Up Times • Jan. 2026

Most email services’ emails are susceptible to being read by others, whether or not the emails are used to train AIs.

Why make things difficult?
Unclear wording makes many wonder if gmail accounts train AI

Privacy advocates call [the opt-out settings] a dark pattern that violates meaningful consent principles.

Google denies using gmails to train its AI, but the class-action suit shows how privacy settings may change without users being aware and how difficult it can be to make public services more private. In this case users found “smart” features automatically enabled.

It’s a new year. It’s a good idea to audit your privacy settings across accounts. Match your communication method to your privacy needs: Casual topics on free services – sure. But sensitive matters on secure business and/or encrypted systems.

Bryley can help you achieve business-grade data handling – and explained in plain language, so you can keep your important data to yourself. The Daily Mail shows how to opt-out of the new default gmail privacy settings … [5 min. read] techrepublic.com

ASML CTO Martin van den Brink shines a light on chip lithographer’s tech in conversation with MIT

MIT’s Technology Review interviewed ASML’s outgoing CTO
The tech behind all this technology

The number of transistors that can be crammed on a chip … means that a single grain of rice [in 1959] … has now become the equivalent of three ocean tankers … full of rice, Martin van den Brink explains. ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) has been a unique contributor to fulfilling Moore’s Law that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

And the basis of their work is the eighteenth-century lithography process, involving a light-sensitive coating applied to a surface, selectively exposed to light through a mask, then chemically developed to transfer the pattern to the surface. Only the size of the surface and the accuracy of the light to achieve these chips– astonishing! [11 min. read] technologyreview.com

The emerging methods to tell truth from fiction are needed in a digital age.

How journalists sort out the fakes
Deepfakes are entrenched in cybercrime and the news

It’s important to know the truth when your business’ money’s on the line, like, ‘is this really my client requesting this unexpected order?,’ or ‘is my boss asking me to transfer $30,000 now?’

But even the use of AI video generators to post fake sightings of something as innocuous as escaped St Louis monkeys, has taken time and energy from the agencies responsible for the monkeys’ capture.

For journalists looking for precise answers, the goal has shifted from definitive identification to a probability assessment and informed editorial judgment, Henk van Ess writes. Van Ess wrote an AI-detection tool, but also gives levels of verification. For quick judgments (like breaking news – which may serve as a good guide for your own business usage):

1. Perfection gut check — Does this person look too polished/perfect for the situation?
2. First impression reaction — Does this feel authentic or “produced”? (Trust your feelings of unease toward artificial representations of human beings, also known as “uncanny valley” feelings.)
3. Production-cost paradox — $8 can now produce professional-looking [results].
4. Emotional manipulation test — Is the content designed to trigger an emotional reaction and quick [response]?

The theme can be summarized by slowing down to consider; and building in verification of unusual requests … [12 min. read] gijn.org (that stands for Global Investigative Journalism Network)

Site of the Oct. 9, 2025 AI symposium.

UConn hosted What Are We Talking About When We Talk About AI? symposium

Behind the scenes the group has been working on an AI Anti-Glossary – not to define terms like “intelligence” but to bring our different conceptions of, in this case, machine intelligence to the surface. The symposium allowed participants to share some of what they’ve uncovered from this work.

UConn Professor of English Anna Mae Duane spoke about people falling in love with chatbots and these LLMs (Large Language Models) being used more in elder care – and care, she said, begins with language. LLMs, like all of computing until very recently, is biased toward the white, mostly-American males who were largely responsible for the internet’s programming and content. This means the parroting of LLMs repeats these tendencies; attempts at steering it a different way are not easily accomplished as it is the foundational dataset.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ting-An Lin offered that literacy means that users understand how AI outputs are generated and the biases baked in: I want us to be careful of the tendency to think that technology can just solve everything.

Professor Duane concluded: The symposium made visible a central paradox: the forms of intelligence most devalued in AI discourse – the embodied knowledge of caregivers … are precisely the forms of intelligence that resist standardization, automation, and reduction. These ways [the human ways] of knowing constitute what we might call “alternative intelligences” – modes of understanding that insist on multiplicity, contradiction, and irreducible human complexity.

And yes Bryley uses tech tools, including AI, but those are not what defines Bryley’s work – in fact the tools are continually vetted and replaced with something better.

What is constant is Bryley’s wholly human, underlying commitment to making clients’ digital existence better to use and more secure … [7 min. read] chcinetwork.org (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes)

Dependable communication was simpler when all you needed for defense was a cat.

Verizon outage reveals vulnerability
While the stated cause may be PR or accurate, the warning is clear

Even when I try to make a Wi-Fi call it says No Network Connection, a redditor posted – meaning, even with Wi-Fi calling enabled many devices remained unable to communicate with texts or voice or other data that moves over Verizon’s cell network.

Were you affected by this outage?

Organizations’ infrastructure often depends on these large providers – even if that’s upstream (by which I mean our suppliers are unable to communicate or process orders).

And what happens if they don’t come through for whatever reason – environmental, hardware failure (seems to be what Verizon is reporting about this incident), sabotage, cyberattack. We have seen over the last few weeks how Starlink was the only remaining working communication method out of Iran – and X is to be applauded for modifying firmware to break that government’s jammers: a software update released on [day two of the protests; January 10] significantly reduced packet loss to approximately 10 percent, per france24.

What do you have in place to backup your methods of communication? Thinking like this is part of any Incident Response Plan – talk to Bryley about it … [5 min. read] mashable.com

^{Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}