Extracting books from production language models - "We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude…substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so" PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671v1
"42% of Danes want to try new alternatives to Big Tech. 68% would like to reduce their screen time … Danmark Skifter [Denmark shifts] is a national campaign where thousands of Danes take back control of their digital lives – not alone, but together.
The campaign runs from January 1 to March 20, 2026. It starts with digital New Year's resolutions in January and culminates with The Big Shift Day on March 20, when all of Denmark shifts together."
Changes to iOS in Japan. iOS 26.2 introduces changes for iOS to comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), creating new options for developers with apps in Japan. Developers can distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces, operate alternative app marketplaces, process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase, use alternative web browser engines, and more.
US Embassy in UK: “Effective immediately, all individuals applying for an F, M, or J nonimmigrant visa are requested to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media accounts to ‘public’ to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility to the United States under U.S. law.” https://uk.usembassy.gov/visas/
Prepping a (hopefully) excellent roast beef pre-xmas meal for my mum, as she'll be with my kid brother on 25th. Nice merlot is open and breathing, roast potatoes are peeled, green veg ready for steaming. I'll keep you posted.
On January 3, 1941, Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur typeface to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.
"The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security."
