I wrote with my student, Adam Costello, about the difference between NFTs that are fraudulent projects versus simply failed, but otherwise legitimate projects. "Decoding crypto asset fraud: A crime script analysis of crypto Ponzi, rug pull, and mint-and-run schemes" doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

Why do we pay journal publishers? What do they do besides host content on a website. Surely the hosting costs are cheaper than paying them to do that for us. The copyediting there is abysmal. Of the last three papers I've published, there have been between 20 and 70 introduced errors.

I once saw a bill in Quit Ron's basement that had a guy who sounded like the Dutch Wesley Willis and another guy who was in a big costume with a giant amplified 4x6 with steel cables that he smashed against the support beams. I also have seen Burning Spear.

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Introduce yourself with 10 artists you’ve seen live Beastie Boys Bo Diddley De La Soul Parliament-Funkadelic Pixies Radiohead R.E.M. The Roots Stereolab Superchunk

I'm happy to announce that the methodological appendix is completed.

Paul Renfro@renfro.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My book is 95% done. I just have to write the prologue, introduction, all the content chapters, and the epilogue.

My friend Beni's in a bad way. He had to leave academia and has spent too much time battling cancer. If you've got even a couple of bucks, that helps. Else a retweet.

Donate to Support Beni as he faces brain cancer and heart surgery, organized by Louise Duncan

Hi. My name is Louise. I'm organising this fundraiser on behalf … Louise Duncan needs your support for Support Beni as he faces brain cancer and heart surgery

gofund.me

New paper in Crime, Media, Culture! I look at examples from the UK, US, Canada and the EU to explore the visual-discursive framing on the border in recruitment materials. You can access it open access here: lnkd.in/eUGeniFF

I wrote with @volkantopalli.bsky.social, Zarina Vakhitova, Harry Liu, Mike Levi, @awinterplace.bsky.social & Alex Baxter about how ransomware has changed over time, and the underlying processes. People forget how ransomware started out, but it's certainly big business now. doi.org/10.1177/0011...

I’m absolutely heartbroken to learn that my alma mater is shutting down after nearly six decades. Hampshire College was one of the most innovative institutions in higher education.😢

Hampshire College to close after years of financial struggles

Hampshire College will close after fall 2026 due to ongoing financial and enrollment struggles.

masslive.com

Folks need to read The Pushcart War.

Urban Truth Collective@urbantruth.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Never forget, for many years Uber insisted it would reduce traffic in cities. Instead, Uber drivers cruise without passengers 40% of the time. Uber & Lyft no longer claim they reduce traffic. They now admit they increase congestion. Now boosters lie about driverless cars. Don’t believe them either.

April Shaw & I discuss how an inappropriate focus on drug using pasts mars health practitioner-patient relationships: ‘Addiction never seems to Be historic’: how older women in recovery from illicit drug use experience stigma within their practitioner-patient communications doi.org/10.1080/0968...

‘Addiction never seems to Be historic’: how older women in recovery from illicit drug use experience stigma within their practitioner-patient communications

This qualitative study examines how women in recovery from illicit drug use perceive their communications with health care professionals when seeking care for various health issues and how these co...

doi.org

Sadly the Harmful Algal Bloom off South Australia may have had a little boost with the recent rain and heat. Satellite images from 5 March. The red areas indicate Chlorophyll A which is what the algae produce, and the second image is the real colour you can see from space go.nasa.gov/3PjpGKc

When in the UK, I had been working with my undergraduate honours students to research an everyday criminology of online life. My student Lisa Burton and I published an examination of consumer-to-consumer marketplaces in the context of the UK Online Fraud Charter. Read it here: rdcu.be/e4P7B

How did we get to the VERY LOW BAR of "we need a law to ensure removal within 48 hours of notification?" 48 hours is an eternity and allows abusive content to be shared across other platfrorms. This is so amazingly screwed.

Charles Mok@charlesmok.bsky.social · 6mo ago

UK "notice and takedown" fast-tracked. Tech firms will have 48 hours to remove abusive images under new law www.bbc.com/news/article...

The beauty of this is that Guttenfelder is covering these men the way they have always wanted: dripping in tacticool gear, in action, looking down their sites at an enemy which surrounds them. In doing so, he reveals who they are. They imagine themselves heroes; he shows they are villains.

Nathan@never-say-die.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Dave Guttenfelder is an amazing photojournalist who‘s most recently primarily focused on conflict photojournalism in Syria and Ukraine. Hes recently turned his talents to Minneapolis.

