In an action that is irritating Elon Musk, France is investigating whether X has manipulated its algorithm and engaged in “fraudulent data extraction.” Prosecutors are looking into if the social media platform engaged in election interference. They launched the investigation on July 11, following reports in January. It has labelled X as an “organized gang.” Engadget.com reports that X responded from the platform’s ‘Global Government Affairs’ account with its own breakdown of what it terms  France’s “politically-motivated criminal investigation” and its refusal to cooperate. What the French government has demanded is that X provide its “recommendation algorithm and real-time data about all user posts on the platform.” France is using multiple experts to look at the information. X put out a statement saying the investigation in France “egregiously undermines X’s fundamental right to due process and threatens our users’ rights to privacy and free speech.” X claims the allegation of manipulating its algorithm for ‘foreign interference’ is completely false. 

We’ve reported on this several times previously, but another case has pointed to the fact that AI-written legal pleadings contain ‘hallucinations’ fairly often at this point…including cases that not only aren’t binding authority…they are totally fake! So that’s not news— but according to arstechnica.com, more courts are missing the fake cases and fake law made up by AI. A case in point; A Georgia court of appeal tossed an order last month due to a lower court judge siding with someone that relied on fake case citations. The matter was a divorce dispute, and the order was drafted by the husband’s lawyer. Note that this is common…judges often call on the lawyers to draft orders after the court rules, since the courts themselves are really buried in work. Normally, the judge asks both sides’ lawyers to draft opinions, though…then the judge or their research attorney assemble the final order from material written by both sides. In this instance, the husband’s attorney used AI and there were 2 fake cases and 11 that were ‘either hallucinated’ or irrelevant. The husband’s lawyer got whacked with $2500 in sanctions in an addition to the case being sent back down for a correct order. 

For some people, it’s like an early Christmas…new emoji are coming to iOS 26 in September. 9to5mac.com notes that the new emoji were announced on World Emoji Day July 17th…I swear there is a day for everything you can imagine! Anyway, there are 26 new ones on the way. A couple of my own family members are particularly excited about the Bigfoot emoji. In addition, there is an Orca, a trombone…could be a sad trombone…that isn’t specified, an apple core, ballet dancers, and a treasure chest. Get ready to spice up your texts with more silliness come this fall!

Headline: Linus has over 6% of the desktop market. Before you say ‘big deal,’ consider this: Apple used to only have about that share of the desktop market. Zdnet.com says the figure comes from the US Federal Government Website and App Analytics. That site keeps track of US government websites visits and analyzes them. If you add in Android (16.2%) and Chromebooks (0.8%), you’re talking about 23% of visitors using Linux, which puts it above MacOS (11.7%), Windows 10 (15.7%), and Windows 11 (15.3%), which is downright impressive. It should be noted that MacOS is based on Unix, which Linux is based on. Take that, Windows. These numbers are based on billions of visits to over 400 US executive branch government domains. That’s about 5,000 total websites, and it includes every Cabinet department. It used to be Linux was only something geeks used…but that is apparently changing. The geek market isn’t to be discounted, though. My own son in IT runs Linus on several computers at his house….both laptop and desktop. If you aren’t excited about the intrusiveness of Windows 11, you might give switching to Linux a try. Linux will also run on older machines that Win 11 or the latest Mac system won’t.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.