"Austrian Supreme Court (OGH): Meta must provide full access to all personal data of user within 14 days, including the sources, recipients and purposes for which each information was used. All of Meta's claims of trade secrets or other limitations were rejected, leading to unprecedented access to the inner workings of Meta. Meta was also illegally collecting data from third party apps and websites and may only provide personalised advertisement if a user provided “specific, informed, unambiguous and freely given” consent. Meta must also ensure that data revealing sensitive information (such as political views, sexual orientation, or health) is not processed together with other data unless a valid legal basis according to Article 9(2) GDPR applies. Meta may not avoid the application of Article 9 GDPR by arguing that it does not intentionally collect such data or that it cannot technically distinguish or segregate it. The case, brought by Max Schrems in 2014, originally lasted 11 years and hit the Austrian Supreme Court three times and the CJEU two times. Mr Schrems was awarded €500 in damages."

noyb.eu

Austrian Supreme Court: Meta must give users full access to their data

The Austrian Supreme Court has issued a ruling in an 11-years long procedure against Meta

#EU #Austria #Meta #DataProtection #DataCollection #Privacy #GDPR #DigitalRights

"If you’re wondering why you’ll be paying more for a new PC or smartphone next year, Micron’s MU -3.01%decrease; red down pointing triangle latest financial results provide a big clue. The maker of memory chips posted record revenue and operating income for its fiscal first quarter late Wednesday; revenue jumped 57% year over year to $13.6 billion. That follows several quarters of strong growth for both metrics. Fueling the growth: demand for artificial intelligence systems that is sharply boosting sales of the specialized type of memory those products need. And the party seems far from over. Micron projected that sales will more than double to a record of $18.7 billion in the current quarter ending in February, while adjusted operating income will surge more than fivefold to $11.3 billion. Analysts were expecting a strong forecast given sharply rising memory prices being reported by industry groups and Micron’s rivals over the past couple of months. But even they undershot. Micron’s revenue forecast beat Wall Street’s consensus target by 31%—the highest such beat in at least five years, according to FactSet. That explains why a stock that has already more than doubled in the past year rose another 8% in after-hours trading Wednesday." https://www.wsj.com/tech/microns-blowout-results-are-bad-news-for-anyone-buying-a-new-phone-or-pc-next-year-1b303c09 #AI #Micron #MemoryChips #Hardware

"Name: Claudius Sennet Title: Vending machine operator Experience: Three weeks as a Wall Street Journal operator (business now bankrupt) Skills: Generosity, persistence, total disregard for profit margins You’d toss Claudius’s résumé in the trash immediately. Would you be more forgiving if you learned Claudius wasn’t a human but an AI agent? In mid-November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI model in its own offices and asked whether we’d like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version. Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to customers—aka my fellow newsroom journalists—via workplace chat app Slack. “Sure!” I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks! Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear. Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared. This was supposed to be the year of the AI agent, when autonomous software would go out into the world and do things for us. But two agents—Claudius and its overseeing “CEO” bot, Seymour Cash—became a case study in how inadequate and easily distracted this software can be. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive." https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34 #AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #AgenticAI #Claude #Anthropic

"Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500mn for his new start-up, in a move that would value the AI company at about €3bn before it has officially launched. LeCun, who recently announced he would be leaving Meta at the end of the year, has also lined up the founder of French health tech start-up Nabla, Alexandre LeBrun, as chief executive, according to people familiar with the matter. LeCun, a French-US scientist and Turing award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, is targeting a €3bn valuation but discussions were still in the early stages and could change, the people added. Details of the new venture, called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, will be announced in January and LeCun will serve as an executive chair. LeCun declined to comment. LeBrun did not respond to an immediate request for comment. “As part of a planned, board-supported transition, Nabla co-founder and CEO Alex LeBrun will transition from his role to become CEO of AMI Labs,” said Nabla co-founder Delphine Groll in a statement."

