San Francisco Moves to Lead Fight Against Deepfake Nudes; The New York Times, August 15, 2024

 Heather Knight, The New York Times; San Francisco Moves to Lead Fight Against Deepfake Nudes

"Instead, the lawsuit seeks to shutter the sites and permanently restrain those operating them from creating deepfake pornography in the future, and assess civil penalties and attorneys’ fees. On the question of jurisdiction, the suit argues that the sites violate state and federal revenge-pornography laws, state and federal child-pornography laws, and the California Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits unlawful and unfair business practices.

San Francisco is a fitting venue, the lawyers argued, as it is ground zero for the growing artificial intelligence industry. Already, people in the city can order driverless vehicles from their phones to whisk them around town, and the industry’s leaders, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are based there.

Mr. Chiu says he thinks the industry has largely had a positive effect on society, but the issue of deepfake pornography has highlighted one of its “dark sides.”

Keeping pace with the rapidly changing industry as a government lawyer is daunting, he said. “But that doesn’t meant we shouldn’t try.”"

Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars; NPR, August 26, 2023

 Dara Kerr, NPR; Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

"An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for this so-called coning incident and dozens of others over the past few months. The group's goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco's streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology."

Can police use robots to kill? San Francisco voted yes.; The Washington Post, November 30, 2022

 Daniel Wu, The Washington Post; Can police use robots to kill? San Francisco voted yes.

"Adam Bercovici, a law enforcement expert and former Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant, told The Post that while policies for robotic lethal force must be carefully written, they could be useful in rare situations. He referenced an active-shooter scenario like the one Dallas officers encountered.

“If I was in charge, and I had that capability, it wouldn’t be the first on my menu,” he said. “But it would be an option if things were really bad.”

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, worried that San Francisco could instead end up setting a dangerous precedent.

“In my knowledge, this would be the first city to take this step of passing a law authorizing killer robots,” Cahn told The Post.

Cahn expressed concern that the legislation would lead other departments to push for similar provisions, or even to the development of more weaponized robots. In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., the police equipment company Axon announced plans to develop drones equipped with Tasers to incapacitate school shooters but canned the idea after nine members of the company’s artificial-intelligence ethics advisory board resigned in protest."

The anti-eviction blues: audio reports from San Francisco's gentrifying streets; Guardian, 1/14/16

Erin McElory, Guardian; The anti-eviction blues: audio reports from San Francisco's gentrifying streets:

"Our data visualisation project grew to study relations between gentrification and factors such as speculation and property flipping, racial profiling and luxury development. But as we produced more and more maps, we became increasingly concerned with the dangers of reducing complex social and political worlds to simple dots on a map – such data can never fully describe the personal and neighbourhood displacements through gentrification.

Our Narratives of Displacement and Resistance project is an attempt to address this. Over the last two years, we have been gathering oral histories of those impacted in different ways by Tech Boom 2.0 – from those evicted by networks of shell companies, to those who have experienced increased racial profiling and those who have fought their evictions through direct action … and won."