"The Pima County sheriff said last week that investigators were unable to retrieve any footage from Guthrie’s surveillance cameras..."

"... because she did not pay for a subscription that would have stored the video. But the sheriff’s department and F.B.I. said that investigators recovered the video today by accessing 'residual data.'"

I'm reading "New Video Shows a Masked Figure at Nancy Guthrie’s Door" (NYT).

My 3 questions: 1. You can't maintain your privacy by declining to pay for the subscriptions? 2. Why pay for the subscription now? and 3. Did Google withhold this video because it didn't want customers to realize they didn't need to pay for the subscription?

Meanwhile, in case you think the video of the masked man led to his speedy arrest: "Man Detained for Questioning in Nancy Guthrie Case Is Released/The development came after investigators released chilling video showing a masked figure on Ms. Guthrie’s front porch the morning of her disappearance" (NYT).

So the ski-mask method, now even more widely known, seems to still look effective. 

"The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose."

Said Marco Rubio, quoted in "'Witch hunt': Ex-EU commissioner Breton denounces U.S. visa ban targeting ‘censorship'" (CNBC). 

The Trump administration imposed visa bans on Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner behind the Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, accusing them of censoring U.S. social media platforms.... The DSA forces tech giants like Google and Meta to police illegal content more aggressively, or face hefty fines.... 

Breton... wrote on X: “Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?” He added: “As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament — our democratically elected body — and all 27 Member States unanimously voted the DSA. To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is."

I can't find anything by Breton explaining his idea of "where" censorship really is. Try to persuade us, Thierry. Give us a chance to argue with you. If you've got a good idea put it up for sale in the marketplace of ideas. Prove us wrong.

ADDED: Breton seems to be giving priority to whatever the majority decides to do. We Americans have traditionally put individual rights above majoritarian choice. I suspect that when he says "Censorship isn’t where you think it is," he means it's never censorship when it's done democratically. Believe that, and you don't believe in individual rights. 

I watched this so you don't have to. Do. Not. Watch.

"Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15 percent in the past year.... Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results..."

"... anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates. For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic. There’s no getting around the decline in traffic. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing not only that people who see an AI-generated summary on Google search are significantly less likely to click on external links than users who don’t, but that people almost never click on the links included in the AI summary. (They do so just 1 percent of the time.).... One strategy is trying to demand compensation from AI companies for crawling their content. Media companies are also investing in their own channels that deliver content directly to readers. They are launching new subscriptions, newsletters, events, membership programs, and even platforms and apps. Wired’s Katie Drummond wrote recently that the... trick... is to 'connect our humans to all of you humans.'...."

From "Traffic Apocalypse/Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites" (Columbia Journalism Review).

"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly."

Wrote Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, quoted in "Google Violated Antitrust Laws in Online Search, Judge Rules/The ruling by Judge Amit P. Mehta was the first antitrust decision of the modern internet era in a case against a technology giant" (NYT).

The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with its search engine. Instead, Google collected more data about consumers that it used to make its search engine better and more dominant....

I googled "world leaders who laugh" and Google treated it as if I had googled "world leaders who laugh at Trump."

 

Link.

My hypothesis is that Google is actively skewing searches to influence the election. But I get the same effect at DuckDuckGo. And Bing. I also tried Grok, and it foisted Harris and Trump on me repeatedly, even when I demanded that it stop. 

I was googling a propos of the previous post, which is about Kamala Harris's laughing and got me wondering what kind of world leaders are associated with laughing. Are they heroes or villains? I could only think of one, a great American hero:

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

"The real fun... begins when you start to use Google Maps in multiplayer mode: building shared lists of saved locations with and for others..."

"... remotely populating their digital landscape with little pins. It’s a simple action that conjures an increasingly rare sense of virtual care. Populating a shareable map is an exercise in memory. I started making shared maps as a way of staying in touch with faraway friends and as a key to my own psycho-geography, doled out to give dear ones a glimpse into my world.... When my German bestie told me she was planning a trip to New York... I nudged her to my favorite haunts; hearing her report back, I felt as if my past were intertwined with her present."

