We’ve noted how Microsoft is a little sensitive about AI slop at the moment. Back in January, CEO Satya Nadella wrote a well-circulated blog post lamenting critics of “AI slop” and demanding the public simply move past such conversations. It was relatively innocuous, but wasn’t received well for some valid reasons.

One problem is that Nadella put the onus on the consumer for ignoring a lot of Microsoft’s terrible choices as it relates to AI, whether it’s the ample lazy AI slop that fills the company’s zombified MSN portal, the rushed integration of AI into software in a way that poses major new security risks, their undercooked AI copyright bots, the company’s efforts to shovel Copilot down the throats of people (whether they want it or not), or some of the really dodgy privacy practices they’ve been engaged with via Windows 11 AI “snapshot” features.

Last week found Microsoft under fire yet again, this time for defensively locking down a Discord server after people wouldn’t stop calling the company “Microslop.” More specifically, Microsoft Streisanded themselves after they tried to ban the term on its Copilot discord server. When people found creative ways to get around the ban, Microsoft decided to lock down the entire server.

When called out for that by frustrated users, Microsoft tried to blame the entire incident on “spammers” who were trying to post “harmful content”:

“The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us, adding that the “blocking of terms like ‘Microslop’ and some others associated with this spam campaign were temporary while the company worked to implement better safeguards.”

Microsoft executives don’t really seem to want to engage in any serious introspection into their rushed adoption of AI in ways customers don’t always appreciate. Most recently, their integration of Copilot into Notepad opened up a major cybersecurity vulnerability.

This whole incident will, of course, only result in users doubling down on their criticisms:

These companies have invested untold oceans of cash into a technology that may have utility for many, but hasn’t, to date, been all that profitable. Many AI companies have layered under-cooked automation on top of very broken systems (see: health insurance or journalism or war) in problematic ways, raising questions about company valuations and systemically poor judgement. All while AI’s immense energy consumption has caused companies to disregard already tepid climate goals.

Instead of engaging in real conversation about these issues you tend to get a lot of generalized defensiveness (“why can’t you simply praise us for our innovation?”), all of which has been made worse by the tech sector’s enthusiastic coddling of authoritarianism.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Nimrod with a comment about the lack of checks and balances for RFK Jr.:

Observation

If a member of organized crime were to manage to get themself elected President, they would probably try to delegitimize the legal system, law enforcement and government authority in general. After enriching themself and their cronies, of course. Maybe they’d even start a war or two as a diversion. They’d also put as many “friendly” judges in place as they could, particularly in the higher courts.
It’s a good thing we’d never elect such a person. /s

In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about MAHA’s call to eliminate the whole childhood vaccination schedule:

This is another instance where you’d be fine with the stupidity if it didn’t affect innocent people. Like with covid, you were fine that dumbasses got themselves infected, but it led to grandmothers and children and random people they encountered getting infected and sometimes dying, so it wasn’t okay. It was fine if some random 50 year old Trump supporter wanted to get the ivermectin shits or waste money on homeopathic “cures.”

But this is expressly the same evil abuse as Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witness parents who refuse medical care for their children, preferring they die than benefit from modern science and treatments.

It also undermines the entire “parents rights” narrative that conservatives like to spin whenever an issue comes up. You don’t get to kill your children just because you’re a brainwashed dumbass. Except, in America, you actually do. And that’s fucking horrible.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from TKnarr that is similarly about the consequences of the administration’s stupidity:

The sad thing is that you should take what Trump says seriously in the same way you should take what the Joker says seriously. Because they’re literally an insane clown with only a tenuous hold on reality, but they’re an insane clown with a tanker-truck full of SmileX who absolutely will blanket the city with it. The people who claim you shouldn’t take him seriously or literally? Are the ones who paid him to do that and are now worried someone might connect the dots that lead back to them.

Unfortunately our version of Bruce Wayne really is the brainless billionaire he-bimbo Batman’s secret identity pretends to be.

Next, it’s Epic_Null with a comment about the impact of social media on kids and teens:

We also should not forget though that we have children who are fairly restricted in where they go. A child who is not allowed to go to the park on their own is not exactly likely to turn into a teen who hangs out at the mall.

