Alfred Ng / Politico: How Vermont lawmakers passed a strict online data privacy law despite significant pushback from the tech industry; GOP Gov. Phil Scott is yet to sign the bill  —  State lawmakers from Maine to Oklahoma say the lessons they learned from battling industry over privacy bills can provide a new playbook to fight back.

Pew Research Center: About 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are unavailable now and 8% of pages from 2023 are unavailable; 23% of news pages have at least one broken link  —  38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later  —  Table of Contents Table of Contents

Politico: A look at UK-based Faculty, which has been awarded UK government contracts for AI safety work without competition, raising questions about its political links  —  LONDON — Early 2000s, University College London: Four bright young things meet and bond over their shared love of physics and neuroscience.

Renee DiResta / The Guardian: How a rightwing smear campaign against NPR and its CEO Katherine Maher, who is on Signal Foundation's board, led Elon Musk to malign Signal  —  Rightwing media personalities on X transmuted a screed against NPR's CEO into a fight over encryption via the Transitive Property of Bad People

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times: Culture secretary Lucy Frazer says the UK is working on rules around the use of creative work for training AI after media and arts executives voiced concerns  —  Culture secretary Lucy Frazer says focus will be on transparency after media and arts executives voiced concern

The Guardian: How China is using AI news anchors to spread its propaganda on social media; Microsoft: some AI anchors were created using ByteDance's video editing app CapCut  —  News avatars are proliferating on social media and experts say they will spread as the technology becomes more accessible