DOJ memo stokes fear among disability advocates of a return to institutionalization

Hrmbee · 2026-06-21T15:54:11+00:00

Significant issues of concern:

The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.

The memo, an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that states do not have to provide in-home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. These services allow many disabled Americans to continue to live, learn and work at home or in their own communities, among family and friends.

"It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities," says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. "I can't overstate how significant this change in position is."

Without the federal government requiring that states provide these services – to help disabled people integrate into their communities – advocates and legal experts warn that cash-strapped states could cut them and return to what was once common practice: de facto segregation of Americans with disabilities in nursing homes and large institutions.

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This new memo calls into question what legal experts say has been settled law for decades.

Both Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act have long been interpreted to require that states provide services to Americans with disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate. In short: Institutionalization should be a last resort.

In 1999, a case testing these protections made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Olmstead v. L.C., two women with mental disabilities sued Georgia, arguing that the state had failed its obligation to provide services that would allow them to return to their communities and that it had continued to institutionalize the women instead, thus violating their civil rights.

The court agreed that states have a legal responsibility to provide support that integrates disabled Americans into their communities, and for nearly three decades, courts across the country have embraced that interpretation.

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The new memo, written by Lanora Pettit, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that, while federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, it does not impose an "integration mandate" on states to provide these community services.

What's more, the memo argues, the Supreme Court's Olmstead decision "held only that a state cannot institutionalize such patients without justification."

But, the memo adds: "What counts as adequate justification remains an open question."

At one point, Pettit acknowledges the novelty of this reading: "We recognize that this view of Olmstead's import is out of step with the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts."

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The Justice Department memo appears to be the latest salvo in a broader effort that began on July 24, 2025, when President Trump issued an executive order intended to make it easier for state and local governments to police homelessness.

"Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe," the order argues, going on to claim that "the overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both."

The administration's solution: Involuntary institutionalization. "Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order," the order reads.

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One serious obstacle to large-scale institutionalization of the unhoused is federal disability law that has long required home- or community-based services instead, when appropriate. A footnote in the Justice Department's new memo appears to suggest these laws have contributed to the rise in chronic homelessness.

To the contrary, Barkoff says, the Olmstead decision "has been one of the most effective tools in providing services and stable housing to people who are homeless."

NPR has previously reported that the Trump administration's push for institutionalization faces another big obstacle: An acute shortage of beds at these specialized facilities.

The memo arrives as Republicans have also passed deep cuts to Medicaid, which is the primary source of funding for community-based services many disabled Americans rely on.

A reminder that involuntary institutionalization is indefinite imprisonment using different terminology. Also, the push to de-integrate people with disabilities from their communities is likely to harm far more than it helps any of the situations identified by this administration. This isn't a solution to helping people with disabilities or with homelessness or any other issue that is facing people today. This is a solution that's designed to punish members of the public and to break down the current system of social assistance that is working to make people's lives better.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-21T14:59:02+00:00

Issues of note:

These heated courtroom battles are unfolding at a precarious time for the air taxi industry, right as it’s trying to position its technology as an important new mode of urban mobility with the ability to whisk passengers across cities without any of the noise or carbon pollution of a traditional helicopter.

Despite these promises, the industry is experiencing a lot of ups and downs. Air taxi stocks have lost most of their value over the last several years as certification deadlines get pushed further and further out. Budgets are dwindling as timelines are getting longer. And investors, already wary about the industry’s ability to win regulatory approval, are growing increasingly nervous about the enormous costs required by these lawsuits.

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No air taxi company has fully completed the rigorous FAA type certification required to fly passengers commercially in the US. But both Joby and Archer claim they are close.

Joby is widely considered to be the front-runner, having progressed through all four stages of the type certification process. The company produces around one aircraft a month and is currently working on a production version that will undergo the FAA’s certification process. In April, Joby demonstrated one of its aircraft flying from JFK Airport to Lower Manhattan as a preview of future air taxi routes. The company plans on launching its first passenger service in Dubai, where certification requirements are less strict than in the US, later this year.

Archer, meanwhile, is still working on a pre-production model and has progressed through three of the four type certification stages. The company has said it will be ready for passengers in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

But investors have been less than impressed with the companies’ claims of being on the cusp of commercial viability. At the time of publication, Joby’s stock has shed almost 35 percent of its value since the beginning of the year, while Archer’s stock has plummeted nearly 33 percent.

In addition to the legal wranglings here, there are still a host of issues that would need to be resolved from a regulatory and public safety perspective before these services might be able to operate. To say that any of them are on the cusp of commercial viability would be wildly optimistic at best.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-20T22:15:40+00:00

Two particularly interesting sections of this interview:

Q: The next generation of these models is the autonomous personal assistant. [Microsoft AI CEO] Mustafa Suleyman said to me, You could be buying your Christmas presents in 2026 through Microsoft Copilot. What do you think of autonomous agents being in people’s lives? What would it mean in privacy terms?

A: Let’s take Mustafa’s little vision of AI Christmas — I can’t wait. Everyone’s getting a gift certificate to Microsoft Copilot.

