Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

@… the travesty is not AI companies making fair use of copyrighted material, it's that you have so internalized the copyright lobby's arguments that you think copyright law overreach is legitimate in the first place. Aaron should never have been prosecuted at all, and in fact neither MIT nor the copyright holders wanted him to be, it was an ambitious Fe…

When you think big tech/ai heads won't make you more angry, you learn they go after rare books, scan them and destroy original copy...
And this is considered "fair use" of course 🤦
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/23/ai-vendors-ar…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

Sources: the USPTO and US Copyright Office were surprised by the DOJ's brief supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in their dispute with the New York Times (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/19/justice-department-openai-new-york-times

Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise
The department argues copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use because that practice is new and transformative.

Heute vor 58 Jahren: Am 24. August 1968 testete #Frankreich mit „Opération Canopus“ seine erste zweistufige #Wasserstoffbombe. Der Test auf dem Fangataufa-Atoll in Französisch-Polynesien machte Frankreich zur 5. Atommacht und markierte ein neues Kapitel im nuklearen Wettrüsten.

This is the reason for the “copyright” strike I received on my FAIR USE Youtubepoop. This is not how #copyright works. #youtube #youtuber

Sources: the USPTO and US Copyright Office were surprised by the DOJ's brief supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in their dispute with the New York Times (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/19/justice-department-openai-new-york-times

Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise
The department argues copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use because that practice is new and transformative.

Donald Trump has offered few details about the “really big news” he plans to announce
during a primetime address Thursday,
beyond saying the speech will focus on voting machines and what he considers “free and fair elections.”
But the timing of the address and leaks to the media
— as well as the Trump administration’s recent actions
— offer clues about what he may try to accomplish.
The White House is considering releasing intelligence about foreign access…

Five ways Trump could use his primetime speech to undermine our elections
The timing of the address and leaks to the media — as well as the Trump administration’s recent actions — offer clues about what the president may try to accomplish.

Heute vor 10 Jahren: Am 24. August 2016 startete #Nordkorea erfolgreich die ballistische Rakete Pukkuksong-1 von einem U-Boot – ein bedrohlicher Schritt, der zeigt, dass die #USA in Reichweite sind. Wenige Tage später, am 5. September, folgte ein weiterer Test in Richtung Japan.

Let's say you're building a house. Normally this involves hiring a whole bunch of experts (either directly or via some company). You need to pay a fair wage for their labor, and you have to pay for all the material they're going to use. Some of them will be more experienced than others. They will sometimes make a mistake. They will sometimes get sick. The whole construction work will probably take a few months, and may get delayed in the process. Some construction material will be wasted. There's also a risk that over the next years, you'll discover that they screwed something up, and have to fix it. But you'll get a reasonably good house.
Now, a kid comes and tells you you don't have to do this. Instead of paying all these people, you can hire him. He's wearing a suit and sunshades. He never laid a brick in his whole life. But he's got this new great technology that will give you a great house in no time. Of course it will cost you, but not as much as the labor of all these people. You try to learn more, and you discover that the technology actually builds and razes a hundred of house-like things a day, until it gets close enough to something that actually resembles a house. There's a lot of wasted energy and material, but you don't have to worry because it's all subsidized (for the time being). You pay less, you get a house that looks just right on the outside and inside, and that seems to work just right.
Of course, there's a real risk that in a few months you'll discover that something is wrong. You may have to pay a lot for a real expert to figure out how things were done, and how to fix them. Or they may not be able to help you. You may be stuck having to call the suit again, and he'll happily come and fix it for you. And by "fix", I mean he will just raze a whole part of the house and start randomly spitting it out again until he gets something that looks about right, and works about right. Of course, it may not really be a good fit for the rest of the house, but you don't want to pay for replacing the whole thing, do you? It may also introduce a completely new issues that will surface in a few months, but that's just how it is.
Welcome to the glorious world of #AI.
#NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

The Trump administration files a brief supporting OpenAI in its dispute with NYT, saying training LLMs on copyrighted works generally constitutes fair use (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-govern…

The Trump administration files a brief supporting OpenAI in its dispute with NYT, saying training LLMs on copyrighted works generally constitutes fair use (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-govern…

