Greetings, my name is David Colarusso. I'm the co-director of Suffolk University Law School's Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab. With one foot in law and the other in tech, I really want the open web to thrive. So I created a bot (@icymilaw.org) and this site to help folks discover great law-themed content while showing off what one can do with sufficiently open protocols.
If you like these, you'll ❤️ The Finite Scroll, an open-source client-side algorithmically-driven RSS reader. You might also enjoy this post: How and why I (still) use social media. It includes tips on how to make your own custom social media algo(s).
In addition to the RSS feeds below, here's the legal tech feed 
powering @news.bot.suffolklitlab.org (another bot of mine).
Note, the number of fire emoji represent how many standard deviations more popular a link is than the average link observed in its category.
News-like Links
A collection of links shared recently¹ by legal-type folks² with URLs that look like they point to news articles,³ sorted by popularity.
- Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥In an internal memo, the F.B.I. said it believed the hackers may have stolen sensitive information on all of its employees.
- Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won’t Touch It (Gift Article) 🔥🔥The administration is brokering deals in a notoriously corrupt industry, including one with a company that the United States deems a security threat.
- Second Prosecutor Quits Trump’s ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case 🔥🔥The resignation adds to the setbacks to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to fulfill the president’s desire to take revenge against the federal officials who have investigated him.
- EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic leaders to control AI lab via 'Founder LLC' to promote public good over market forces 🔥🔥Anthropic has long positioned itself as the virtuous AI company. An early look at its IPO filing shows how it is creating a new "Founder LLC" vehicle aimed at serving the common good, while insulatin...
- The Moves That Backfired on Trump and Drove Interest Rates and Inflation Higher 🔥🔥The president’s own agenda has helped undermine promises to fix the economy and get the deficit under control.
- Oxford Street to be pedestrianised from 26 October 🔥🔥Buses, taxis, bikes and other vehicles, will be banned from Orchard Street to Great Portland Street.
- Schools forced to shut amid burst Thames Water pipe ‘leaking 750 litres a second’ 🔥Leak causes outages and low pressure in parts of London and Surrey, affecting 6,000 properties and leaving some without water ...
- RAF Fairford suspects are British men in their 20s, police say, as Iranian embassy denies involvement 🔥The men, who all live in London, were arrested near the base on Sunday morning. Residents say security had been stepped up in the days before.
- Ospreys are disappearing along the East Coast. Scientists think they know why. 🔥At the center of a widening crisis for one of the nation's great wildlife comebacks is a fish most Americans would hardly recognize.
- New tool directly links carbon emissions to amount of environmental and economic damage caused 🔥Carbon Impacts Tracer can be used to estimate climate impact from emissions across eight different factors, including lost food production ...
- EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs 🔥Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. The ...
Blog-like Links
A collection of links shared recently⁴ by legal-type folks⁵ with URLs that look like they point to blogs/newsletters,⁶ sorted by popularity.
- DOGE vs. Civic Tech 🔥🔥As DOGE revisionism picks up, a contrast with the civic tech movement it displaced illuminates its failure ...
- Breaking: DOJ asks SCOTUS to erase trans people from the law in case over trans care in prison 🔥🔥Solicitor General John Sauer made the alarming, all-encompassing argument — previously covered at Law Dork — to the Supreme Court on Monday morning.
- ‘F*cking P*dophile’: Trump Faces Backlash as Food Banks Run Dry, Fuel Costs Soar, Healthcare Premiums Rise, and the War Rages 🔥Good morning.
- Crucial Hearing on Team Trump’s Contempt for the Rule of Law 🔥Entire D.C. Circuit takes up administration’s effort to force Judge Boasberg to stand down.
- Rats Are Fleeing the Sinking Ship But they have waited too long and are still too few in number to change the outcome of a likely Democratic tsunami ...
AI & The Law Links
A collection of links shared recently⁷ on Bluesky that look like they talk about AI & the law,⁸ sorted by popularity.
- EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic leaders to control AI lab via 'Founder LLC' to promote public good over market forces 🔥🔥🔥🔥Anthropic has long positioned itself as the virtuous AI company. An early look at its IPO filing shows how it is creating a new "Founder LLC" vehicle aimed at serving the common good, while insulatin...
- OpenAI breach proves need for more data centres, major parties say† 🔥🔥Labor, Coalition agree OpenAI's Medicare breach proves the need for Australia to secure "a seat at the AI table" by rolling out data centres nationally.
- Bill Gates Says AI Safety Concerns Are ‘Not A Hoax,’ Contradicting Trump† 🔥🔥In a “Meet the Press” interview that aired on Sunday, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder said he hoped to meet with Trump about AI regulation.
- Bill Gates says unchecked AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’ in call for regulation 🔥Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.” Continue reading...
- Judges Warn That AI-Generated Lawslop Is Getting So Bad It’s Threatening Courts' Ability to Function A panel of three Florida state district court judges blasted a family attorney for using AI to generate "frivolous, scattershot arguments."
Law Review-like Links
A collection of links shared recently⁹ on Bluesky that look like they point to papers in law journals or the like,¹⁰ sorted by popularity.
- Protectors of Predators or Prey: Bystanders and Upstanders Amid Sexual Crimes† In the wake of widespread revelations about sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, and others, the United States is reckoning with the past and present ...
