Texas is sitting on two different answers about how much it can regulate a social platform. A Collin County judge entered an agreed temporary injunction requiring Discord, within 90 days, to give Texas users the age-assurance and default-safety settings from its UK product. Discord admitted no wrongdoing, preserved its jurisdiction and venue objections, and the lawsuit continues. The order acknowledges that IP geolocation is imperfect; traffic routed elsewhere, including through a VPN, may not look Texan.
The Fifth Circuit then weighed in on a broader preemption argument. HB 18, Texas's SCOPE Act, directs covered digital services to shield known minors from specified categories of third-party content; Section 230 generally bars treating an online service as the publisher of content supplied by someone else. A divided panel held that HB 18's monitoring-and-filtering requirement is preempted because enforcing it would make platforms answer for their publication decisions. The court did not invalidate the law as a whole. Texas thus obtained specific account controls from Discord by agreement while a broader, contested content-policing mandate remains preliminarily blocked under federal law.
La Mesa, California, a city in San Diego County, has activated a 24-hour AI assistant on its police non-emergency line to answer routine questions and route callers to police or city staff. Supplement 08 explores the vendor, how the system works, the department's staffing and workload, and a local objection to automated first contact.
A Notre Dame-led study of facial recognition found that larger galleries made participants likelier—and more confident—to identify the wrong person from a photo lineup. The paper awaits peer review. (arXiv)
ChatGPT helped four Minnesota fraudsters deflect insurers' scrutiny with fabricated records in a $2.2 million Medicaid scheme. (Justice Department)
Chicago's forensic lab earned accreditation four years after a damaging inspector general report. (WTTW)
Colorado's new AI hire will help build shared AI services across state government. (Government Technology)
Woodstock, north of Atlanta, is considering a $75,000 link between its police records and Cherokee County's Peregrine intelligence platform. (Woodstock City Council)
Young adults are increasingly using AI chatbots to decide what to say in real-life conversations. (The Wall Street Journal)
Some shareable links created by AI chatbot users have appeared in internet search results. (Axios)
An Atlanta man allegedly duped agents into entering a PIN that wiped his phone instead of unlocking it. (The Guardian / Indictment)
Microsoft is tightening enterprise Windows licensing to make it harder to impersonate or copy a company’s licensing system. (Neowin)
The Vatican's prayer app allowed unauthenticated access to profile data from roughly 700,000 accounts for at least six months, new reporting says. (Tom's Hardware)
About Plain Thinking
Grant Morgan is an attorney, former prosecutor and former Tribune Publishing reporter who covered Gary, Indiana, and Chicago’s northern suburbs. Plain Thinking covers AI and consequential technology affecting lawyers, police and courts.
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