“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

"“Those responsible for violations of the law must be held to account, and the rights of the victims’ families to truth, justice and reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence must be upheld,” Mr. Türk said in a statement.

Mr. Türk’s call comes as 18 people died while in ICE detention in the first five months of this year, an increase from eight people in the same period last year, according to ICE data. The US agency reported an additional death on 4 June, bringing this year’s current total to 19 deaths. In 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, compared with 11 in 2024.

There have been “concerning allegations regarding the use of force” in US immigration detention facilities, and five of the officially reported deaths in 2026 were classified as suicides, Mr. Türk wrote."

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167816

#USA #Trump #ICE #Immigration #HumanRights

"Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week."

https://kotaku.com/playstation-store-movies-digital-studio-canal-terminator-2000711013

#Sony #PlayStation #DRM #StudioCanal #Copyright #IP

"When this rolls out to your account, you can visit Google’s My Activity page and then select the Search Services History tab to opt out. This page gives you a solid sense of what Google saves from your Search history. It’s also where you can turn off the entire setting and delete your activity. It’s critical to uncheck the box next to Save media if you don’t want your image uploads used for AI training.

It’s worth doing this change now rather than later. There’s not much you can do after your media data is thrown into the AI blender. “If your saved media is used to train our AI models, it is disconnected from your Google Account. This training data will be kept for up to 4 years, even if you delete the original activity,” read the pop-up when I turned off this feature. That’s such a long time for my random image Search uploads to float around in the digital ether."

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-opt-out-of-google-search-new-ai-data-training/

#AI #AISearch #Google #AITraining #Privacy #DataProtection #AIOverview

"Plain English is the discipline of choosing the simplest word that carries the full meaning. It doesn't reduce accuracy. It reduces the cognitive load required to extract accuracy from the text."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plain-english-being-understood-across-time-zones-carrie-warner-wsc1e/

#Writing #Language #TechnicalCommunication #Technicalwriting

"The spectrum of engagement with models clearly challenges the copyright system. A system, in this Kat’s view, which, until recently, was oriented around individual acts of copying, with platforms cast as new points of interference to bridge technological enforcement gaps. However, UGC occurring on AI model marketplaces demands a shift in rhetoric and approach. Their ability to redistribute creative agency and control over the tools of cultural production should prompt us to reflect on how copyright law should respond to creativity that occurs through shared infrastructures.

Cases like Pelham I (IPkat here), Pelham II (IPKat here) and Mio/konektra (IPKat here) illustrate the growing tendency to view the boundaries of copyright through the lens of communication. Infringement depends on recognisable elements, for both phonograms and works of applied art, and creative-based exceptions centre upon dialogue. It could be said that the future trajectory of copyright depends on the dialogue between relevant interests, and to the extent that they do not, perhaps copyright’s individually focused boundaries should shrink. Instead, the collective value of creativity that benefits non-expressive uses (training AI models or downstream monetisation of generated AI content) should be recognised and remunerated through an area of law more suited to valuing collective expressive, namely cultural heritage."

https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2026/06/running-tintin-model-locally-on-your.html

#AI #LLMs #LocalLamas #China #Chatbots #Copyright #IP #OpenSource #OpenWeights

"Today (Wednesday 24 June) the European Commission announced a new reform proposal for Europol – the EU’s policing agency – expanding Europol’s operational powers and weakening key data protection safeguards to the tune of €3 billion.

This is the 3rd Europol reform in six years changing Europol’s mandate to increase its powers and budget. This puts the European Commission increasingly at odds with the boundaries set in the EU treaties, which provide only for Europol to remain in a supportive role to Member States’ police authorities and competent solely for serious forms of criminality.

The Commission’s proposal claims that “interference with the rights to privacy and protection of personal data… remains both necessary and proportionate,” however under the proposed changes, anyone could have their personal data stored and processed by this obscure EU police cooperation agency.

Despite acknowledging the most recent Europol reform in 2022 already massively expanded the agency’s mandate, the proposal charges ahead with significant deregulatory measures to further weaken data protection laws and expand operational powers:"

https://protectnotsurveil.eu/resources/press-release-europol-mandate-overhault-2026/

#EU #PoliceState #Europol #Surveillance #Privacy #FundamentalRights

"“It is not only an attempt at chilling speech,” said Chip Gibbons, policy director at the advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, “but an indication that the [the Trump administration is] going to continue going after protests extremely hard.”

In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the protest: five others took plea deals, another five have state charges pending and three more were indicted last month. What the federal government has described as “antifa extremists” are activists you’d find anywhere in the US: trans people, tattoo artists, vegans and anti-ICE community members who engage in mutual aid. The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature, including zines, and other basic security measures common in our modern era – like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance; using the encrypted messaging app Signal; or dressing in all-black clothing – is alarming to activists.

“Zines are a foundational first amendment document” going back to the Federalist papers, said Xavier de Janon, the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild and the attorney representing Elizabeth in her state case. “Zines discussing ideas of revolution, mutual aid, ideas of a world after capitalism should not be able to be criminalized in and of themselves … That’s just dangerous to all of us.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

#USA #FreedomOfExpression #PressFreedom #Activism #Zines #ICE

"“It’s really not a niche problem. It is a problem that every enterprise will face if they are bullish on AI, if they haven’t already,” he adds. The amount of token spending is increasing “exponentially, as more and more people are starting to use AI.”

Kwak says after Accenture tried to get enterprises to adopt AI as quickly as possible, AI has reached scale in most areas in both Accenture and its clients. But with that scale is a new opportunity for Accenture regarding its clients: “to really think about token economics.” The bill of the overall AI spend is visible, Kwak explains, but attributing that AI spend at the token level to the value outcomes on the projects where AI is being used is not visible.

Finally, the “controls are just arriving too late.” Those are things that might stop someone spending a bunch of money on tokens, like budgeting or different tiers.

Following the Financial Times’ reporting of Accenture’s policy to force AI adoption or risk missing promotions, an Accenture spokesperson told CNBC, “Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work. That requires the adoption of the latest tools and technologies to serve our clients most effectively.”

Kwak says Accenture plans to formally launch a product called “Token IQ” soon."

https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies-are-scrambling-to-stop-spending-so-much-on-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #Tokenomics #Tokens #Enshittification #AIBubble #TokenOps

"The conversation that feels more core to the trajectory of AI is that of regulation and control of open models. I think it is an economic good for cheap intelligence to diffuse widely, and our default position should be to cheer for open models, but this model’s release date will have it be permanently associated with Claude Fable — and therefore Claude Mythos — in the mental map of AI power structures. We are at a point where Mythos-class model capabilities are deemed not safe for release by the U.S. Government and the Chinese model makers are charging forward in capabilities available to all.
(...)
I totally see why it is scary to imagine an openly accessible Mythos class model, but if open models get banned now and only closed models get 10 or 100X better in 2 years in the hands of one or two companies, I think we will have bigger problems on our hands."

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/glm-52-is-the-step-change-for-open

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #GLM #China #OpenSource #OpenWeights