My main newsletter, Complex Machinery, includes a section called "In Other News..." It's where I list one-liners about interesting articles that didn't fit into any segments.

You can think of this list as a version of In Other News, but with a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

Above the fold

1. A Moroccan intelligence officer sheds light on their country's use of technology against dissidents. (Le Monde 🇫🇷, The Guardian)
2. The artwork you see in museums and private collections may have a shady past. One Marine-turned-prosecutor is working to fix that. His take: collectors and curators can ask four simple questions to keep their showrooms clean. (Financial Times)
3. Russian culture has no shortage of dark jokes about life and politics. Here's a sample of the latest, focused on Putin and the war special military operation in Ukraine. (Tap Water Sommelier | Konstantin Asimonov)
4. Madison Square Garden has made headlines in recent months over its internal security systems. Till now the coverage was about facial recognition tools that would block people who had criticized the venue's leadership; a recent hack reveals detailed profiles of celebrity visitors, including their sexual orientation. (Wired)
5. This Bluesky thread on food supply chain safety is well worth your read. (JayIsPainting)
6. An "author" has created reams of genAI-slop "biographies" of well-known figures, including one on New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill. (New York Times)
7. Consumers are (perhaps mis)using credit card chargebacks in a war against (sometimes scammy) retailers. (Bloomberg)
8. It's bad enough that genAI-related companies have been competing with consumers for GPU cards and other computer parts Now they're raiding bookstores so they can score some pre-LLM, guaranteed-slop-free training content. (404 Media)
9. OpenAI and model-hosting company Hugging Face have announced a wee security incident involving a genAI bot gone rogue. (OpenAI)

The rest of the best

Datacenters

• This family's home was apparently in the way of a planned datacenter project. (Futurism)
• For all the excitement around datacenters, the companies behind them are sure in a hurry to pass the buck take on investor money. (WSJ)
• Meta projects one of its datacenters will cost $50 billion. To put that in perspective, that's more than half of what the company spent across its multiple years of metaverse projects. (WSJ)

… and everything else

• Medicare looks to AI to help with prior authorization process. (Undark)
• Brands have raised concerns about what genAI-based search summaries will say about them. Now it's politicians' turn to face the bots. (New York Times)
• A bug in cloud provider AWS's billing system gave some customers sticker shock. (The Register)
• Would you trust a genAI agent with your credentials? Password-keeper software 1Password thinks you will. (The Verge)
• This latest outbreak of foodborne illness? Several restaurants cited the potential risk exposure a while ago. (Forbes)
• Here's yet another example of cops abusing their access to technology systems – specifically, Flock cameras. (Atlanta News First)
• Hyundai workers strike over concerns of robot-related job loss. (ARs Technica)
• Hackers allege that AI-music-generation app Suno is built on tons of copyrighted music. (Futurism)
• A few months back, you probably saw headlines about AI-based job applicant screening tools. A judge has ruled that a lawsuit against one such tool provider, Workday, may proceed. (Tech Policy Press)
• Machine-based translation already had a rough reputation. Then Grok's "hold my beer" moment took that reputation to new lows. (Futurism)

Did I miss anything?

Have something I should read? Send the link my way.