Posts from blackneon.net

Year in Review.

Usage of the flexible payment method hit an all-time high on Cyber Monday, driving $1.03 billion in online spend (up 4.2% YoY), as consumers looked for greater flexibility in managing their holiday budgets. The vast majority of BNPL transactions are happening on a mobile device as well, at 79.4% share on Cyber Monday (vs. desktop). In an Adobe survey of over 1,000 U.S. consumers (conducted Nov. 2025), respondents said they were most likely to use BNPL for electronics, apparel, toys, and furniture purchases.

As a non-American, I watch USA when I am bored.

Wikipedia.

Today, the Commission has issued a fine of €120 million to X for breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The breaches include the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.

The report, Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human rights violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida, reveals human rights violations that, in some cases amount to torture, occurring at Krome and “Alligator Alcatraz” within an increasingly hostile anti-immigrant climate in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis, whose administration has intensified criminalization and mass detention of migrants and people seeking safety. Findings were gathered during a September 2025 research mission.

For over a decade, U.N. aid agencies poured millions into the company despite warnings from human rights advocates.

In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media; advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more polarized opinion profiles - a polarization pull'' - and improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also creates incentives to park society insemi-lock’’ regions where opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with important implications for democratic stability as AI capabilities advance.

Key FindingsChinese LLMs censor politically sensitive images, not just text. - While prior research has extensively mapped textual censorship, this report identifies a critical gap: the censorship of politically sensitive images by Chinese LLMs remains largely unexamined. - To address this, ASPI developed a testing methodology, using a dataset of 200 images likely to trigger censorship, to interrogate how LLMs censor sensitive imagery. The results revealed that visual censorship mechanisms are embedded across multiple layers within the LLM ecosystem. The Chinese Government is deploying AI throughout the criminal‑justice pipeline—from AI‑enabled policing and mass surveillance, to smart courts, to smart prisons. - This emerging AI pipeline reduces transparency and accountability, enhances the efficiency of police, prosecutors and prisons, and further enables state repression. - Beijing is pushing courts to adopt AI not just in drafting basic paperwork, but even in recommending judgements and sentences, which could deepen structural discrimination and weaken defence counsels’ ability to appeal. - The Chinese surveillance technology company iFlyTek stands out as a major provider of LLM‑based systems used in this pipeline. China is using minority‑language LLMs to deepen surveillance and control of ethnic minorities, both in China and abroad. - The Chinese Government is developing, and in some cases already testing, AI‑enabled public‑sentiment analysis in ethnic minority languages—especially Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian and Korean—for the explicitly stated purpose of enhancing the state’s capacity to monitor and control communications in those languages across text, video and audio. - DeepSeek and most other commercial LLM models have insufficient capacity to do this effectively, as there’s little market incentive to create sophisticated, expensive models for such small language groups. The Chinese state is stepping in to provide resources and backing for the development of minority‑language models for that explicit purpose. - China is also seeking to deploy this technology to target those groups in foreign countries along the Belt and Road. AI now performs much of the work of online censorship in China. - AI‑powered censorship systems scan vast volumes of digital content, flag potential violations, and delete banned material within seconds. - Yet the system still depends on human content reviewers to supply the cultural and political judgement that algorithms lack, according to ASPI’s review of more than 100 job postings for online‑content censors in China. Future technological advances are likely to minimise that remaining dependence on human reviewers. China’s censorship regulations have created a robust domestic market for AI‑enabled censorship tools. - China’s biggest tech companies, including Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance, have developed advanced AI censorship platforms that they’re selling to smaller companies and organisations around China. - In this way, China’s laws mandating internal censorship have created market incentives for China’s top tech companies to make censorship cheaper, faster, easier and more efficient—and embedding compliance into China’s digital economy. The use of AI amplifies China’s state‑supported erosion of the economic rights of some vulnerable groups abroad, to the financial benefit of Chinese private and state‑owned companies. - ASPI research shows that Chinese fishing fleets have begun adopting AI‑powered intelligent fishing platforms, developed by Chinese companies and research institutes, that further tip the technological scales towards Chinese vessels and away from local fishers and artisanal fishing communities. - ASPI has identified several individual Chinese fishing vessels using those platforms that operate in exclusive economic zones where Chinese fishing is widely implicated in illegal incidents, including Mauritania and Vanuatu, and ASPI found one vessel that has itself been specifically implicated in an incident.