Just finished "Rialto" by Kate Milford. A wonderful book with a *lot* of things to like but also a few I wish had been done differently.
Starting with the good stuff, an #OwnVoices portrayal of anxiety depression is always welcome, *especially* one that portrays positive coping strategies, including active therapy, and complex but ultimately supportive family dynamics. Dad & daughter each reminding each other to use calming strategies at different points in the book was lovely, and getting to see the complexities of the trying to be a supportive sibling was great! Larger than that aspect, portraying a YA adventure in which the parents are actively involved but don't spoil things is so great and must have been difficult to pull off. Most YA stuff quickly ushers the parents out of the picture, and this fails to provide any kind of positive or negative role model for parent/child interaction. This book had ample examples of the former, *and* let the kids have plenty of agency too. Excellent stuff that I absolutely want to see more of.
So what didn't I like?
First, as an anarchist, I always hate to see unapologetically positive (and thus drastically unrealistic) portrayals of the police. Without getting into spoilers, even the stuff about the Piepowder court bothered me. It's presented here as a cutesy alternate court tradition, but I can't help but speculate that these courts were likely not always fair in practice, and the whole "single person makes immediate judgments model" from this book is terrible in general. I just don't like positive portrayals of terrible systems that happen to be good because the people involved are good people, since they reinforce harmful positive mental models of "justice" that don't apply to the real world. This element wasn't enough to totally spoil the book for me (the plot could have mostly functioned without it) but it's a downside to me.
Second, the book is set in rural Missouri, and has plenty of Black characters. Yay for representation? Certainly better than the cast being all-white given the setting. But the book doesn't have any Black *culture* that I picked up on, and it chooses to try to completely sidestep the relevant history. Maybe I'm just not attuned to elements that were there; if anyone who read this did see them feel free to point them out. The history definitely isn't there though... for example, was the park segregated, or not? During the time it was active one imagines most parks would have been, and that if it hadn't been that would have been a very important difference, which would even have been relevant to the plot and themes of the book as written.
Now perhaps this critique is unfair because Black children and young adults *should* get to see themselves portrayed in cozy fantasies without things always having to be about racism... In a choice between erasing Black characters and erasing racism (and especially racist histories) maybe there's no right answer here and this is fine, actually. My instinct tells me that there are ways to do better, though, and that presenting a history with all the racism carefully elided isn't the greatest compromise to make here.
A while ago I read "Under the Heron's Light" by Randi Pink. It also has mythical animal guides, a Southern setting, helpful family members, a multi-generational mystery to solve, and a (slightly older) teen protagonist who is up to the task. In contrast, it is all about racist history, and takes us through multiple extremely harrowing scenes from the past.
In any case, this discomfort also wasn't a deal-breaker for me, in part because, as I said, I think it's probably good for Black children to see uncomplicatedly positive representations of people like them alongside the plenty of stuff out there that does get deep into the racism and history. I also don't have the best perspective to judge this stuff, although that doesn't mean I should default to "it's probably fine" (I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels they have a better perspective on this, about this book or the trend in general...).
Overall, I enjoyed Rialto quite a lot. I don't think it quite makes it into my top tier of recommendations for my kids, but I think it does make the list somewhere.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

A parallel principle applies here. Those who seek fair elections are obliged to use responsible reasoning, to establish coherent principles and argue the substance of democracy’s foundations. But those who seek to undermine elections and destroy democracy can be utterly absurd in their logic. They do not need to make a coherent case; they only need chaos.
3/

RE: #cybersecurity at a company and use Intune to manage your desktop/laptop fleet, propose a project for next year to start managing browser extensions. It’s a fair amount of work to get started, but once under management you can put in place processes for your help desk to handle requests for unallowed extensions.
https://msendpointmgr.com/2025/10/04/taming-browser-extensions-with-intune/

Just finished "Salvage" by Renée Nault. I'm a sucker for romances in general and for characters like these, so I enjoyed it a lot, even though I wish works like this would actually address the structural issues they bring up more thoroughly. I tend to think about the messages of a work in terms of counterfactuals. For example, how would this story play out of Paolo hadn't been a good artist, or hadn't been so likeable, etc.
Also: how do the wealth differences play out in the end? Paolo & his family might escape poverty by association, but where I their community does these line get drawn and the rest get left behind? The natural true "good ending" for all these cross-class romances is an anarchist revolution, but so rarely do we get to see that... The alternative is to believe that only some of the lower class deserve being saved because of their virtues, which ends up being a toxic and regressive message.
To be fair, I think Nault pulls off an above-average landing for this trope, and her illustrations of the lower-class communities and their own richness are hopeful. I just always find myself wanting more.
All of that aside, Nault's art is truly wonderful, especially her use of color and the way she uses it consistently to emphasize thematic elements. It's a really beautiful graphic novel.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

📝 Local news, minus the noise

September 22, 2026
I wanted local news for Wassenaar, but without press releases pretending to be journalism, political parties' own opinions dressed up as reporting, and definitely without gambling ads. So I built my own aggregator.The idea is simple enough: pull RSS from every local source I can find, dump it in a database, filter out the garbage, read what's left. In practice the filtering turned into the whole project.Right now I'm pulling from eight feeds. The municipality's own news, Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl, the Police1, Wassenaar Times, a 112-incident feed, and Vrienden van Wassenaar2. There's also a Google News search bolted on for regio15.nl (for pictures of accidents), since that site doesn't bother with RSS. That one runs backwards from the others: instead of a blacklist of things to exclude, it needs a whitelist of every street name in Wassenaar.Local news has a lot of overlap, and that turned out to be its own little problem. A fire, a crash, a stabbing — the same incident shows up on Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl and the municipality's site within a few hours, each with its own angle and its own stock photo. Reading all four versions back to back is a waste of my time. So every article gets a story ID, and anything covering the same event shares one. The August fire near Wassenaarse Slag is a good example: the municipality's evacuation notice, Omroep West's first report, Centraal 's follow-up and Wassenaarders.nl's colour piece all fold into a single thread. I read it once instead of four times with diminishing returns each pass.
The municipality's own feed, for what it's worth, is fine — road closures, permit notices, the odd royal decoration. Boring in exactly the way a municipal feed should be. The actual problem is political parties. Wassenaarders.nl in particular runs a fair amount of content that reads like it came straight out of the VVD's press office: opinion with the "opinion" part quietly removed, no facts, never a critical word. Similar stuff turns up on other sites too, from groups clearly attached to a party. None of it belongs in a news feed, because it isn't news, it's a party talking about itself.And then, separately, there's the gambling ads. At some point the person running Wassenaarders.nl started slipping in LLM-written ads for online casinos. Tacky doesn't cover it, that's close to unethical, and it has no business anywhere near something calling itself local news.Both problems land on the same site, which is why its exclude list dwarfs everyone else's combined, and keeps growing. The real reason it's such a pain is that the guy doesn't use metadata at all — no categories, no tags, nothing structured to filter on. Every other feed gives me some kind of handle beyond raw text. This one just gives me a title and a blob, so I'm stuck excluding it phrase by phrase as new junk appears. Death by a thousand keywords.One nice side effect of all this: both the 112-meldingen.nl feed and the police feed carry GPS coordinates and a priority code for every incident. Too good a dataset to ignore, so I'm using it to plot a risk map of incidents around Wassenaar, somewhere you can actually see where things cluster, rather than scroll a list of accident reports. Give it a few more months and I can map the most dangerous places in Wassenaar.Aggregating local news sounded like a small job. It wasn't, because most local sites simply aren't built to be aggregated: no proper feeds, no metadata, party messaging laundered as journalism, and in one case, a whole side business in AI-written gambling ads. The technical bit was the easy part. The filtering never really finishes.
Which took an incredible effort to find, only to discover het Police only posted two items in the last 3 years. ∩A weird local organisation that's quite critical of the government. ∩
#Blog #Article #Media #PersonalWebsite #WebDevelopment #Local #Wassenaar

Some of the amazing roadside artwork of the Tour de France race. #Cycling #Tdf #TourDeFrance #Art
Also fsck #Copyright as Win11 literally wouldn't let me 'copy' this from my browser. Utterly fair use, but plebes like us can't be granted those rights.