YouTube will begin using AI along with facial recognition to determine your age. To “protect” minors we will yield our identities. We’ll cover revelations of the CCP and the Federal Reserves’ strange relationship, how Code Pink thinks U of M should protect CCP scholars, and Palantir become the operating system of our government. And reminder – there’s be NO election in District 35. AI and lots of news.
Good Bye Internet
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/extending-our-built-in-protections-to-more-teens-on-youtube/
Privacy experts are demanding transparency after YouTube announced it would test using AI to estimate user ages in the US ahead of a wider rollout of the age check system.
Throughout the first half of August, YouTube will begin interpreting “a variety of signals” to determine if certain users are under 18. No new user data will be collected, but those signals could include things like “the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account,” YouTube said.
Anyone determined to be too young will automatically be hit with protections, with YouTube disabling their personalized advertising, “turning on digital wellbeing tools,” and “limiting repetitive views of some kinds of content” determined to be harmful or too mature.
YouTube claims it has been estimating age in other markets “for some time, where it is working well.” But it’s clearly not a perfect system, as the company has set up an appeals process for any adults accidentally flagged as teens by AI.
That appeals process seems problematic, privacy experts told Ars, as it requires users to submit a government ID, credit card, or selfie to verify their actual age. YouTube does not specify in its blog what will happen with this data. Asked for comment, YouTube would only confirm to Ars that the company “does not retain data from” a user’s “ID or Payment Card for the purposes of advertising.”
“I think we can assume that means it will be retained for other purposes,” David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars. But the lack of transparency leaves users guessing about those other purposes, as risks of leaks or breaches may risk exposing vulnerable users who rely on anonymity to use YouTube.
Why are we OK with HBO only requiring a credit card and then the household is responsible for who watches the content, yet we have to monitor every move on YouTube? Parents have to take responsibility. Period.
Good Bye Rights
We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — robots.txt files.
The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.
If true, the evasion flouts Internet norms in place for more than three decades. In 1994, engineer Martijn Koster proposed the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which provided a machine-readable format for informing crawlers they weren’t permitted on a given site. Sites that their content indexed installed the simple robots.txt file at the top of their homepage. The standard, which has been widely observed and endorsed ever since, formally became a standard under the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2022.
Cloudflare isn’t the first to say that Perplexity violates the spirit if not the letter of the norm. Last year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge that stopping Perplexity—and two other AI engines from Microsoft and Anthropic—was a real pain in the ass.” Huffman went on to say: “We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the Internet is free for them to use. That’s their real position.”
214 Days Without State Senator
Midland City Council urges Gretchen Whitmer to call special election for Senate District 35 https://t.co/UUlRlwL4Dr via @Th_Midwesterner
— The Midwesterner (@Th_Midwesterner) August 1, 2025
If They Won’t Build Solar Farms, They Will Follow Elawn’s Advise and Charge Battery Farms Instead. Look Out Michigan
Some Michigan residents are pushing back against a possible battery energy storage facility, citing fire and environmental risks. Supporters say it strengthens the grid and supports renewables. pic.twitter.com/fkuDmvzTGB
— Dave Bondy (@DaveBondyTV) August 3, 2025
Reprioritize Energy Use For National Security
🚨 ELON MUSK: "Batteries are going to be a massive thing. The scale of battery demand, I think not that many people appreciate just how gigantic the scale of battery demand is.
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) July 24, 2025
The sustained power output from the US grid is around 1 TW, but average usage is less than half of it.… pic.twitter.com/yM7cAT7zre
Show Notes: Exi, Effuge Planetam Carceris
GM Pivots From EVs To … Lithium Storage For AI
After pouring billions into electric vehicle battery development, GM is finding new ways to maximize the technology. Enter battery energy storage systems, another profit center for battery production — and, thanks to the Detroit automaker’s recently expanded partnership with Redwood Materials, a way to sell new and used batteries profitably today.
Across its two Ultium Cell facilities — in Springhill, Tennessee, and Warren, Ohio — GM could produce enough battery cells for between 600,000 and 800,000 electric vehicles annually. Additional capacity from a joint venture with Samsung planned for Indiana could soon bring the company close to producing 1 million electric vehicles in the United States per year, according to Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry.
In order to power artificial intelligence more economically, GM’s latest partnership with Redwood uses batteries to charge what it calls a microgrid, a localized energy production and distribution network separate from a main electric grid.
