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The White House is preparing to issue an executive order as soon as Friday that enlists the power of the federal government to block states from regulating artificial intelligence, according to four people familiar with the matter and a leaked draft of the order obtained by POLITICO.

The draft document, confirmed as authentic by three people familiar with the matter, would launch several efforts to challenge state AI laws — including an “AI Litigation Task Force” run by the Department of Justice.

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug was responsible in an apologetic X post.

“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that went undetected in testing and has not caused a failure.

The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest, funnel customer records to a data broker they co-own called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which then sells access to peoples’ travel data to government agencies.

The IRS case in the letter is the clearest example yet of how agencies are searching the massive trove of travel data without a search warrant, court order, or similar legal mechanism. Instead, because the data is being sold commercially, agencies are able to simply buy access. In the letter addressed to nine major airlines, the lawmakers urge them to shut down the data selling program. Update: after this piece was published, ARC said it already planned to shut down the program. You can read more here.

Archives

• Main article: https://archive.md/Ot2Er
• Update: https://archive.md/iG6XB

Two federal appeals court judges appointed by President Donald Trump described his arguments as "meritless" and "unpersuasive" in a ruling affirming a lower courts decision to dismiss his $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for its coverage of the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Education Department plans to announce Tuesday that it will move multiple parts of the agency to other federal departments, an unprecedented and unilateral effort to dismantle an agency created by Congress to ensure all Americans have equal access to educational opportunity and better coordinate federal programs.

The move was described by three people informed of the plan ahead of the announcement. Two of these people said six offices within the department would be shifted elsewhere; the third person said it was at least two.

Archive: http://archive.today/Tw2Xx

A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”