If we want independent people who use third spaces… we have to make laws and culture that supports people being independent and using third spaces.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Stephen Thaler’s latest loss in his quest to get copyright protection for the generations of his AI system:

Does Thaler believe he got thrown under DABUS?

In second place, it’s an anonymous reply to our guest post entitled Human Problems: It’s Not Always The Technology’s Fault:

There is one golden rule – It’s always someone else’s fault, and they owe me a lot of money.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, it’s another somewhat slow week when it comes to jokes, so we’ll keep it to just one pick — another comment from MrWilson, this time about Roblox’s rollout of AI-powered real-time rephrasing of profanity in chat:

Holy forking shirtballs!

That’s all for this week, folks!

Before we get started: last week, I asked for your feedback on the weekend posts and some possible changes we’re considering going forward. The dominant theme of the responses was that lots of people like the Comment posts just the way they are, but can take or leave these History posts. We’re still mulling over the options, and next week we’ll be taking a break from the History posts for a few weeks while we spotlight our game jam winners. After that, the likely plan is to bring back the History posts with a time shift to ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago, and also to replace these paragraph summaries with a simple bullet list of headlines, in the hopes that it makes them a little more interesting and easier to skim (plus a little quicker to put together on my end, since it seems like not many people are reading them).

But, for this week, we’re not making any changes just yet — so let’s get started!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, we did a deep dive into the problems with Senator Tillis’s Digital Copyright Act, while some other Senators were pushing the FCC to finally update the pathetic definition of broadband. A DMCA complaint claiming copyright on the word “outstanding” sought to get dictionary entries de-listed from Google, while one court was allowing a lawsuit over abusive DMCA notices to move forward. Tennessee lawmakers introduced another attack on Section 230, while the Utah legislature wrapped up its session by passing two unconstitutional internet bills, but we wrote about how it’s not just Republican state legislatures pulling such nonsense. Also, a judge tossed out the Trump campaign’s laughably stupid SLAPP suit against the New York Times.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, while Donald Trump sent a cease and desist threat to a band over using his name in a song, we wrote about how laws should be designed as if the people we distrust the most are in power. We dedicated an episode of the podcast to the ins and outs of the Apple/FBI fight over iPhone encryption, while noting that the DOJ kept pointing to a test in its cases that didn’t actually exist, and how Apple might be forced to reveal and share the iPhone unlocking code widely, just before Apple’s VP of Engineering spoke up about what the FBI was doing. Of course, none of this stopped Senators Burr and Feinstein from threatening yet another bill to backdoor encryption, or President Obama from getting everything wrong about the issue.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, we did a deep dive into a pair of recent events all about intermediary liability and Section 230. Music publishers settled with Limewire to avoid proving they actually owned the copyrights in question, while the RIAA (which was also very unhappy with Rep. Lofgren for calling out ICE’s web censorship) had its absurd claim of “trillions” in damages against Limewire rejected by a judge, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear an important appeal regarding copyright and the first amendment. Meanwhile, we saw several examples of silly trademark bullying, with Lady Gaga threatening a controversial line of ice cream, Zynga seeking to trademark the suffix “Ville”, and Bath & Bodyworks going to court to explain to Summit Entertainment that the word “twilight” existed before the movie.

The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially a World Cup for baseball, 20 nations are playing against one another in a banger of a tune-up for the Major League Baseball season. It’s a flamboyant delight, with cultural celebrations such as the Italian team doing a shot of espresso after they hit home runs in the dugout.

The American team is managed by former major leaguer Mark DeRosa. While I won’t bore you with too many gory details, DeRosa royally fucked up during the tail end of pool play. Through a complicated series of winning scenarios and tie-breaker rules, the American team headed into its game with Italy needing to win to secure its place in the playoffs. DeRosa, it appears, was under an entirely different impression. These were his comments before the game with Italy.

After the game, he mentioned that some of his players were “dragging” on the field and he essentially put in a lineup that didn’t include many of the normal starting players. If you don’t know professional baseball culture, there’s a reason for the dragging. With nothing at stake, it’s pretty clear DeRosa thought the playoffs were already secured… and told his players to go out and celebrate that night. They likely did, late into the night and with the help of plenty of alcohol. Then they lost to Italy, which meant they needed Italy to win or to get into tie-breaking scenarios against their next game with Mexico. They got lucky in that Italy did beat Mexico in the next game, but the fuck up took things out of the hands of Team USA, leaving it up to their rivals.

