California
Stories
How a Bad AI Camera Hit Put the Wrong Man in a San Diego Jail Cell
The officers had a timestamp that ruled him out, a missing gun, and the wrong hoodie color, but the algorithm’s answer outranked all of it.
SDSU Wired Its Dorms With 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students
The students found out their dorms held more than 330 cameras from their own newspaper, not the school that installed them.
California Assembly Passes Under-16 Social Media Ban
Buried past the 76-to-0 vote is a clause letting the Attorney General widen who counts as a “covered platform’ without the Legislature voting again.
- Members
Stop Renting Access to Your Own Movie Collection
Running it yourself means a price you set, a door only you hold the key to, and infrastructure that answers to no one but you.
California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux but Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web
California fixed the most obvious problem with its age-tracking law but replaced it with a version that follows you across the entire internet.
- Members
The Strange Truth Behind the New WhatsApp Privacy Lawsuits
End-to-end encrypted, with asterisks nobody reads.
Hawaii to Pay Up After Trying to Criminalize Political Memes
Hawaii’s taxpayers now owe six figures because their state tried to make certain memes illegal.
Disney Faces $5M Lawsuit Over Disneyland Facial Recognition
The lawsuit lands as facial recognition quietly becomes the price of admission at stadiums, airports, and more.
Tumbler Ridge Lawsuits Seek to Force OpenAI Into ID Verification, Police Referrals for ChatGPT Users
The remedies sought would end pseudonymous AI use and wire every ChatGPT conversation to a permanent law enforcement pipeline.
- Members
The Opt-Out Button Is Decorative: A Guide to Hardening Your Browser
The opt-out button you’ve been clicking is decorative, so here is the browser build that stops asking nicely.
California Lawmakers Advance Bills to Impose AI Chatbot Censorship and Age Verification
California’s new bills would let state lawmakers define, by statute, exactly how agreeable a chatbot is allowed to be.
California’s “Stop Nick Shirley Act” Would Penalize Journalism
The First Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this; a law that punishes speech before any court decides whether it was harmful.
