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)