From "I Was Lonely In a New City. This Tech Trick Helped Me Belong/There is a comfort in having somewhere tried and true to go, especially when you’re a stranger in a foreign city" (NYT).

"I’m glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all."

Tweeted Elon Musk... and I didn't understand that and was about to Google for an answer before noticing the irony, so I decided to blog about it, here on my Google-owned blogging platform.

Let's see: Business Insider has "Elon Musk is accusing Google of running 'insane racist, anti-civilizational programming' with its AI":

"The detour took Easler and her family onto a gravel road that eventually disappeared into a bumpy dirt trail."

"They quickly realized something was wrong as they looked at the line of cars in front of them. 'They’re all going directly into the desert,' Easler recalled. The Google Maps route created a day-long ordeal.... SFGate reported on the incident after Easler posted a TikTok video that garnered more than a million views.... Even as the route got bumpier as it proceeded off-road... they trusted that the large number of cars accompanying them meant they were still on the right track, Easler said. 'Nobody was turning around. So we figured that it led somewhere,' Easler said...."

From "Google apologizes after map led drivers down dirt path into the desert" (WaPo).

So did they "quickly realize[] something was wrong" or did they keep "trust[ing] that the large number of cars... meant they were still on the right track"? The article doesn't bother to make sense, even as it shows a vivid example of humans proceeding blindly into the unknown.

Here's the TikTok that garnered:

"Google’s A.I. safety experts had said ... that users could experience 'diminished health and well-being' and a 'loss of agency' if they took life advice from A.I."

"They had added that some users who grew too dependent on the technology could think it was sentient. And... when Google launched Bard, it said the chatbot was barred from giving medical, financial or legal advice. Bard shares mental health resources with users who say they are experiencing mental distress. The tools are still being evaluated and the company may decide not to employ them.... Google has also been testing a helpmate for journalists that can generate news articles, rewrite them and suggest headlines.... The company’s A.I. safety experts had also expressed concern about the economic harms of generative A.I.... arguing that it could lead to the 'deskilling of creative writers.' Other tools being tested can draft critiques of an argument, explain graphs and generate quizzes, word and number puzzles."

From "Google Tests an A.I. Assistant That Offers Life Advice/The tech giant is evaluating tools that would use artificial intelligence to perform tasks that some of its researchers have said should be avoided" (NYT).

"I like the logo, definitely a piece thread that happens to be shaped like the Tamil கு (ku)."

 A comment on the NYT article "What Is the Threads Logo Supposed to Look Like? Sure, it’s probably an @ symbol. But the abstract logo of Instagram’s new Twitter rival has drawn comparisons to an ear, an ampersand and a piece of spaghetti."

Threads is getting a lot of puffy press. 

Is anyone saying that "Threads" sounds an awful lot like "threats"?

ADDED: Here's this in today's NYT: "Why the Early Success of Threads May Crash Into Reality/Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta’s might to push Threads to a fast start — but that may only work up to a point." That doesn't sound puffy. Mike Isaac likens Threads to Google+, which back in 2011, was supposed to be the "Facebook killer." It got a big headstart because there were pre-existing Google users. But by 2018, it was dead. You need people to keep using the thing.

A strange but intriguing grammatical error in a Supreme Court opinion.

From yesterday's unanimous opinion, Twitter v. Taamneh, written by Justice Thomas:

The plaintiffs (who are respondents) contend that they have stated a claim for relief under §2333(d)(2). They were allegedly injured by a terrorist attack carried out by ISIS. But plaintiffs are not suing ISIS. Instead, they have brought suit against three of the largest social-media companies in the world—Facebook, Twitter (who is petitioner), and Google (which owns YouTube)—for allegedly aiding and abetting ISIS.

You'd think the proximity of "Twitter (who...)" to "Google (which...)" would set off somebody's grammar alarm. They're both corporations and — though it's sometimes said jocosely or not that "corporations are people" — they're not human beings and they don't get "who."

It's an outright error, but I'm interested in why something worked on by so many industrious writers and editors would fail to catch it. I came up with 2 ideas:

"He still believed the [Google and OpenAI built] systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways..."

