Nilay Patel

Cory Tomczyk, a Republican state senator in my delightfully broken home state of Wisconsin, is spitefully suing a tiny four-person local newspaper for defamation after it reported that he used a homophobic slur at a county board meeting. The mounting legal costs could put the paper out of business.

The legendary Defcon infosec conference was this past weekend in Vegas, and visitors with iPhones noticed they were getting iOS popups to share their passwords with nearby “Apple TVs.” It’s Defcon, so of course that was a prank by a researcher who calls themselves Jae Bochs on Mastodon. TechCrunch’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has the story:

The (messy, sad) Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial continues to have strange knock-on effects: a legal YouTuber called “Nate the Lawyer” sued the CEO of Bot Sentinel for defamation over tweets that included questioning whether or not “Nate” was really a lawyer at all.

We’re as guilty as any other publication in citing app usage data from data shops like SensorTower and SimilarWeb — it’s useful to rely on some data from a neutral source when talking about app and platform usage — but John Gruber dives into how that data is actually collected. And... maybe it’s not great!

This story is basically Kansas restaurant owner Kari Newell swatting a local newspaper and having all of its computers and phones seized because a reporter looked up her public DUI record on a state website. It is unconscionable that Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar signed this warrant and that the cops executed it. Hey, let’s see if anyone has the integrity to stand by these decisions:

“What can computers do with books?” has been raging as a debate essentially since computers have existed, and the current AI-powered version of the argument contains exactly the same issues as ever. For example, when Amazon released the Kindle 2 in 2009, the Author’s Guild threatened to sue the company over the text-to-speech function, claiming it would steal audiobook revenues. Here’s the interview I did back then with Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, and his primary objection to the product:

Congrats to Katie, who has had many notable gigs but none more important than being The Verge’s first-ever science editor, during which time she published this Phil Collins playlist. No, I do not remember why. Go get ‘em, Katie.

It is bonkers that this video and others like it have been available for over a year and they aren’t mentioned in every single UFO conversation! Cameras! We know how they work! The simplest explanation is best!

No one knows!