AI tools are no longer unable to realistically render faces of real people, and can now generate face images of actual individuals that are essentially undetectable as synthetic to most human observers, research by Kramer et al concludes: buff.ly/yooYg1g HT @bxjaeger.bsky.social

I spoke to NPR yesterday about X's AI, Grok, and users generating sexual content of women and girls. This has been an issue for months on X. This did not just suddenly start over the holidays. And on a larger scale, an issue for years in AI-gen tech www.npr.org/2026/01/12/n...

Elon Musk's X faces bans and investigations over nonconsensual bikini images

After the social media app's AI chatbot started generating sexualized images of women and children, two countries have blocked it and several more have launched investigations.

npr.org

The destruction doesn't make for a photo-op like tearing down the East Wing of the White House or bulldozing the Rose Garden, but it's every bit as bad. Generations of American children learned to spell and count, learned the Preamble to the Constitution, from watching shows produced by the CPB.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dissolved, ending its 58 years as the primary funder for PBS, NPR and local TV and radio stations

ICYMI 👇

Dutch_OsintGuy@dutchosintguy.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨New blog: A city is not a word. It’s a language system. When people say “020,” “Mokum,” or “Freedom City,” they’re still talking about Amsterdam just not in a way your #OSINT investigation understands. Imagine how many you’re missing. Read the blog here: www.dutchosintguy.com/post/how-osi...

As fine an actor as he was, Isiah was an even better spirit and the greatest gentleman.

‘The Wire’ actor Isiah Whitlock Jr. dies at 71

"The Wire" actor Isiah Whitlock Jr. died on Tuesday at age 71.

thebanner.com

For my #osint people.

Benn Jordan@bennjordan.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Using a search engine, we found 67 unsecured admin panels for Flock Safety cameras. The majority of them use AI to zoom in and follow people. I had both live and 31 days of archived footage from retail parking lots, forest trails, playgrounds, etc. @404media.co youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?...

This is the third edition of OSINT Field Notes, a monthly newsletter on digital investigations, techniques and tools. This issue covers X location data, Nano Banana, 3D flight paths, and a sanctions data diving. Thank you for the support on these 🙏 tinyurl.com/osintfieldno...

OSINT Field Notes #3

3D scenes from scraps of imagery, X’s hidden location signal, how to follow sanctions paper trails and the global MAGA grifters exposed.

tinyurl.com

#TheoreticalCrim is happy to name our 4th and final #EditorsChoice article of 2025: Sean Columb's, 'Criminal synergies: Human smuggling and illicit organ removal on the Central Mediterranean route.' Check out this article and this growing #OpenAccess collection: journals.sagepub.com/page/tcr/col...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

"Ethically trained" typically means "fine tuned with data acquired with consent". Unless a company or service has clearance for every single piece of training data in their BASE MODEL, it's likely still utilizing protected IP. I don't personally care much until "ethically" is used in marketing.

Sinthoid 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸@sinthoid.bsky.social · 8mo ago

So like, this obviously sucks either way and I ask this as someone who's never heard of ElevenLabs, is their description of their models as "ethically trained" actually mean anything or are they just saying shit?

"Imagine you stole all of the intellectual property in the world. And you're using it to help people write middling emails and make revenge porn about women, and also children. And you're powering this plagiarism and non-consensual porn machine by eating up what's left of humanity's carbon budget."

How to explain AI to your family this holiday season | CNN Business

Politics, football and movies are among the many topics that tend to come up around Thanksgiving. In 2025, a new question may arise at the table: Why the heck is everyone talking about AI, and what sh...

cnn.com

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

On top of that, you'll be losing negotiation power to competition from other buyers trying to panic-buy a new house before the rates go back up. Buy what you can afford. You can't refinance an overvalued house purchase.

Breaking News: Viola Fletcher, the oldest survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre who testified a century later in Congress to the terror she witnessed in the hope of winning reparations, died at 111. nyti.ms/4or9B1e

To give you an idea about just how eventful the end of COP30 was, I wrote and rewrote this entire 2000 story for @drilledmedia.bsky.social three times over a period of about six hours as it was all happening.

COP-tastrophe: How the COP of Implementation, Truth, Forests, and Indigenous Peoples Failed on All Counts

COP30 began full of promise but ended as yet another reminder that the mechanism for global climate governance is broken.

drilled.media

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn

Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

404media.co

The UK Government has released its response to the House of Lords’ Media Literacy report. The Lords warned that poor media literacy threatens democracy itself. The government agrees, but its plan focuses on coordination more than transformation. committees.parliament.uk/publications...