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FEMA Now Requires Disaster Victims to Have an Email Address (Maria) 

The author writes, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will now require disaster survivors to register for federal aid using an email address — a departure from previous policy where email addresses were optional. The move, FEMA employees tell WIRED, puts people across the US with little to no access to internet services at risk of losing out on crucial federal financial assistance after disasters.”

Surveillance Company Flock Now Using AI To Report Us To Police if It Thinks Our Movement Patterns Are “Suspicious” (Sean) 

From the ACLU: “The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That’s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we’re ‘suspicious.’ That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.”

How Does Trump’s Federal Takeover End? (Dana) 

The author writes, “What’s happening doesn’t look like a carefully regimented and organized attempt at standing up a military dictatorship. Trump seldom acts with that sort of discipline. Instead, it looks like an improvisational and opportunistic grab of power — Trump seeing what he can get away with and what he can normalize. With no stated goal, and with an acquiescent Congress and Supreme Court, the country could end up with the US military occupying its major cities before most Americans realize what’s happening.”

Google’s Deepfake Hunter Sees What You Can’t — Even in Videos Without Faces (Mili) 

From ScienceDaily: “AI-generated videos are becoming dangerously convincing and UC Riverside researchers have teamed up with Google to fight back. Their new system, UNITE, can detect deepfakes even when faces aren’t visible, going beyond traditional methods by scanning backgrounds, motion, and subtle cues. As fake content becomes easier to generate and harder to detect, this universal tool might become essential for newsrooms and social media platforms trying to safeguard the truth.”

People Are Starting To Talk Like ChatGPT (Laryn) 

The author writes, “What looks like English to you [from a chatbot] is really a simulacrum of actual human speech. The unnerving thing is that now, with hundreds of millions of people regularly engaging with chatbots, English-speaking humans are starting to talk like the inhuman communicator on the other side. For example, ChatGPT uses the word ‘delve’ at higher rates than people generally use when writing or speaking English. As Florida State University researchers Tom S. Juzek and Zina B. Ward have found, this likely results from small biases and errors in the human feedback process compounding over time.”

More and More Books Are Being Banned. California Libraries Find a Solution (Reader Steve) 

From the Los Angeles Times: “To combat book censorship, some Southern California public libraries, including Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, are joining libraries nationwide to provide access to online library cards. Children as young as 13 can get a free e-card to access the libraries’ catalog of e-books and audiobooks, without parental permission and without any challenges they may face to get a book in their local library.”