At the Easton #TeslaTakedown, 600 protesters or more covered all four corners for the first time. The pleasant weather brought more families and supportive drivers. High energy. My sign read, 'The SIGNAL is coming from INSIDE the house!' and is available for download.

In Thursday Threads this week: key legal cases and corporate actions on using copyrighted materials in AI training, emphasizing growing tensions between creators and tech companies as AI increasingly utilizes large licensed and some pirated datasets.

At the Columbus, Ohio, #TeslaTakedown, attendance rose to 450-500, featuring music and supportive honks. My improved sign read, 'Our GOVERNMENT was fine. Now it is MUSKed UP! FIRE ELON! Read the post for instructions on how to print your own.

The case of OCLC against Anna's Archive, accused of “data scraping” from OCLC's WorldCat, takes a turn as the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio decides to certify several “novel and unsettled” legal questions to the Supreme Court of Ohio.

This thread of articles reviews social media's role in spreading misinformation and impacting teen mental health, highlighting personal strategies for prevention and a review of how “Community Notes” do and don't help.

The second #TeslaTakedown at the Easton Tesla store saw around 400 attendees, despite gloomy weather reducing family participation. The presence of more police, especially a “Dialogue Team,” was noted, along with increased driver support through honks and thumbs up. The author's protest sign, though still verbose, was better received than last week. A personal dilemma arose over using an old point-and-shoot camera to avoid digital tracking at protests, an effort to maintain privacy while still capturing the event.

This Thursday Threads explores global security issues, encryption reforms, and tech giants’ countermeasures against quantum threats and AI, reinforcing the crucial role of end-to-end encryption in safeguarding privacy and communication.

For #TeslaTakedown, I crafted a sign on economic disparity. Using a “cosmic distance ladder,” I aimed to show that while 1,000 passersby might collectively hold $100M, Musk's net worth of $350B highlights our shared realities versus billionaire influence.

Recent research in generative AI highlights impressive capabilities and concerns. Models show harmful behaviors like 'emergent misalignment' and can 'scheme' autonomously. In Minecraft, AI agents mimic human-like social dynamics. However, models struggle with historical accuracy, revealing biases and knowledge gaps. Despite rapid advances, the unclear mechanisms of AI underscore the need for careful study to manage future risks.

This week's Thursday Threads is on generative AI in libraries, with projects by OCLC, JSTOR, EBSCO, Clarivate, and ProQuest. OCLC's AI model is removing duplicate WorldCat records. JSTOR and EBSCO explored AI tools for article summaries and research questions. Clarivate's survey highlighted AI as a library priority but noted concerns about skills and budgets. Ed Summers critiqued AI's biases, legal issues, and environmental impact, urging responsible use in libraries.

I've been in or near higher education for my entire career, so it is probably no surprise that educational technology ranks high on DLTJ topics. Although a lot of my experience is with library technology, that isn't the only part of the ed-tech landscape that I'm interested in. Take, for …

Batteries are among the technologies that have had a silent, dramatic change over my lifetime. Last week, as I was setting up a blood pressure cuff for my mother, I opened the compartment in the back and realized I needed 4 AA-sized batteries. It was once common for devices to …

With millions of digital transactions taking place every day, have you ever wondered about the complex world behind your simple card swipe? In this week's Thursday Threads, we delve into the multi-layer maze that is the credit card industry. Grappling with $130 billion in fees, merchants are the invisible heroes …

In this week's Thursday Threads, I'll point to articles on the contentious subject of facial recognition technology. This tech, currently used by law enforcement and various businesses around the world, raises critical ethical and privacy questions. Beyond the instances where facial recognition use has resulted in wrongful apprehensions by law …

This week's Thursday Threads looks at digital storage from the past and the future. There are articles about the mechanics of massive data storage systems in tech giants like Google and Amazon, the still existing use of floppy disks in certain industries, and the herculean efforts of digital archivists to …

This week, I'm going to tug on time. This follows the last item in last week's issue of Thursday Threads: The Clock that Made Power Grids Possible. Two years ago, I also published an issue about time, pointing to articles about eliminating the leap second, time standards on the moon …

I'm about halfway through Saul Griffith's 2021 Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, and I find the author makes a compelling point about bringing nearly everything—energy creation, transmission, and use—to a common factor of "electricity" and then optimizing that system. There are many interesting problems …

One of the very first issues of Thursday Threads was on data centers (2011). That issue had articles on a major Amazon Web Services outage, remote data centers powered by renewable energy, and videos about Google's and Meta's data centers. Unfortunately, I've found that the videos are lost to time …

Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022, I started my own list of things I learned in 2023. Reaching the end of another year, it is time for Things I Learned In 2024:

1. Some jurisdictions use "day fines"—or fining an offender based on that person's daily …

Four years ago I posted my reflections here on the 2020 presidential election. This year, I worked the election again as a precinct election official ("PEO"—a poll worker) for Franklin County, Ohio. Much like four years ago, it was a record-setting voter turn-out year, and unlike four years ago …