Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Democracy
"I’m a political scientist, and I found that Americans were far less likely to publicly voice their opinions than even during the height of the McCarthy-era Red Scare."
Democracy
Stephen Miller and at least a dozen other Trump appointees own stock in Palantir, the company that provides "mission critical" services to ICE.
AI
A federal court agreed that using copyrighted works to train AI is fair use - but that pirating them to do so infringes creator rights.
Media
"Substack's One Weird Marketing Trick was leveraging the economic interests of traditional media employees against their publishers to get positive "earned media"."
Democracy
"There are clear indications from oppressive governments around the world that biometrics will be used to harm human rights, regardless of their accuracy or fairness."
Democracy
"When the government can track where you go, whom you associate with, and what you spend your money on, it [...] chills freedom of expression, undermines your freedom to travel, and destroys the fundamental privacy right that underlies American liberty."
AI
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to a publisher. Today, Anthropic crawls 60,000.
Democracy
404 Media reveals collaboration between ICE and local police
Democracy
It's going to be a long summer. WIRED has some advice for being prepared.
Notable links
404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
Notable links
[Cameron Faulkner at The Verge] Bounce is a game-changer for the open social web: "Bounce is built on the work of Bridgy Fed, which makes your Bluesky posts visible on Mastodon and vice versa. Using Bounce will bridge your accounts, in case you haven’t already set up Bridgy
Technology
[The Browser Company] Arc is my primary browser, and I'm feeling like that's a choice I should never have made: "The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at