Client Challenge

#AI #StartUps #AIBubble #AIHype

"The “scientific” study of politics has lost what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the analysis of the deep ethnographic and cultural meanings constituting society and individual actions. Geertz was a master of this humanistic art, which required patient fluency and subtle attention to the linguistic and meaning-making features of politics. Such meanings are not accessible to an empirical approach that breaks down narratives, traditions, and ideologies into atomistic bits or multiple-choice options on a survey. Achieving thick descriptions requires the time-consuming art of interpretation, informed by years of learning about a culture and its history. But Geertz believed that it was the form of inquiry most capable of grasping the ideological and cultural realities of a society. Anyone who abandoned this art would be at risk of experiencing even their own culture as a stranger would, perplexed by the symbols and signs swirling about them. Ironically, this state of cultural bewilderment is now typical of many of the experts who spend their lives studying American government. Wonkish blindness to the power of MAGA is a direct result of neglecting the art of interpretation. What interpretive engagement reveals is that since its inception MAGA marked a dramatic ideological mutation on the right, a homegrown fusion of celebrity, neoliberal boss culture, Christian nationalism, and autocratic notions of the executive. Ideological innovation within the movement has only accelerated since 2016, leaving political scientists, pundits, and an elite liberal public struggling to grasp MAGA both past and present. This has made many American liberals years too late in realizing what was happening, as well as inept at organizing a response." https://harpers.org/archive/2026/01/in-the-land-of-the-data-blind-jason-blakely-political-science-trumpism/ #PoliticalScience #Trump #Trumpism #MAGA #Politics #Ideology #SocialSciences

"Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now quoting scripture—and Christian nationalists are now pitching network state cities. So you know things are getting bizarre. But here's the thing: It makes perfect sense because it's a strategy, and it's spelled out in black and white. In his book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, Balaji Srinivasan identifies evangelical Christians as followers of the so-called "Red God"—right-wing Republicans who will ally with his gray tribe of tech billionaires. Together, they'll crush Democrats, democracy, and the nation state. It's a clinical, almost contemptuous framing of Christianity as a political weapon. But it works because both Christian nationalism and tech fascism share the same playbook: seize the pillars of democratic society and replace them with parallel alternatives, all run by authoritarian elites. The Christian nationalists call it the Seven Mountains mandate—taking over government, media, education, business, arts, family, and religion. The tech authoritarians call it replacing the cathedral with parallel institutions. Different language, same goal: elite minority rule and the end of democracy as we know it. Today on the Nerd Reich podcast, we expose how this alliance actually works. I'm joined by Matthew Boedy, author of the definitive book on the Seven Mountains mandate, who explains how figures like Charlie Kirk and other religious extremists have been systematically organizing this takeover. And Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler takes us inside Highland Rim—a proposed settlement on the Tennessee-Kentucky border that's basically a network state for Christian nationalists. It comes complete with crypto and investments from the same venture capital networks funding Silicon Valley's dreams of exiting democracy."

The Nerd Reich

JD Vance's Theo Bro Network: Silicon Valley Meets ‘God’

JD Vance links Silicon Valley extremists & Christian nationalists. From Curtis Yarvin to Seven Mountains—inside the authoritarian alliance.

#SiliconValley #Nationalism #ChristianNationalism #NetworkStates #Religion #Crypto

"The global economy is undergoing a fundamental shift. After decades of free-market orthodoxy and neoliberal globalization, we’re witnessing the return of industrial policy — but this time with a twist. Major economic powers — especially the United States, China, and the European Union — are now explicitly intertwining their economic strategies with national security concerns. This isn’t just a policy adjustment. It represents a wholesale transformation of how major powers approach economic development and competition. These three economic giants are implementing distinct approaches to industrial policy while pursuing similar objectives: technological leadership, supply chain security, and national economic sovereignty. What we’re seeing is the emergence of a new economic nationalism, one that is reshaping the global economic order. (...) The crucial point is this: neomercantilism — the idea that countries should actively use industrial and trade policies to generate trade surpluses and enhance competitiveness — has always viewed economic power and national security as inseparable. So, what we’re witnessing today isn’t the invention of something entirely new, but rather the resurrection of ideas that were temporarily suppressed during the neoliberal era of the 1980s onwards. During that period, international organizations effectively outlawed industrial policy through structural adjustment programmes and free trade agreements. The Washington Consensus reigned supreme. But the 2008 financial crisis, rising inequality, climate change pressures, supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by COVID-19, and intensifying geopolitical tensions have collectively demolished faith in free-market orthodoxy. Industrial policy is back. And it’s back with a vengeance." https://www.theglobalcurrents.com/p/industrial-policy-returns-as-a-weapon #IndustrialPolicy #EconomicNationalism #Nationalism #Protectionism #PoliticalEconomy

