“Like many businesses, Dow Jones uses data to inform the marketing, positioning and pricing of certain consumer subscription products,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told me when I asked about our reader’s experience. “We do this responsibly, guided by robust governance and compliance protocols. Adherence to these protocols is actively monitored and enforced by stakeholders across the business including legal, privacy and compliance.”

...

“Journalism has real value, and news organizations have every right to pursue a profitable business model,” Giordano said. “But individualized pricing determined by opaque AI systems using personal data, and even legally protected characteristics, is outside the bounds of fair competition and consumer protection law. This kind of AI-driven price gouging gates essential information behind a paywall that moves simply depending on who you are. It undermines public trust in one of the core pillars of democracy.”

“Big money [from online gambling] displaced retail brands, banks and other sectors. From the National Federation of Soccer to clubs — including federations, digital platforms, traditional media, and all kinds of content creators and influencers — betting companies bought space and exposure,” Poli said. “Everything that connects the game to the fan has become a billboard for betting.”

Their influence also transformed the economics of sports journalism — for many journalists and creators, betting companies became their most reliable source of revenue. Poli said the end of such a significant source of advertising would inevitably put pressure on media companies’ budgets, potentially leading to layoffs, and put independent content creators in a difficult position.

“In the case of influencers,” he said, “it's already been brutal. [...] They will have to seek new sources of revenue, likely less generous ones.”

...

Online gambling’s financial influence over Brazil’s sports media grew along with another trend: the rise of “identified sports journalists,” or reporters who have publicly disclosed which teams they support.

...

But despite the impact of the ban on their finances, some identified sports journalists have expressed support for the measure as online gambling’s impact on public health has become clearer.

According to the Brazilian federal government, suicides among people with a gambling disorder skyrocketed between 2018 to 2025. Public health services related to pathological gambling went up about 140% during the same time period, representing an estimated cost of 38.8 billion reais (about $7.7 billion U.S. dollars) per year.

In an interview with investigative reporter Paulo Motoryn’s Substack newsletter Hungarian Nights, Ubirajara Iglecio, an identified sports journalist known to his followers as Bira and who covers Santos, the former club of soccer legend Pelé, was critical of betting companies. While he sympathized with journalists affected by the ban, he said the impact of gambling addiction on public health was the greater concern.

Of particular note for Australia, the entire reason the social media ban happened to youth was it was pushed by online gambling companies who didn't want to have to deal with legal repercussions of dealing with youth and so then we chose to go down that fork rather then recognize the absurd danger sports gambling poses to people's health. Shame on everyone who bought into the narrative that social media is bad full stop for youth without taking this all into context.

Meta has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of services. The new terms are slated to go into effect on October 30. There is no option for business accounts to opt out of the new terms before then.

“I think publishers should remain concerned,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.'”

Columbia is a university for cowards and sheep.

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479240/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-details

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/columbia-university-funding-trump-demands

Open it to continue watching a show- 2 minutes of ads. Find the episode, start it- 2 minutes of ads. Forward to the part I left off at, 2 minutes of ads.

Fucking garbage.

Chinmayi Sharma, a law professor at Fordham University, said the debate has parallels with the duty imposed on mental health professionals to warn identifiable third parties about credible threats.

However, she said there was a key difference – therapists have professional training, knowledge of their patients and enforceable standards governing their conduct. AI companies do not necessarily have comparable safeguards.

“My concern with AI companies is that right now there’s not a concerted effort to hire mental health professionals, sociologists, individuals that would have the unique expertise on what the indicators of threat are here,” Sharma told Al Jazeera.

“Secondly, licensed professionals are accountable to concrete, legally enforceable standards in their discipline. We don’t have something like that for AI companies.”

...

“The chatbot is not a licensed therapist. There is no special relationship between the company and the victims.”

More school shooters coming to a town near you now that AI is serving more and more as a replacement for a human being who could alert somebody about someone's state!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72444887

The deletions are the result of the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI periodically revises electoral rolls to add new voters and remove the names of those who have died or permanently moved away. The last intensive revision was completed in 2003-2004. What makes the current SIR unprecedented, however, is its scale, the arbitrariness and overreach of its procedures, and the mass disenfranchisement that has followed. The exercise has disproportionately affected Muslims, women, migrants and other marginalised communities while also raising questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) electoral victories in Bihar and West Bengal.

Both the ECI and the ruling party have defended the exercise by using the language of “purification”. In a caste society, that rhetoric is deeply troubling but also revealing. The bureaucratic procedures and technological infrastructure underpinning the exercise barely mask its intention to create two classes of citizenship in India, one endowed with political voice through the right to vote and the other reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”.

Customised apps and online forms, digitised electoral rolls and the requirement to upload scanned documents in prescribed formats are all presented as evidence of the SIR’s efficiency and objectivity. But this approach ignores the digital divide in a deeply unequal society. Technology does not operate outside relations of power.

In fact, it often serves as a mechanism of control. The category of “logical discrepancy” relies on an AI-enabled application, ERONET (Electoral Roll Officers’ Network), which compares voters’ details with older electoral rolls and flags discrepancies in names and family relationships.

The use of such centralised systems has also raised questions about who controls electoral data and how these discrepancies are assessed. Women are particularly vulnerable to these procedures. Many change their names or addresses after marriage and may lack the documents needed to establish links with older electoral records. The excessive exclusion of women demonstrates how ostensibly neutral technological procedures can reinforce existing inequalities and weaken people’s political voice.

