Links for 14 June 2026

KPMG fabricated AI case studies in a report designed to sell clients on AI adoption by Matthias Bastian. (Consultants are going to have to change how they get paid. The apparent quality of the report or other consultant deliverable, as measured at invoice time, is more and more different from its real value. Some possibilities:On Prediction Market Sales Engineering)

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google by Ashley Belanger. Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews. (icymi:fix Google Search to remove the “AI” slop and other crap)

The rise of prediction markets is creating new ethical headaches for journalists by Kaleigh Rogers. (The big underlying problem, though, is prediction markets free-riding on “oracle” information from news sources in order to resolve big-money contracts. In order for prediction markets to stay sustainable and honest, oracle services need to be expensive. More:Pay the oracle.)

VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry by Cooper Quintin and Rindala Alajaji. (Don’t worry, these features will be back. Time to establish policies and norms for excluding surveillance glasses from any spaces you control or have influence over.)

Ukraine Is Not Losing. Russia Is Not Winning. by Anne Applebaum. The AI-powered drone interceptors are made possible by a complicated network of radar systems, acoustic sensors, and other tools that hundreds of large and small Ukrainian tech companies are creating and updating every day, using data they get directly from soldiers like the ones I met. Almost none of these companies existed four years ago. They have emerged from a tech-literate civil society whose members changed their professions or their focus to help defend their country.

Exclusive: Americans Now Overwhelmingly Oppose New Data Centers Near Them by Robinson Meyer. (But does this opposition translate into minimizing “AI” usage, or cutting back on “AI”-dependent products and services? I do notice that calling a feature “AI” makes people more likely to ask me how to turn it off.)

Advertising’s ‘most hated man’ is back with a new warning for CMOs by Lara O’Reilly. Mandel, who works as an advisor to marketing and tech companies, said his biggest bugbear about the industry now is principal media. The practice takes many forms, but at its essence, it’s when agencies purchase a large volume of media — spots where ads can run — at a discount, resell it to their clients, and make an undisclosed margin on top. (As a privacy nerd, I generally don’t have a beef with the actual advertisers—legit buyers and sellers have a shared interest in a win-win transaction. The problems are mostly with all thecrooks in between those who are selling and those who are shopping.)

How Uber saved $35M a year on ads We did a holdout on Meta for 3 months. The results came back conclusively that there was no incrementality. With no ego, pride, budget manipulating, or any other crap I sometimes see, we made the decision to turn off spend on FB and return the money to the business.

It’s time to talk about my writerdeck on Veronica Explains. (Straightforward description of converting an old laptop to a text-only writing tool, with file sync to a more full featured system.)

This Blog Post is Your Sign to Start Self-Hosting You need datacenters to host GMail for everyone on earth, but you only need one small Linux box to run a very significant portion of your digital life.

Pirated Sports Streams Are Warping TV’s Most Important Ratings by James Hercher. To estimate the total missed audience that watched illegal streams of sporting events is practically impossible. Were the viewers hosting parties? Watching alone? Working at a bar or restaurant when they realized they didn’t have the right subscription and decided to pirate? With this in mind, the Super Bowl’s ratings were likely off by somewhere between one and two million total viewers, and that’s being conservative, Adalytics Founder and CEO Krzysztof Franaszek told AdExchanger.

Meat Industry Price Fixer Sentenced to Make Money by David Dayen. Most importantly, Agri Stats would still be able to issue its most critical reports, which ranked processors against their competitors on various metrics. These are the reports that tell processors when to cut supply or raise prices relative to others.