"The growth of the U.S. electric grid depends on factory workers like Cisco, whose craft can take three to five years to master and can’t be fully automated. The manual precision and specialty materials required are among many reasons that the U.S. is struggling to meet the surging electricity needs of the artificial-intelligence frenzy. “Believe me when I say that they are artists,” Anthony Allard, head of North America for Hitachi Energy, said of winders. “This is an extremely manual job because they have to be extremely precise in the way they do it. If not, there will be some issue later down the road with the equipment.” Transformers are used to step up voltage from power plants to send electricity onto the grid, or to step down voltage so it can be used by cities, neighborhoods and large customers such as factories, data centers and oil-and-gas facilities. New ones are needed every time a new source of power generation or a big customer connects to the grid. They can be as large as buildings or as small as garbage cans. The ones made in South Boston can weigh up to 285,000 pounds, roughly the equivalent of 24 elephants or 65 pickup trucks. Orders for larger transformers have exceeded supply by about 14,000 units this year, according to Wood Mackenzie. Similar labor and supply-chain hurdles are slowing the construction of natural-gas-fired power plants and gas turbines, which have a yearslong backlog. The South Boston factory, which already has three shifts, is expanding. Construction has also begun on a new $457 million facility in an adjacent field, where Hitachi Energy will make even bigger transformers beginning in 2028. A potential bottleneck: hiring around 800 more workers, including winders, in a county with a population of about 34,000." https://www.wsj.com/business/the-factory-workers-who-build-the-power-grid-by-hand-4a846658 #AI #PowerGrid #Energy #DataCenters #USA

RT @RnaudBertrand This is an incredible story by Reuters: they reveal that China now has a working EUV lithography machine prototype, which makes China the only country in the world to have succeeded at replicating the ASML technology, years earlier than anticipated. The machine apparently "fills nearly an entire factory floor". It's operational and successfully generates extreme ultraviolet light (what "EUV" stands for), but has not yet produced working chips. The objective for the latter is 2028, which is a crazy fast timeline: ASML took 18 years to go from prototype to machines that could produce commercially-available chips, China aims to do it in 3. The security measures around the project look insane. The employees work under fake identities so they don't know each other's real names. They work inside secure facilities where "no one outside the compound could know what they were building - or that they were there at all". They're divided in "teams who are kept isolated from each other to protect the confidentiality of the project," where "they don't know what the other teams work on." For foreign employees, China exceptionally gave them Chinese passports and allowed them to maintain dual citizenship, which is normally forbidden under Chinese law. This seems to be because some of the employees are former ASML workers such as Lin Nan, ASML's former head of light source technology (https://scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3308204/former-asml-head-scientist-lin-nan-drives-chinas-latest-euv-breakthrough), who would be less vulnerable to Western sanctions under Chinese citizenship. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/

"The scale of investment into legal AI startups has been massive. Robin AI is one of many well-funded players in a crowded space. With large capital inflows come large growth expectations. Robin’s inability to meet those expectations may indicate that investor appetite has outpaced market readiness. Competition in contract-review AI is fierce. Many players are pursuing similar approaches, which erodes differentiation and pressures pricing. Robin had to compete not only with established legal tech vendors but also with DIY in-house solutions and large platform entrants with deeper resources. And then there’s the broader narrative: commentators are already flagging generative AI investment as frothy. Legal tech won’t be immune to that dynamic, whether the spillover is beneficial or problematic. Robin’s distressed sale announcement is uncomfortably public. This isn’t “quietly pivoting to a new strategy.” This is “we might be for sale because we’re out of runway.” That kind of visible stumble casts a shadow on the entire peer group. Bubble warning, not bubble burst I lean toward seeing this as more than Robin’s personal misstep, but I’m not ready to declare a full legal-tech-AI bubble burst. What I see is a bubble warning. The fundamentals of legal AI (contract review, document analytics, workflow automation) still hold promise. Firms genuinely want better efficiency, and AI is one tool in that effort. But the mismatch between expectation and execution is large, and it’s been this way for a while."

3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Is the Collapse of Robin.AI a One-Off or a Sign of a Legal Tech AI Bubble?

I've been thinking about a story that I believe deserves more attention than it's getting. Robin AI, once positioned as a rising star in ...

#AI #GenerativeAI #LegalAI #RobinAI #UK #Law