Category «AI»

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 13, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: How much is the Facebook settlement payout per person?; New Study: How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied); It Is Happening – Don’t cross a U.S. border without a “perfect burner phone”; When typing becomes tracking; and Study reveals widespread silent keystroke interception.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Search Engines, Social Media, Travel

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 6, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Ice obtains access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps; Amazon to Enter the AI Agent Race in a Big Way, Internal Documents; Selling Surveillance as Convenience; Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist; and Verizon Finally Restores Service in Most Areas After Day-Long Outage.

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Subjects: AI, Computer Security, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

1500 Years Versus 4 Hours: The AlphaZero Project and What It Means for Artificial Intelligence

Jerry Lawson, a master of both IT matters as well as chess, addresses the question – will computers ever achieve the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an intelligence that matches or surpasses human abilities across virtually all cognitive tasks? Experts disagree not only on the feasibility but also on the desirability of such an outcome. Optimists envision an era of abundance. Pessimists fear an existential threat.

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Subjects: AI, KM, Legal Technology, Search Engines

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 30, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Meta might be secretly scanning your phone’s camera roll – how to check and turn it off; Shadow IT Is Expanding Your Attack Surface. Here’s Proof; ScamAgent shows how AI could power the next wave of scam calls; FEMA now requires disaster victims to have an email address; and the FCC is Cracking Down on Robo Callers Blocking 1,200 Phone Providers Over Spam Calls.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 23, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Foundations for OT Cybersecurity: Asset Inventory Guidance for Owners and Operators; How poisoned data can trick AI − and how to stop it; This Is How They Know You’re Using a VPN; Swedish startup unveils Starlink alternative — that Musk can’t switch off; and Burner Phone 101 Workshop.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge

Iris van Rooij is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the School of Artificial Intelligence in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on the computational foundations of cognitive science. Recently she was looking for information on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. To her surprise and dismay, she hit upon a ScienceDirect page that ‘defined’ the concept using, as she terms it, AI Slop. She shares the thread of her email communications with the Elsevier Helpdesk that detail her concerns about AI generated definitions, and links within articles, and the fact that authors cannot say ‘no’ to their work being used for AI training and AI generated texts. In addition, she includes references and recommended readings about AI’s impact on education and the future of academia.

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Subjects: AI, KM, Legal Research, Technology Trends

Mastodon Resources 2025

Marcus P. Zillman recommends selected sources and sites to help navigate and use the vast Fediverse effectively. Although BlueSky, Threads and Twitter continue to dominate the social media space, Mastodon offers open source connectivity that transverses silos and allows users to seamlessly communicate with users across platforms with little impediment.

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Subjects: AI, KM, Law Librarians, News Resources, Social Media

Beyond the Tool: Why True AI Literacy is About Critical Thinking, Not Prompting

Michael G. Wagner, a technology educator with more than 30 years experience in higher education, contends that the nature of AI literacy is largely misunderstood within the education community. Ultimately, the goal of AI literacy should not be to make students better at using AI, but to empower them to be more discerning thinkers, more ethical citizens, and more self-aware human beings in a world where AI exists. Analyzing the relationship between artificial and human intelligence requires two components: understanding how LLMs work, and understanding how human cognition works. Wagner says we understand neither well enough to make informed judgments. The uncomfortable truth is that confident dismissal of AI’s intelligence often just reveals a deeper misunderstanding of our own.

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Subjects: AI, Communication Skills, Education

How poisoned data can trick AI − and how to stop it

Hadi Amini and Ervin Moore discuss how the quality of the information that the AI offers depends on the quality of the data it learns from. But if someone tries to interfere by tampering with their training data – either the initial data used to build the system or data the system collects as it’s operating to improve – trouble could ensue.

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Subjects: AI, Cybersecurity, KM, Legal Research, Search Engines, Technology Trends

Another Brilliant Idea! the Hidden Dangers of Sycophantic AI

Jordan Furlong’s article expands analysis on the already noted risks arising from lawyers using AI. Generative AI can be incredibly, and dangerously, sycophantic. This is particularly worrisome for lawyers, because if they lose intellectual skills, what will they left to offer people? Furlong notes that the similarities between lawyer thinking and AI “thinking” should be a cause for alarm within the legal profession.

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Subjects: AI, Communication Skills, Communications, Legal Education, Legal Profession, Legal Research, Management
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