You may not care about any of the above, but baseball fans do. DeRosa, in his day job, is also an employee of MLB, serving as a commentator on the MLB channel. MLB itself took down the original video of DeRosa’s comments and put up a version in which you don’t hear DeRosa’s mistake nor his admitting later that he screwed up.

Also, this reporting from The Athletic doesn’t actually make things look better for DeRosa and Team USA:

“The league appears to have taken down video that included DeRosa’s mistaken comments from MLB.com, with attempts by The Athletic to access it yielding error messages early Wednesday morning. A version of the interview that remained on MLB Network’s Facebook page appeared to be condensed and did not include the now-scrutinized remarks.”

I really don’t know what MLB was thinking here. American baseball fans would somehow forget what they heard DeRosa say? A screw up that could have bounced the American team from the WBC entirely would somehow fly under the radar?

Regardless, the Streisand Effect took over and now then the reporting on all of this went into wide circulation. In discussing MLB’s attempt at the hidden ball trick, reporting on DeRosa’s fuck up went through another, and larger, round of reporting. By trying to hide what DeRosa did, MLB made it public all the more.

This is classic Streisand Effect stuff at work and I can barely believe that Major League Baseball thought this isn’t exactly what would occur.

We’re a couple weeks late to this one, but it deserves more attention than it received. As the Washington Post first reported, a federal judge has found that the IRS violated federal law 42,695 times when it handed over confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE last summer. But the raw number, staggering as it is, undersells how absurd this whole thing was. The details of how it happened are so much worse.

Federal law has a pretty basic safeguard built in: before the IRS can hand over a taxpayer’s home address to another agency, the requesting agency has to provide the name and address of the person they’re looking for — specifically to prevent the government from using tax records as a fishing expedition against people it hasn’t already identified.

Can you guess how the Trump IRS’s actual verification process worked when ICE wanted addresses? I’m betting you absolutely can.

The judge, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, laid it out in devastating detail. When ICE sent over its massive datafile of 1.28 million records, the IRS ran two different matching processes. For requests where ICE included a Social Security number, the IRS used something called “TIN Matching” — which checked that the name and SSN matched IRS records. What TIN Matching did not do was verify that ICE had actually provided a real address. The only address-related check was an automated filter that looked for whether the address field contained something resembling a zip code — meaning, any five-digit or nine-digit number.

That was it. That was the safeguard.

As Judge Kollar-Kotelly pointedly observed:

A zip code is not an address, and a zip code proxy, as the IRS would define it, might as well be a set of random numbers. For instance, ICE could have submitted a request with an “address” like, “Don’t Care 12345,” or, “00000,” and still received a taxpayer’s address through the IRS’s TIN Matching process.

And this was the process used for the overwhelming majority of the disclosures. Of the 47,289 taxpayer addresses the IRS shared with ICE, 90.3% — those 42,695 — went through TIN Matching, the process that never actually checked the address. Only 9.7% went through a process that bothered to verify ICE had provided a matching address.

So when the IRS’s own Chief Risk and Control Officer, Dottie Romo, filed a supplemental declaration with the court admitting the agency “may have supplied last known addresses to ICE” in cases where the data was “either incomplete or insufficiently populated,” that was putting it generously. The judge’s opinion catalogs what ICE actually submitted as “addresses” in many of these cases:

In other words, the IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient. The IRS, for example, disclosed to ICE the last known addresses for taxpayers in situations where ICE supplied an “address of the taxpayer” in its request that contained “language indicating that the address was not complete, such as ‘Failed to Provide,’ ‘Unknown Address,’ or ‘NA NA.’” ….The IRS also disclosed to ICE the last known addresses of taxpayers where the ICE-supplied address was missing essential information, such as “a street name or street number.” … Still more, the IRS disclosed to ICE the last known addresses of taxpayers where the ICE-supplied address “referred to, described, or named specific locations”—examples of which are “jails, detention facilities, or prisons”—and “the corresponding city, state, and zip code” for those locations, but did not include “the street names and street numbers where the buildings or facilities are located.”

“Failed to Provide.” “Unknown Address.” “NA NA.” The system was designed not to catch these deficient requests. The TIN Matching process, as the judge noted, “was not designed to identify the additional types of data insufficiencies.” Of course it wasn’t. Because the process never looked at the address field in any meaningful way to begin with.

Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights (which brought the suit), told the Washington Post there was no precedent for anything like this:

“I don’t know of any opinion about the IRS like this. The kinds of mass requests that are coming in are unprecedented.”

And then there’s the timeline of what happened after the government figured out what it had done, which is deeply disturbing as well. The Department of Treasury identified the problems on January 23, 2026. That very same day, it notified DHS. Also on that very same day, the sole ICE official who had access to the illegally disclosed taxpayer data gave two additional ICE officials access to it. The stated reason was “for the purpose of allowing [them] to create an adequate system of safeguards for the data.”

So on the day they found out the data was obtained in violation of federal law, the first move was to give more people access to the illegally obtained data.

And when did the government get around to telling the court and the plaintiffs about these 42,695 violations of federal law? Nearly three weeks later, on February 11. As the judge noted, Defendants “informed DHS right away, but they waited nearly three weeks to inform Plaintiffs and the Court.” The opinion goes on to observe that this, along with the broader pattern, “undercut many representations made by Defendants during this litigation” and reflects, “at the very least, a disconnect between the agency clients and counsel, which leads to some concern regarding the completeness of the administrative record.”

“Some concern.” That’s judicial restraint doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The case is now before the DC Circuit, where the government is appealing Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s earlier order blocking the data-sharing arrangement. In the meantime, DHS has been defending the program as essential to immigration enforcement, with a spokesperson offering the standard line to the Washington Post about how “information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals.” Which might be more compelling if the agency’s actual implementation hadn’t involved waving through requests with “NA NA” where the address was supposed to go.

A judge has now formally documented that the IRS broke federal taxpayer confidentiality law tens of thousands of times in a single data dump, using a verification process so hollow that literal gibberish would have passed muster — and when the government discovered this, its first move was to expand access to the illegally obtained data and wait three weeks before telling the court. And yet the government is still fighting to keep the underlying program alive.

The power of the latest generation of AI systems is such that previously impractical applications are not just possible, but scalable. For example, moving beyond basic early AI text translation tools, it is now possible to use live translation to communicate in another language in real time. For many people that will be a real boon, especially when they are traveling. But here’s something that is likely to prove more controversial: real-time rephrasing of profanity within chat. It’s a new AI-powered feature from Roblox that is designed to “keep gameplay fluid while maintaining civility within chat”:

Roblox is leveraging AI to automatically rephrase profanity. Rather than displaying only hashmarks, filtered text will be translated into more respectful language that remains closer to the user’s original intent. For example, a message that violates Roblox’s profanity policies, such as “Hurry TF up!” would previously have appeared as “####” within experience chat. That will now be rephrased to “Hurry up!” This new layer is designed to maintain civility by rephrasing the language and replacing “stop signs” with real-time guidance.

Specifically:

When a message violates Roblox’s profanity policy, everyone in the chat is notified that the text has been rephrased to keep things civil. While rephrasing reduces some of the disruption in the chat, Roblox’s multilayered safety system remains in effect for more serious behavior. Rephrasing is available exclusively for in-experience chat between age-checked users in similar age groups and is supported in all languages currently available through Roblox’s automatic translation tools.

Alongside this new AI-based capability, Roblox is also tweaking its text filtering system:

Early results from Roblox’s testing show significant improvements in detecting leet-speak, or letters replaced with numbers or symbols, and more sophisticated attempts to bypass filters.

Parents may applaud real-time rephrasing as a way for the service to nudge younger users away from bad language in their interaction with others, without stopping them playing altogether. But it creates a dangerous proof of concept that others may build on, particularly in jurisdictions that want stricter controls on what people say online.

It’s easy to imagine situations where Chinese AI systems, for example, rephrase people’s language on social media in real time to promote “social harmony”. Not only the style but even the content’s details could be subtly changed away from controversy towards conformity. It would be possible for rephrasing to be visible only to others, so the person making a comment might not even be aware that their words were being subverted in this way. Something similar is already happening with Chinese AI chatbots that censor their own answers, without acknowledging that fact. As Chinese AI companies become increasingly important players in the online world, this kind of covert rephrasing by them — and others — is another issue people will need to watch out for in our brave new AI world.

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