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  Cloudflare (>20% of all domains) has started automatically implementing DSM Dir art 4 rights reservation (ie copyright/TDM objection to scraping) for all sites that do not have a robots.txt file. They also adding purpose fields (new content-signal field with search, AI train, AI use) to robots.txt unilaterally and are enforcing it through monitoring and analysis. https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurations/managed-robots-txt/

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  on protest and bluetooth mesh networking apps - india attempts to restrict source code to stop people circumventing internet shutdowns https://restofworld.org/2026/india-github-geoblock-jack-dorsey-bitchat/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds

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  RE: https://someone.elses.computer/@mikarv/117009744087358555 You can now access many more digital laws, not just the GDPR, at the UCL Massively Crossreferenced Digital Laws page: EU: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, UCPD, NIS2 UK: OSA, DPA18, ...+ Each article/para/recital, links to what-cites-it in int'l cases/statutes/guidance https://homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/laws/index.html

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  Parts of the GDPR are cited and interpreted by thousands of pieces of case law and guidance, but there's no easy and free way to find out what. We've made a tool which makes it super easy, for 13,000 citing documents, all in one place. More regulations to come! https://homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/laws/gdpr.html

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  after Brexit, any of the pan-European PLC type company, the ‘Societas Europaea’, were converted into ‘UK Societas’. This is now a highly endangered species of legal person, with only seven active, and no way to form new ones.

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  UK: social media ban CJEU: hold my beer

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  Information Compliance team at the House of Commons managed to send an incorrect email to 120,000 recipients (me included), ironically intended as an internal puff piece about how good their information compliance is https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/incorrect_email_recipients_may_2#incoming-3456681

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  genuine q: if ai coding is massively increasing engineers’ productivity why does software either feel the same or worse? where is this productivity actually going?

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  in the legislative proposal to expand the supreme court, could you please also tell them to publish HTML versions of their judgments? (you can still paginate them precisely, technology is amazing!). section 508 of the rehabilitation act called and it wants the judicial branch in scope.

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  Firefox raises the alarm about Google’s attempt to build ‘Prompt API’ into Chrome-like browsers — de facto standardisation towards local Gemini models, required agreements to terms of use despite being local — a Chrome infrastructure play all over again? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/30/mozilla_pushes_back_against_googles/

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  more backlash to scraping, this time to Common Crawl — a notoriously intransparent org for what they moderate (if they moderate, or eg remove csam) or what they include https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-30/news-organizations-push-back-against-web-archive-used-for-ai

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  It seem that archive.today has been blocked at some technical level by an order by the Roskomnadzor — seemingly from laws cited not for piracy (these sites, and their .is and .ph domains, avoid paywalls) but under disinformation law — they are often used to document/subvert Russian media censorship.

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  A good start to a proposal for reviews, requiring authors of submitted papers to expend tokens to submit and earn them back through reviewing. Needs to be more radical though in light of AI slop: cap on total submissions, earn further at steep rate through reviewing. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3770921

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  really useful primer on data, ai and trade law from @streinz https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-world-trade-law/conceptualising-data-and-artificial-intelligence-in-world-trade-law/1D280F68D70CFBA9E0171B8C15939BCF especially good if the issue comes up in teaching

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  Musk’s xAI rapidly appoints an EU representative for the DSA following Grok investigation, choosing an entity with an address in Estonia but no registered presence in the country. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/elon-musk-ai-company-basement-address @fantafanta

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  Amazon employees race to automate non-essential tasks to expend tokens to impress managers on internal AI usage leaderboards. Great outcome, all. https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/4965c8a3-169e-4815-bd1b-16f5e9a22e70

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  Canvas pays presumably enormous ransom to end extortion of universities and schools — receives questionable promise that data has been deleted. Moodle less of a monoculture but unis must harden it, possibly rebuild from the ground up in something other than PHP… https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/12/double-canvas-intrusion-confirmed-as-shinyhunters-resets-leak-deadline/5238361

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  more Hugging Face content moderation challenges — the model marketplace finds itself hosting infostealers disguised as legitimate models https://www.heise.de/en/news/Infostealer-on-AI-platform-Hugging-Face-disguised-as-OpenAI-repository-11290946.html

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  “It has not been a productivity booster at all, it feels like a speedrun towards severe mental exhaustion” https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/

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  In Memoriam: Prof William Twining https://currentlegalproblems.org/article/in-memoriam-prof-william-twining/ (Philip Schofield, David Sugarman, Jane Holder)

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  on vibe coding as an ADHD multiplier — a strong, short blog on the author’s personal experience of building repeated things they don’t need as a form of pseudo productivity https://thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.html

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  wow, save energy by not saying please or thank you to your AI. the individualistic ‘turn off the lights’ moment for LLMs. models use tools and hidden thinking that expend thousands of tokens in seconds. two or three tokens of nicety isn’t going to move the needle. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529017-ditch-the-niceties-in-ai-prompts-to-save-energy-use-say-researchers/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=technology

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  Meta's latest attempt to stop the progress of my 2018 GDPR access complaint and its draft fine of €360-€430 million dramatically failed in the Irish High Court last week https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/05/21/meta-loses-challenge-to-possible-430m-fine-over-personal-data-processing-complaint/ The case is long and contains excerpts from relevant documents which I cannot myself post as Ireland changed primary law (Data Protection Act 2018 s 26A) during my complaint to make it a crimina...

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  Still waiting for the AI Act advisory forum (Art 67), meanwhile the all important, de facto compulsory, privatised harmonised standards, made without democratic process (yet part of EU law), charge ahead. EC opines on their suitability without civil society input or views. https://edri.org/our-work/the-eu-ai-office-must-prioritise-setting-up-the-advisory-forum/

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  Real time bidding and the tracking infrastructure is so toxic & illegal that the firms whose apps embed this code have to pretend to be shocked when resulting data appears in a huge leak from an actor many steps away, with a history of selling to law enforcement https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

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  Great work from Foxglove — UK government sheepishly forced to increase estimated carbon emissions from data centre usage by... 100 times https://www.ft.com/content/0c8bc0a9-63e5-4739-a91e-f07189b45f20?syn-25a6b1a6=1

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  2 year research postdoc at UCL Laws on data and democracy, public law focus — could focus on surveillance and/or AI issues https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-ucl-jobs/details?jobId=43885&jobTitle=Research+Fellow+%28Data+and+Democracy%29

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  ‘Going to the cloud’: renting servers, or integration of deeply proprietary services? “both options go by the same name, and organizations often slide from the first into the second without realizing the fundamental difference, until it’s too late” - @C__CS https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2645879#d1e228

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  Trump lets down the Rust belt already.

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  Palantir sells AI tool to the Met Police to discover bent coppers, trawls over presumably IT & telemetry data that few look at, starts hundreds of investigations for non compliance, WFH, roster fraud, and dozens related to… undeclared membership of the Freemasons? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/25/met-police-investigates-hundreds-officers-palantir-ai-tool