The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where it’s demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of what’s to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines free speech and due process rights. Thus far, Columbia appears to be complying with the administration’s demands, even as its students gear up to fight back.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents raided Columbia University’s campus on Thursday night, looking for students in two residential buildings, according to a university-wide email sent by Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. At a press conference on Friday, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating whether student protesters at Columbia violated federal terrorism laws and that it would prosecute “any person engaging in material support of terrorism.†Hours before the raids, Columbia received a joint letter from three government agencies demanding that it punish student protesters; empower “in …
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon's cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon's email said: "As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature." One of the most marketed features of Alexa+ is its more advanced ability to recognize who is speaking to it, a feature known as Alexa Voice ID. To accommodate this feature, Amazon is eliminating a privacy-focused capability for all Echo users, even those who aren't interested in the subscription-based version of Alexa or want to use Alexa+ but not its ability to recognize different voices.
[...] Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users' Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to "Don't save recordings" will see their already-purchased devices' Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that "if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work." As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don't let Amazon store their voice recordings. Amazon's email continues: "Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon's secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of controls by visiting the Alexa Privacy dashboard online or navigating to More - Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app."
Further reading: Google's Gemini AI Can Now See Your Search History
OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”
The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.
In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek.
“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”
Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.
“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.
Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant.
The company will be upgrading “more” users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant “will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores” at some point “later this year.” (9to5Googlereports that phones running Android 9 or earlier and without at least 2GB of RAM will still be able to use the classic Assistant.)
“Additionally, we’ll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini,” Google says. “We’re also bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs.”
The company says it will share more details “in the next few months.” (I would guess that Google will announce information around that new experience at Google I/O in May.) In the meantime, “Google Assistant will continue to operate on these devices,” according to Google.
Google initially launched Google Assistant in 2016. Now, though, Gemini has become the catch-all branding for many of Google’s AI and assistant-like efforts, so it’s not too surprising that the company is officially retiring Google Assistant.
Update, March 14th: Added details from 9to5Google.
Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn’t deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren’t long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut down products with quarterly “spring cleanings,” but now, it just does so whenever it’s time for another product to be put out to pasture.
Follow along here for all our coverage of everything Google sends to the graveyard.
Microsoft's Mads Kristensen took to social media to ask Visual Studio developers to share their favorite prompts to get GitHub Copilot AI to improve their code.
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