æva black

Reposting and pinning this. If you’re thinking, “operator, I need an exit” — because you’re trans & live in the US — this a great resource.

someone has actually done it, they have a white passport book congratulations to this person. www.reddit.com/r/Passports/...

In case it’s hard to tell what I’m actually saying here: Slowing down vulnerability disclosure is to cybersecurity as drinking sea water is to dehydration. Might feel better if you’re desperate but it will greatly accelerate your doom. This isn’t a fix for vuln process saturation

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. —George Orwell, "1984"

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

The Biden White House guys who had the meeting on AI with Andreessen have *just now* figured out that they should point out that Andreessen has been intentionally lying about it ever since in order to drum up support for the fascists. WHY THE FUCK DID YOU WAIT www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Realizing the extent to which this is true wildly changed my opinions about how to deal with Trumpism, since they're never going to be satisfied unless they're actively dominating everyone else. You can't give them some concessions and go back to the status quo: they're reactionary revolutionaries.

Act 372 allows police to arrest librarians if they allow children to access "material harmful to minors." Librarians, fearing arrest, have been forced to cut off access to LGBTQ+ resources, sex ed and literature that deals with sex, sexuality, race or gender. And in some cases, the whole library.

peak Pygmalion displacement especially notice 1 to 5 in the table below (pdf here: doi.org/10.31235/osf...)

A career lawyer at DOJ said “she received a message from DOJ leadership asserting that all of the Dept’s lawyers - including its civil rights attys - needed to be fully on board with the President’s agenda.”

A direct ban on minors accessing lawful speech faces serious First Amendment problems, and courts have blocked age-verification laws on those grounds. If the goal is keeping teens off these services, that deserves an honest debate, not a consent requirement engineered to reach the same result.

For the people and bots reading this without context: it is not necessarily good news that the best open model has been jailbroken and will happily conduct offensive cyberattacks, and that inference is being hosted by a company that keeps no records of how you use their system.

“Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

📣 "The minimum transparency required by the OSI open source licenses for AI systems does not allow agencies to make risk-informed decisions about their software." - www.cisa.gov/sites/defaul... The risks of opaque LLMs also needs to be considered in the context of EU CRA risk management...

Last week, New Jersey became the latest state to enact a shield law to protect trans and reproductive rights. @valorievandieman.bsky.social brings you the story here!

The destructive scanning of books is actually about US copyright law more than anything. AI companies were ruled not to have to worry about copyright infringement if they destroy the books they scan.

A license that basically says “promise not to sue us for infringement done during model development in order to use our infringement machine, and accept liability for infringement this model might do when you use it” is certainly a choice one *could* make … </hottake>

🎯

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

There's an important conversation going on about a proposal for an open source license for AI systems - background here https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1089251/fe6ec26152e704ef/ (free link) This is an important conversation with some significant policy questions join in #OpenSource #OpenAI

NEW: Flock has said for years that its cameras "cannot track individuals." We found the code for its new AI tool. It's preloaded w/ prompts like "Find me witness" & "find relatives." One tracks visitors of multiple hotels, another if you visit banks after midnight. www.wired.com/story/flock-...

NEW: An "unprecedented" number of people have received Apple's latest notifications alerting them they were targeted with mercenary spyware, according to security researchers. A soldier fighting in Ukraine told us he knows of other soldiers getting them. Lots of posts on social media too.

SCOOP: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it. What did we find? It ended up at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. Yes. This is literally the logo outside the Amazon warehouse door. Read now:

New working paper w/ Hanna Folsz In Jan 2025 Trump issued an executive order targeting corporate DEI programs. Many companies ended DEI fearing financial risk We find that firms that kept DEI performed just as well in financial markets, revenue, etc democracypolicylab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...

if you work for a company that’s trying to get you to hack back DO NOT DO THIS. it will come down on you personally and that company will not have your back when (not if) something bad happens to you!

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

⚫ El eclipse solar sobre Zaragoza, en imágenes. La silueta de la basílica del Pilar y el Ebro dejaron algunas de las estampas más espectaculares de la tarde. 🔗 arainfo.org/todos-los-de... 📸 Fotos: Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza

Wrote about Monday's Ninth Circuit ruling that I think is wrong on both the facts and the law, but could have a massive (damaging) impact on the open internet. Effectively the court removed the part of Section 230 that actually mattered, by insisting *everyone else* was sloppy with their language.

Hardware scarcity is our new reality — and spells growing difficulty for mid-sized businesses, managed hosting providers, and many open source communities.

Chinese-made camera components in a UK Navy drone were caught transmitting "heartbeat" data to an IP address in China, The Telegraph reports. The equipment was used around British special forces.

Nobody warns you how tremendously disconcerting going back to an American restaurant is after living anywhere else long term. - them walking off with your credit card & no tap to pay - the huge portions and sodium - the weird attentiveness for tips - being IDed over 30 - flags everywhere

Google - a thrice-convicted monopolist - is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine: www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/goo... 3/

Bombshell new report out from my investigators this morning spanning our four year investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s financial records. This report shows exactly how Wall Street protected Epstein and enabled his sex trafficking for decades. Mega thread following with some key points:

I'm not going to mince words: the major AI labs are negligent in protecting the public from their agents. We need government regulation now or at the very least a private cause of action with guaranteed punitive damages for agents damaging others. www.anthropic.com/news/investi...

CISA published a guidebook for federal agencies Thursday to aid them on managing security risks with open-source software, touching on topics like patching and open-source AI models. Read more from @timstarks.bsky.social: cyberscoop.com/cisa-open-so...

Watch it till the end. This is moral clarity -- TMZ understands the moment, and what that Rand Paul kangaroo court was, better than any coverage I've seen so far. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zaO...

Friendly #DEFCON34 reminder: Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities are prohibited at DEF CON. There is no exception for recording glasses with prescription lenses. Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them. Please see our Photo policies for more. defcon.org/html/links/d...

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Most popular smart watches and fitness trackers aren't end-to-end encrypted, nor say how often governments demand access to users' data. My argument: If wearable makers don't want to disclose that they're turning over users' data to the feds, then the obvious fix is to end-to-end encrypt it.

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

1. In an incredible new landmark review, the Health Council of the Netherlands has declared that gender-affirming care for trans youth works, reducing wait times is "morally urgent," and regret is rare. It is the latest of many Euro countries to advance care. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Trans people have always and will always exist. Gender-affirming care is incredibly important. It should be a decision between individuals, families, and doctors — not the government.

'Between Computer Code And Legal Code: Open Source's Influence' by Æva Black at RustWeek 2026! www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfjY... @aeva.online #rustlang #RustWeek