Adi Robertson
Happy 25th birthday, Deus Ex!
It was either yesterday or today, and I’m feeling almost nostalgic enough to boot up the original game and sneak around the Statue of Liberty while enjoying one of PC gaming’s all-time great soundtracks.
Adi Robertson
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
Adi Robertson has been covering the intersection of technology, culture, and policy at The Verge since 2011. Her work includes writing about DIY biohacking, survival horror games, virtual and augmented reality, online free expression, and the history of computing. She also makes very short video games. You have probably seen her in a VR headset.
More From Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
It’s 1PM. Do you know where your children are scrolling?
Maybe, argues longtime internet law scholar Danielle Citron, sometimes you shouldn’t. We’ve got a slow holiday Thursday here at The Verge, so it’s time for me to finally read this paper from early June about alternatives to the “parental control model” of children’s privacy online — a topic that’s not going away any time soon.
The parental control model is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is an empowering façade that leaves parents unable to protect children and undermines the intimate privacy that youth need to thrive. It is bad for parents, children, and parent-child relationships. And it is bad for the pursuit of equality.
Adi Robertson
The TikTok ban is banned, again.
The incredibly weird saga of the ordered, then reversed, then passed, then upheld, then ignored, then ignored even harder attempt to ban one of America’s most popular social networks continues — as it will continue until US-China tensions cool down, everyone forgets it ever happened, or the heat death of the universe.
Trump gives TikTok another ban extension
Lauren Feiner
News
Adi Robertson
‘00s nostalgia is getting dark.
Erika Hall has reminded me and every other millennial on the internet of David Rees’ clipart webcomic Get Your War On, a cultural document of a period that is suddenly seeming awfully relevant. This ran for almost eight years.
Gaming
Adi Robertson
Data brokers are dangerous, example #4231234198123.
“Court documents unsealed Monday alleged Vance Boelter, 57, used online people search services to find the home addresses of his intended targets. Police found the names of 11 registered data brokers — or companies that gather and sell people’s information, including addresses, emails and phone numbers — in Boelter’s abandoned car after the shootings.”
Ron Wyden is on it; if only the rest of Congress was.
Adi Robertson
“I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I think he was just trying to sound cool.”
I couldn’t possibly single out the best of many perfect lines in Kerry Howley’s detailed and morbidly funny exposé of chaos at the Pentagon, where Signalgate was just the tip of the iceberg. But this part is pretty good:
Carroll encountered many people as he walked through the hallway, onto the escalator, off the escalator, through the mess hall, to the basement, where he was interrogated for an hour. On the way out, in the Pentagon lobby, he saw General Michael Guetlein.
“Mike,” Carroll said, “I got fired.”
“That’s really funny,” said the general.
Pete Hegseth Is Playing Secretary
[nymag.com]
Adi Robertson
“Even easy things are hard.”
Astute AI copyright observer Michael Weinberg raises some good questions about the Common Pile, an AI training dataset billed as being composed of only “openly licensed text”:
On one hand, this is an interesting effort to build a new type of training dataset that illustrates how even the “easy” parts of this process are actually hard. On the other hand, I worry that some people read “openly licensed training dataset” as the equivalent of (or very close to) “LLM free of copyright issues.”
Does an AI Dataset of Openly Licensed Works Matter?
[michaelweinberg.org]
Adi Robertson
Political cheapfakes aren’t dead yet.
The New York Times surveyed the ecosystem of disinformation around the LA anti-ICE protests, and the results are striking for looking... pretty much exactly like the pre-AI world: old recirculated photos, fabricated quotes, and a shot from an ‘80s action movie. The Washington Post did its own social media look-around and found mostly people supporting dueling narratives with real footage. There’s still time for generated fakes to cause problems, but at the moment, reality seems to be eye-catching enough.