"... but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. 'Maybe what is going on in these systems,' he said, 'is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.' As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous.... Until last year, he said, Google acted as a 'proper steward' for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.... But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation."

From "'The Godfather of A.I.' Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead/For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm" (NYT).

"The Montana House of Representatives on Friday approved a total ban on TikTok inside the state..."

"The legislation, which would also bar app stores from carrying TikTok, the wildly popular viral video app, was approved 54 to 43 in the last of two votes in the State House. The State Senate passed it in March.... Montana will be in uncharted territory if it tries to ban the app. A trade group funded by Apple and Google has said the companies cannot stop app downloads in a single state. Critics of the legislation say that TikTok users could disguise their location to maintain access to the app, and that the ban may be hard to enforce in border towns.... The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech groups have said the bill violates the First Amendment rights of Montanans who use the app."

From "Montana Legislature Approves Outright Ban of TikTok/The bill, which would make the state the first to ban the social media app, now goes to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte" (NYT).

Here's the top comment at the Times: "I might suggest that the Montana State House tech gurus contact their counterparts in China. They are far more experienced in throttling apps, prosecuting developers and penalizing users of consumer software offerings."

The ACLU notes the free speech violation, and Apple and Google — saying that they can't stop downloads in a single state — are setting up the argument that it violates the dormant Commerce Clause. 

I think Governor Gianforte has the background to see multiple reasons to veto this bill. Wikipedia:

"YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki will step down after nearly a decade... leaving all of the major social media and entertainment platforms in the management of men."

WaPo reports.

It was in Wojcicki’s Silicon Valley garage that Larry Page and Sergey Brin began building the search giant. Brin later married her sister, and Wojcicki stayed with the company, rising through the ranks and holding a number of major roles before being appointed head of YouTube in 2014.Wojcicki was seen by many Google employees as more or less a member of Brin and Page’s family....

So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley. 

Can anyone explain what's going on here? Should I be opting out?

Email from Google:

"That... section was tough not just because I didn't know WTF [that one word] was, but because it gets really tight in there..."

"... and there are only a few clues to help you out with [that word], and those are either cross-referenced or vague."

Writes Rex Parker, about today's NYT crossword, about what was the last word I got. Maybe you haven't done the puzzle yet, so I'm putting a page break before the spoilers, but what follows is of interest even if you don't do the puzzle:

"On Christmas Day in 2010, a short, bespectacled 27-year-old Chinese programmer named Zhang Yiming logged onto Douban, a Chinese hybrid of Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads..."

"... to share his thoughts on a movie he had just watched. Zhang used his Douban account as a chronicle of his personal development, recording the books he wanted to read ('What Would Google Do?' 'Catch-22' and 'The Road to Serfdom') and the movies he’d seen ('The Departed,' 'Good Will Hunting,' 'Inception'). The movie Zhang watched that Christmas was 'The Social Network.' The movie was of particular interest to Zhang.... Born in 1983 as the only son of a librarian and a nurse, Zhang came of age in a China flush with reform and newfound connections to the West.... Zhang loved the freedom that technology offered and displayed a fondness for the West, politically as well as culturally. In 2009, when Chinese authorities blocked access to several websites, he took to his personal blog to voice his disapproval, according to a Wall Street Journal profile. 'Go out and wear a T-shirt supporting Google,' he wrote. 'If you block the internet, I’ll write what I want to say on my clothes.'..."

Much more about Zhang and the app he created in "How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis/A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive?" (NYT). 

"More and more young people are using TikTok’s powerful algorithm... to find information uncannily catered to their tastes."

"That tailoring is coupled with a sense that real people on the app are synthesizing and delivering information, rather than faceless websites.... Doing a search on TikTok is often more interactive than typing in a query on Google. Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos. This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean.... Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Va., uses TikTok for many search queries: recipes to cook, films to watch and nearby happy hours to try. She also turns to it for less typical questions, like looking up interviews with the actor Andrew Garfield and weird conspiracy theories. TikTok’s results 'don’t seem as biased' as Google’s, she said, adding that she often wants 'a different opinion' from what ads and websites optimized for Google say."

From "For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine/Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers. Google has noticed" (NYT).