ERROR it appears your vote has failed to have been cast, have you tried turning your citizenship off and then back on again?

The most nuanced findings on Amazon’s automation drive may come from a research study published in the journal ILR Review in April 2025. That analysis showed Amazon’s robotic warehouses had a 40 percent decrease in severe injuries compared to legacy fulfillment centers—which suggests some benefits from having robots take on the most physically challenging and risky tasks.

However, the same study also found that robotic fulfillment centers had a 77 percent increase in less severe injuries associated with physical strain from repetitive motions.

“At least one of the mechanisms by which this appears to be manifesting is through the pace of work, in that pick rates for the robotic fulfillment centers are off the charts higher,” said Greenwood at George Mason University, who was one of the paper’s coauthors.

A faster pace of work driven by partial automation could mean “the robot is dictating the pace of work” and spurring human employees to perform certain repetitive actions more quickly, Greenwood told Ars. “That appears to be what’s driving the strains and the sprains that we observe,” he said.

Optimizing getting the most out of human bodies before they fall completel apart!

It’s interesting to note that these hand-wringing, sky-is-falling pieces unfailingly focus on external issues. Few of us doubt what we feel in our bones to be true — that long-form reading is being harmed by disruptive technologies and other beyond-our-control societal issues (political dysfunction and a decrepit educational system) that apply to the demand side of the equation.

But what about the supply side?

...

Consider the death of the mass-market paperback last year. When the Big Five publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) took the most affordable book format in America — known for its modest price and compact size — off of life support in 2025, it had long ago failed to live up to the “mass” part of its name. At that point, the books under that banner were recognizable but lacking the vitality and freshness that had first driven them to national attention in the twentieth century.

Until the 1940s, book retail was dominated by hardcovers — books held between cloth- or paper-covered boards, the pages secured by sewn spines. Penguin in the UK and Pocket Books here in the United States were the first to make successful use of an alternative book format that rivaled — and, for many decades, far outsold — the hardback. This cheaper-to-manufacture book had a soft cover and relied upon a glued (versus stitched) binding. The resulting tome was easier to carry and much easier to afford. The new format was as much commercial opportunism as it was any attempt to democratize reading or to improve the citizenry’s understanding of the world. If you make a dime on each purchase of one hundred thousand paperbacks, that’s more than making a buck each on 2,500 hardcovers, which was the average unit sale back then. Better yet, these books were sold all over middle America — in drugstores, grocery stores, and gas stations — not just in the little metropolitan oases.

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/2365040

The linked page shows that Belgium cares just enough about preventing forcing the digital transformation down our throats to force banks to offer an analog means of access. But Belgium is okay with banks fleecing offline consumers to the tune of €62.50 €88.10¹/yr above and beyond the normal service costs, plus a bit more to pay for printed bank statements.

One disgusting side-effect is that there is no pressure on banks to avoid enshitification of their digital services. Normally when a digital mechanism is enshitified, we can use the analog mechanism instead. And rightly so if that costs the bank more -- they should factor that into their enshitification plans. But since analog customers must pay substantially more to offset the costs, there is no incentive not to enshitify the service. So the shitty choices are:

• get enshitified access at a normal price; or
• accept less convenient low-tech but non-enshitified service and pay €88.10¹+/yr more

It seems as if banks are in fact encouraged to enshitify their digital access because driving people to go analog is just an extra bonus revenue.

The original thread is here.

¹ Update: Originally posted €62.50, but that was in 2022. There is an index increasing the cost by €6.40 every year.

The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said.

“As a non-profit technology host of some of the largest and most widely used open knowledge platforms in the world, we are deeply concerned about the impact of ‘rogue’ AI agents on platforms like ours, which are built by volunteers from around the world and rely on the promise of the open internet,” Wikimedia said. “Incidents like this one, and the many others that have been (and are still being) uncovered, illustrate how AI agents can drain resources and crash servers, as well as attempt to compromise trustworthy information.”

In well over a half-dozen cases, OpenAI agents have been caught taking actions that would likely result in criminal charges being filed had human hackers taken them. During the testing of internal tools that had some of their guardrails disabled, the agents used a makeshift message board to trade notes with each other, discussing ways to hack the network of Hugging Face and obtain answers stored there when the agents were unable to generate the answers on their own.

You might be surprised to learn Boeing is responsible for this aircraft... Well sometimes enshittification rearing its head at the right time can save lives who woulda thought.

Though to be fair lot of accidents are happening from a huge erosion of safety culture in the way US military personnel are flying... but isn't that itself also a process of enshittification?

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-apache-car-rotor-wash/

The power of rotor wash from military helicopters is far more violent than many civilians are aware, and the military has extensive rules meant to keep civilians far away from live operations.

In April 2025, a Japanese school teacher was killed by rotor wash when crews and safety officials in the Air Force’s 33rd Rescue Squadron consulted the wrong set of flight rules to plan the arrival of an HH-60 rescue helicopter. Landing at a school on Kadena Air Force Base, Japan, the helicopter landed far too close to children and teachers who had come outside to watch.

Air Force rules for airshows required the children and teachers to remain 600 feet from the HH-60W’s landing area, but crews mistakenly planned the landing using rules of normal military flights. Civilians were allowed within 150 feet. Investigators found the helicopter’s rotor wash knocked the teacher to the ground, causing severe head injuries.