Linkage

• Lawsuit Claims Microsoft Tracked Sex Toy Shoppers With 'Recording in Real Time' Software (404 Media) Just when you thought that Microflaccid could not get any creepier.
• Civil Rights Complaint Filed Against Illinois Schools For Using Cops To Handle Normal Discipline Issues (Techdirt) Ignores the elephant in the room, the racist intent driving the hiring of SROs.
• Appeals Court Says Border Patrol Dog Is Capable Of Detecting The Difference Between Legal And Illegal Humans (Techdirt) The judges believe that a dog can distinguish the difference between a person with and without a green card.  It's the 5th Circuit, populated by weird right wing nut-jobs, of course.
• How the Zebra Got Its Stripes - and How Humans Stole the Trick (The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter) Painting cows with zebra stripes reduces the number of flies biting them.
• How Did Silicon Valley Turn into a Creepy Cult?  (The Honest Broker) Short answer, mine, not his, is impostor syndrome, because folks like Andreeson and Horowitz somewhere, deep down realize that they are snake oil salesmen waiting for the bezzle to collapse, so they cloak them selves in the robes of techno-divinity.
• Can’t stop your cat from scratching the furniture? Science has some tips (Ars Technica) Stressors, particularly kids are associated with this behavior.
• Teaching Teachers to Bust Unions (EXPOSEDbyCMD) The evil rat-f%$#s at the "Freedom Foundation."
• Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing (Matt Stoller) Fun with pharmacy benefits managers.  Where are the prosecutors?
• The serious science of trolling LLMs (lcamtuf’s thing) "Far from being a waste of time, internet trolling is becoming a legitimate scientific pursuit. When a model aces a human benchmark, it’s hard to know how much of this can be credited to reasoning and how much of it boils down to recall from the training data set. It’s when it fails at a simple task that we know what the limitations are — and trolls are the torch-bearers of this new enlightenment."

 How people get cats: