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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici

Evaluating Generative AI for Legal Research: A Benchmarking Project

Via LLRX – Evaluating Generative AI for Legal Research: A Benchmarking Project – It is difficult to test Large-Language Models (LLMs) without back-end access to run evaluations. So to test the abilities of these products, librarians can use prompt engineering to figure out how to get desired results (controlling statutes, key cases, drafts of a memo, etc.).… Continue Reading

SUVs are setting new sales records each year so are their emissions

IEA: “The large, heavy passenger vehicles were responsible for over 20% of the growth in global energy-related CO2 emissions last year SUVs accounted for 48% of global car sales in 2023, reaching a new record and further strengthening the defining automobile trend of the early 21st century – the shift towards ever larger and heavier… Continue Reading

Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are “shadow libraries” to shut down lawsuit

Ars Technica: “Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was… Continue Reading

Huge Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm

Search Engine Land: “A trove of leaked Google documents has given us an unprecedented look inside Google Search and revealed some of the most important elements Google uses to rank content. What happened. Thousands of documents, which appear to come from Google’s internal Content API Warehouse, were released March 13 on Github by an automated… Continue Reading

Lawyers to Plastics Makers: Prepare for ‘Astronomical’ PFAS Lawsuits

The New York Times [no paywall]: “At an industry presentation about dangerous “forever chemicals,” lawyers predicted a wave of lawsuits that could dwarf asbestos litigation, audio from the event revealed…A wide swath of the chemicals, plastics and related industries are gearing up to fight a surge in litigation related to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl… Continue Reading

Hackers Claim To Have Breached Ticketmaster Stealing Personal Data of 560M Users

HackRead: “ShinyHunters hacking group has claimed to have breached Ticketmaster, stealing the personal data of 560 million users. The 1.3 TB of stolen data also includes payment details. Learn more about this major cybersecurity incident and its implications. The notorious hacker group ShinyHunters has claimed to have breached the security of Ticketmaster-Live Nation, compromising the… Continue Reading

The Monopoly Case Against Ticketmaster, Explained

404 Media: “The Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation/Ticketmaster isn’t really about high ticket prices, or ticket scalpers, or any individual offense. It is about a systematic vertical integration of the entire live music business, which has led to the company’s dominance over tickets, yes, but also over live music venues, artists’ tour booking,… Continue Reading

Corpus of Resolutions: UN Security Council

“The Corpus of Resolution: UN Security Council (CR-UNSC) collects and presents for the first time in human and machine-readable form all resolutions, drafts, and meeting records of the UN Security Council, including detailed metadata, as published by the UN Digital Library and revised by the authors. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the most influential… Continue Reading

PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data

The Verge: “PayPal is launching an advertising platform built on a trove of customer transaction data. The company’s new advertising business will encompass purchase information and customer spending habits from PayPal and its sister app Venmo, according to The Wall Street Journal. PayPal has brought on Mark Grether, the former vice president and general manager… Continue Reading

Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector

404 Media – and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem – “As an endless stream of entirely wrong and sometimes dangerous AI-generated answers from Google are going viral on social media, new research from Google researchers and several fact checking organizations have found that most image-based disinformation is now AI-generated, but the way researchers collected their… Continue Reading