Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Business
[Anil Dash] "I realize that most people who've never been in the boardroom have a lot of questions (and often, anxieties) about what happens on a board, so I wanted to share a very subjective view of what I've seen and learned over the years.
Last year I wrote a little about how I hope AI will be used, using the GPS navigation in my car as an analogy: I like my GPS. I use it pretty much every time I drive. But it’s not going to make the final decision about which way
AI
[Nikhil Suresh at Ludicity] "This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and
Privacy
[Dave Maass and Cooper Quintin at EFF] "When law enforcement uses ALPRs to document the comings and goings of every driver on the road, regardless of a nexus to a crime, it results in gargantuan databases of sensitive information, and few agencies are equipped, staffed, or trained to harden
Culture
[Sarah E. Needleman and Ann-Marie Alcántara at the Wall Street Journal] "Earning a decent, reliable income as a social-media creator is a slog—and it’s getting harder. Platforms are doling out less money for popular posts and brands are being pickier about what they want out of sponsorship
Technology
[Alan Levine at CogDogBlog] "ShareOpenly breaks the door even wider than sharing to Mastodon, and I intend to be using it to update some of my examples listed above. Thanks Ben for demonstrative and elegant means of sharing." Thank you, Alan, for sharing! There's more to
A sound shook Frances fully awake. Her dreams faded quickly into the cold air, her sleeping memories of San Francisco collapsing into the smell of stone and moss and rot. There was someone in the house. And so begins The Source, at least as the draft stands today. What follows
AI
[Michael Atleson at the FTC Division of Advertising Practices] "Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods." The FTC
Business
[Michael Grothaus at FastCompany] "United Airlines announced that it is bringing personalized advertising to the seatback entertainment screens on its flights. The move is aimed at increasing the airline’s revenue by leveraging the data that it has on its passengers." Just another reason why friends don'
AI
[Robb Knight] Perplexity AI doesn't use its advertised browser string or IP range to load content from third-party websites: "So they're using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string. I can't even block their IP
Health
[Chris Bing and Joel Schechtman at Reuters] "The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and
AI
[Heather Bryant] "What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data