sued for libel after the 2020 election, for an undisclosed amount. As The Guardian notes, a Smartmatic suit against Fox is still in progress — though the network cut a huge surprise settlement deal with another voting company, Dominion, last year.
Whoever’s been cosplaying him is fairly funny, but Carpenter’s latest tweet clinches that it’s almost certainly not real. They’ve still got Scorsese over there, though.
T-Mobile is invoking the major questions doctrine, which the Supreme Court strengthened in 2022, to explain why the FCC shouldn’t make companies unlock phones within 60 days of activation for use with other carriers. These are just comments, not a lawsuit — but they’re not hard to read as a signal of a potential future legal fight.
[Broadband Breakfast]
The Twitter that spawned it may no longer really exist, but the absurdist US Consumer Product Safety Commission account is still going strong on X. Of course it’s getting in on Moo Deng.
By routing traffic through Cloudflare, for now:
A person close to Cloudflare confirmed that X had recently switched to using the company’s services but said that it was not actively trying to help X evade the block in Brazil. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss business with a client, suggested that regulators would most likely eventually be able to figure out how to block X again.
[The New York Times]