The draw of microgrids is that they can operate “self-sufficiently” through providing stored power during outages, according to Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project Drawdown. The microgrid in Nevada where GM batteries are currently in use, for example, can deliver 12 megawatts of power at any instant, and the total capacity of the site is 63-megawatt hours, the company said.
Elon Musk’s xAI’s Colossus supercomputer in Tennessee has drawn questions about air pollution, water usage and the equity of government incentives for the project. Musk, the CEO of the largest electric vehicle company in the world by sales in Tesla, uses gas turbines to power the data center.
Goodbye Privacy – ChatGPT Results In Google Search
Faced with mounting backlash, OpenAI removed a controversial ChatGPT feature that caused some users to unintentionally allow their private—and highly personal—chats to appear in search results.
Fast Company exposed the privacy issue on Wednesday, reporting that thousands of ChatGPT conversations were found in Google search results and likely only represented a sample of chats “visible to millions.” While the indexing did not include identifying information about the ChatGPT users, some of their chats did share personal details—like highly specific descriptions of interpersonal relationships with friends and family members—perhaps making it possible to identify them, Fast Company found.
OpenAI’s chief information security officer, Dane Stuckey, explained on X that all users whose chats were exposed opted in to indexing their chats by clicking a box after choosing to share a chat.
Fast Company noted that users often share chats on WhatsApp or select the option to save a link to visit the chat later. But as Fast Company explained, users may have been misled into sharing chats due to how the text was formatted:
“When users clicked ‘Share,’ they were presented with an option to tick a box labeled ‘Make this chat discoverable.’ Beneath that, in smaller, lighter text, was a caveat explaining that the chat could then appear in search engine results.”
Gradual Approximation
What on earth is this demonic madness?
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 4, 2025
Acosta got fired from CNN, so now he’s “interviewing” scripted AI chatbot holograms of dead people which are pre-programmed to agree with him.
Absolute insanity. https://t.co/j4qsTSThos
The New Govt Operating System
Charles E. Wilson, CEO of GM, during his confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense in 1953:
“For years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa”
Under President Trump, Palantir is evolving into the de facto operating system of the US government.
— AF Post (@AFpost) August 2, 2025
Palantir has secured over $900 million in federal contracts under the Trump administration, with annual earnings between $228 million and $542 million from 2020 to 2024, mostly… pic.twitter.com/9tbgxe2reo
Code Pink – Protect CCP Scholarship
The University of Michigan has done nothing to protect its Chinese scholars who have faced racist persecution by the federal govt.
— CODEPINK (@codepink) July 30, 2025
Join us at UMich to deliver our petition demanding leadership reject discrimination:https://t.co/ljlmwZDmhK pic.twitter.com/rSZbWAgeNf
CCP Courting Members of the Federal Reserve
https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/the-ccp-is-inside-the-fed-shocking
The Justice Department indicted John Harold Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s Division of International Finance, for allegedly passing sensitive U.S. economic data to agents tied to the Chinese government .
Rogers served at the Fed from 2010 to 2021, holding access to confidential materials related to FOMC deliberations, economic forecasts, and tariff policy analysis .
He allegedly began working with Chinese co‑conspirators posing as university students starting around 2013, and intensified the misconduct after 2018, using personal email and printed documents to transfer restricted Fed data .
In 2023, Rogers is accused of receiving approximately $450,000 from a Chinese university while teaching and meeting with these supposed “students” in China, including hotel rooms where he shared Fed trade secrets.
He delivered an address – “The New Paradigm and New Macroeconomy” – at the China International Capital Corporation (CICC) Investment Strategy Conference on June 12th 2024. CICC is a Chinese partially state-owned multinational investment management and financial services company. He also spoke at the Western China International Finance Summit in 2023.
Michigan Is So Healthy It Has To Pay For Babies
Paying For Babies: Govt Drives Birth Rates Off Cliff
Backed by a mix of state, local and philanthropic money, Rx Kids gives mothers of newborns up to $7,500, with no income requirements and no rules for how the money is spent. Supporters believe the program could be a model for mitigating the high cost of having children in the U.S.
“There’s all kinds of reasons, no matter what your political affiliation or ideology is, to support this,” said state Sen. John Damoose, a Republican and ardent supporter of the program.