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Amy Greenblatt's avatar

Come for the legal analysis, stay for the cat pictures. Thank you, Professor.

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Stephen Michael Kellat's avatar

Well, I wound up with a double-header on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the summer term teaching. I just met both of my new sections of my digital literacy class on Thursday. That means I have to miss office hours through August 1st.

I'll throw this out there now since I can't be at office hours. It kinda intersects the cases being talked about. I know I had to bring it up with my digital literacy students in-class. Microsoft recently announced a feature called "Recall". Quite a few people in the tech sector became increasingly horrified when details dribbled out as to how this would be implemented. It would be a total boon to prosecutors, though. The goal of the feature would be to allow you to ask a natural language question to an AI system and be able to search back within the past 90 days or so to see what you did. To accomplish this, though, the system would take constant screenshots of everything that you did that would be uncensored and would capture everything including financial details, passwords, and medical information. Those screenshots would be transcribed by a computer vision AI running locally on your computer and saved in an unencrypted database that would be accessible to anybody that had your password/PIN to access the computer. A proof of concept attack was published that showed fairly quickly that you wouldn't need anything on the scale of NSO Group's Pegasus to do evil with this.

Although Microsoft said initially it would only be turned on by default on their new Copilot+ AI-enabled computers that they would be selling an additional detail dropped that it would later be pushed to all Windows 11 computers and enabled by default. The outrage in the IT sector got very loud at that point and people started discussing adversarial mitigations to be able to disable the new feature as quickly as possible. Microsoft finally backpedaled Friday and said that it would shift from the feature being opt-out to being opt-in but it would still ship it as part of the operating system.

Imagine if this existed in the criminal cases of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump as evidence.

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SandyG's avatar

A question for you. Can an AI search find my posts on Substack?

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Philip's avatar

Maybe you need to have a hydroponic garden in your office for days of mowing and noise-conscious Pancake? It could be a sideline business. Better yet, if lemons could be grown in that manner, go for it. It could be a metaphor for some / most / (all?) GOP politicians, and when you are dealt lemons, unlike them, you don't blame it on the Democrats....you make lemonade! (Interesting observations in the crux of the roundup in how stark the ethics are between the two cases. I shake my head on how this election could POSSIBLY be close. Obviously lack of knowledge, unrefined critical thinking skills, gripping fears. IMO, I think many of these people have too much free time on their hands to ruminate. I limit my news reading, not on social media, and only use a cell phone in the event of an emergency. I like being connected to humans directly, not anonymous bots or instigators. And yes, I will have an enjoyable Caturday, many thanks!

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Michael Tenzer's avatar

Thanks! Besides the usual informative perspective you provide, it's always great to see a cat next to a stack of books!

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Anna Chanakas's avatar

Great show, thanks for breaking everything down for us.

Papa Renato is depriving poor Henry out of his protein! I’m on team Henry, let him eat cicadas! In moderation, of course 🐾🐾🐾

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Lauren's avatar

What was the wording when he bought the gun? Did it say he had to be sober for x number of days? The other question is the PROOF he had something in his system. What PROOF do they have? Do they have urinalysis test results? Thanks.

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Lionel Galway's avatar

I don’t have the form in front of me but it was something along the lines of are you using drugs. Interestingly, “drugs” currently includes marijuana so if you are regularly smoking pot you have to lie to be able to get a gun from a dealer.

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Lauren's avatar

It makes sense that drugs would include marijuana. Hence asking about what proof they had.

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Don Stevens's avatar

The referenced article “The Nation by Elie Mystal, who read the section on DOJ in MAGA’s Project 2025 blueprint for autocracy in America.” Is well worth the read. Thank -you, Asha.

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D . O. Olson's avatar

Like why did the California Seagull become utahs state bird?

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Ray in Bowie MD's avatar

No A/C in New Haven/Hamden , eh? Growing up in D.C. without central air, it was heaven to go to NE CT for a month each summer and escape the heat.

Conversely, visiting my Mother In Law from my central air conditioned home in MD suburbs to her non-A/C home outside NH got progressively hotter from 1980 to 2010; not as refreshing.

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