- Known to Police: the Revival of Juvenile Curfews A few years ago, in response to an uptick in crime rates, many cities revived a familiar tool—juvenile curfews. Yet unlike prior iterations, modern juvenile ...
- “The People Have a Right”: Vermont’s Village Greens, the Declaration of Rights, and Greater State Constitutional Protection for Free Speech and Peaceful Assembly† This Article argues, for the consideration of the Vermont Supreme Court, that Articles 13 and 20 of the Vermont Constitution, declaring the people’s rights of f ...
- Three Accusations against Israel: Apartheid, Settler Colonialism, and Genocide under Legal and Historical Scrutiny This article examines three recurrent classifications of Israel and its conduct: apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide. It treats apartheid and genocide ...
AI Paper-like Links
A collection of links shared recently¹¹ on Bluesky that look like they point to papers on AI,¹² sorted by popularity. Wondering why this section is on a site about the law? Well, I teach a course on AI & the Law, and it turns out that understanding this stuff is super important to figuring out what the law might have to say. So, I figured since I was sharing lists, I might as well share this one too.
- Shutdown Sabotage Propensities in Multi-Agent Systems† 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥The final safeguard against rogue AI behavior is the human ability to shut systems down. It has been theorized that when an AI is instructed to perform a task, self-preservation can emerge as an instr...
- Cheap, open agents make LLM pollution harder to mitigate 🔥🔥🔥Large Language Model (LLM) pollution occurs when synthetic responses contaminate data intended to capture human behavior. High deployment costs have so far limited the risk posed by autonomous survey agents. However, open-weight models paired with open-source agentic frameworks may have removed thi…
- Game-Theoretic Lens on LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems 🔥🔥🔥Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning, planning, and communication abilities, enabling them to operate as autonomous agents in open environments. While single-agent systems r...
- DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale† 🔥Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation requirements, retain state across long interactions, and draw from large image corpora with limited reuse. Supporting them therefore requires an elastic execution platform rather than a single sandbox runtime. This report presents DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec), a production sandbox platform that exposes FnCall, container, microVM, and full-VM sandbox backends through a unified SDK. DSec coordinates placement and lifecycle management across the cluster, composes environments from independently versioned layers, combines memory sharing, reclamation, and CPU scheduling for high-density execution, and loads image data on demand from Fire-Flyer File System ...
- "As a Language Model...": Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice and Activation Steering Reproduces It† Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to add disclaimers like "I'm just an AI" when asked about something related to themselves. The self-reports from such responses are used in debates about AI safety or self-knowledge of the models, yet what drives them is not well understood. Are the models telling us about themselves or rather how they are deployed? In this work, we show that the chat template works like a switch - when present, it turns this disclaimer voice up and experiential voice like "I feel" down, across 8 popular open-source instruct models up to 9B parameters in size. And conversely when the chat template is not present, it turns the disclaimer voice down and experiential voice up. Inside the activations of 3 models, we find a direction that steers this behavior. Removing the direction in the model's activation space turns disclaimer voice down and adding it turns it up, while a random direction of the same size has little effect. We find that instruct models without chat template, when we add the disclaimer direction to them, disclaim like the template was there. Since the chat template controls the disclaimer voice of LLMs, then researchers studying self-reports or introspection of models might have a confound they need to control for. Our results show that there is a direction they can use to steer this voice. More broadly, our work shows that what models say about themselves is not a fact about them. What they say doesn't come only from weights, but it is partially set by the chat template, and because of that a model's self-description shouldn't be treated literally.
The High Score
The 20 accounts most reposted by @icymilaw.org over the past week¹³ (the list below is updated every Sunday). High Score, get it? One Score = 20, as in, "four score and seven years ago." ;)
- ICYMI (Law) (@icymilaw.org)
- Law + Tech News Bot (@news.bot.suffolklitlab.org)
- Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) (promoted)
- Raffi Melkonian (@rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Ray Beckerman (@raybeckerman.bsky.social) (promoted)
- CREW (@citizensforethics.org) (promoted)
- Corey Rayburn Yung (@coreyryung.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Harry Litman (@harrylitman.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Roger Parloff (@rparloff.bsky.social)
- Katie Phang (@katiephang.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov.bsky.social)
- Barb McQuade (@barbmcquade.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Good Law Project (@goodlawproject.org) (promoted)
- Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jessica Pishko (@jesspish.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jameel Jaffer (@jameeljaffer.bsky.social) (promoted)
- In Medias Malone (@professormusgrave.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (@profciara.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Michael J. Stern (@michaeljstern.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) (relegated)
- New York Attorney General Letitia James (@newyorkstateag.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Sarah Szalavitz💡 (@dearsarah.bsky.social) (relegated)
- ❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ (@sababausa.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Jay Kuo (@nycjayjay.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Brian Finucane (@bcfinucane.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie (@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app) (relegated)
- Professa Murray (@kalimurray.bsky.social) (relegated)
- The Empty City (@davidallengreen.bsky.social) (relegated)
† This link was also in yesterday's digest. ¹ Approx. 1 day lookback. ² Attorneys, law profs, et al. ³ News-like links (law) ⁴ Supra note 1. ⁵ Supra note 2. ⁶ Blog-like links (law) ⁷ Approx. 3.5 days lookback. ⁸ AI & the Law ⁹ Approx. 1 week lookback. ¹⁰ Law Review-like ¹¹ Supra note 9. ¹² AI Papers et al. ¹³ High Score
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