If Meta is so good at AI then what’s this doing here?

In the news: Meta releases its first frontier model, Muse Wonder. Hooray, you’re really smart and good at AI.

So what’s this?

Yes, it’s a Facebook ad mimicking Facebook’s own notification widgets.

A company that’s so good at AI that they can recognize billions of people in random uploaded photos, but can’t see when an ad is designed to look just like their own images?

That’s like a high-school-level machine learning project to spot. And these ads have been running for quite a while now. Along with a bunch of other crooked stuff, like trademark-infringing ads that take advantage of a system designed to help fakes hide from the real brand.

Facebook serves deceptive ads because they choose to.

That puts companies using Meta Pixel, SDKs, and CAPI in an awkward position. The data being collected is feeding in to Meta AI systems that are designed to defraud people—and a dollar that someone loses to a Facebook scam is a dollar they can’t spend on a legit product or service.

Bonus links

Annual Report 2025 out now! from noyb. noyb has filed its second complaint against OpenAI and has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta over AI training. While many details are still unclear, we see collective redress as the primary new approach to enforcement and intend to expand in this area.

Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine by Jeremy Hsu. Russian companies like Yandex will also have a hard time establishing infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia to provide additional wartime resiliency. That is partly because of the Sovereign Internet Law passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019….By comparison, Ukraine has a much more decentralized digital ecosystem consisting of smaller data centers. It has also taken steps to build out backup infrastructure, including moving some equipment and networks underground or outside the country.

Bless The BC250, The Budget E-waste Steam Machine by Chris Person. Since it is no longer profitable to run these things in servers to mine bitcoin, many of them appeared on the secondary market as e-waste….Despite having fairly lean performance by gaming standards, the board includes something worth its weight in gold: 16 gigs of GDDR6 RAM soldered right in there that cannot be salvaged and scalped.

Everyone Won the Ross Fair Use Appeal. Except Ross. by Aaron Moss. Rights holders and AI advocates are both calling the Third Circuit’s Ross decision a win. They’re just reading different parts of it.