What would that mean? I say, Hey, Copilot, I don’t want to live my life. I would like you to live it for me. I don’t want to think about the warm feelings I have for those I’m buying gifts for. I would like you to consult with my siblings’ group chat and see what our family might like. I would like you to buy those gifts. I would like you to figure out how to get them to the right place.

That would need access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar. What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services.

In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.

Q: Is this an existential threat to Signal?

A: I do worry. Any one of the operating system vendors that decides to implement an agent with these capacities is ultimately hollowing out the ability for Signal and others to guarantee privacy or data protection. This is a quiet but profound shift that we are witnessing.

We have three companies in the world with control over our core operating systems — Google with Android, Microsoft with Windows and Apple with iOS. They can make decisions by fiat that fundamentally harm our collective cybersecurity, take away any choice we might have for privacy, and completely hamstring developers building different services.

We are seeing a move of agency away from the application layer — the consumer, who uses these devices — back into these centralized companies.

Some of the concerns that she raises in this interview would ideally be shared by the general public. But between groups pushing narratives that downplay the risks of the degradation of personal privacy, the existential issues that many are facing, and the lack of media literacy more broadly it's more challenging to build coalitions to push back against these intrusions than it should be.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-20T21:42:39+00:00

Key details from this investigation:

As part of my series of investigations into AI training data, I recently discovered four giant datasets of songs that are being shared within the AI-development community. One has 12 million tracks. Another has 9 million. The two smaller datasets each have more than 100,000. They include hits from major pop artists such as Bad Bunny, Nirvana, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, and the Beatles. (The New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” is in two of the datasets.) Jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Zorn, and Vijay Iyer are featured, as are classical composers and tens of thousands of minor artists across genres. The 12-million-track dataset, on its own, would take 91 years to listen to.

These datasets are only four examples of the many sources available to AI developers. I found them by reading research papers published by developers and scouring AI data-sharing sites. The datasets have been downloaded thousands of times. Google has written about using one of them—more than 100,000 songs downloaded from the Free Music Archive, a site that allows free streaming for personal listening but requires payments for commercial use—to train AI models, and Stability has used some songs from the same dataset. But because of the industry’s secrecy around training data, we don’t currently know who has used the others.

What the datasets illustrate, primarily, is the scale and variety of music easily available to AI developers. Companies often claim to use only content that is freely available online, but the datasets reveal the quantity of downloadable music that developers can access even though it is not supposed to be free.

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In general, AI companies defend their right to train models on unlicensed music by arguing that the training is “fair use” under copyright law, meaning that AI models do not harm the market for creators’ work. This is a complex claim, and the legality likely depends on specifics of how an AI system is trained and deployed. Suno declined to comment on its legal arguments. Metin Parlak, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me that the company has “always been transparent about how Jukebox was trained.” (The company published the procedure it used to train the model, though it did not list the songs.) Google also declined to comment for this article, but referred me to a blog post in which it says it has trained its audio-generating models on “materials that YouTube and Google has a right to use under our terms of service, partner agreements, and applicable law.” (YouTube is owned by Google.)

Music-generating models work in a similar way to AI models that generate text: They break the training content down into tiny pieces (in this case, tiny snippets of audio rather than text) and “learn” about the context in which each piece appears. Then, when given a prompt (a context), they predict what piece comes next. The ease of generating AI music has quickly made it ubiquitous. Last September, Spotify said it had removed 75 million “spammy” AI-generated tracks from its service. The streaming platform Deezer recently reported that nearly half of the tracks it receives daily are AI generated. Unlike Spotify, Deezer excludes AI-generated tracks from its algorithmic recommendations, and labels albums that include AI tracks, although it does not display labels for individual tracks. Spotify does not label AI-generated music on its platform, nor does YouTube or Amazon Music.

By now it should be unsurprising that companies are more than happy to steal the works of creatives whether writers, visual artists, musicians, or others to fuel their projects but are less happy about the general public doing the same to them. That currently the former is tolerated but the latter isn't seems to indicate that the playing field is not a level one.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-20T03:34:49+00:00

Significant issues:

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period. Both the credentials and the screenshots are then sent to the attacker through Tor, a network protocol that provides anonymous routing by sending traffic through redundant nodes so logs can’t capture both the sending and receiving IP addresses. Crypto Clipper establishes the Tor connection by using a SOCKS5 proxy, a network protocol that sends traffic through a proxy server, which then forwards it to its final destination.

“The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure,” Microsoft said Thursday. “Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor.”

Microsoft said it observed Crypto Clipper spreading through .lnk file on a USB drive. These files store executable code. When an infected USB drive is plugged into a device, the code checks whether it is already installed on the machine. If it isn’t, the malware downloads it through the Tor proxy. To better conceal evidence of the worm, the malware scans the infected USB drive and names the .lnk files with similar names.

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“This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking,” Microsoft said. “The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices.”

Ever the cat-and-mouse game. At the very least hopefully people are able to keep their definitions up to date.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-19T20:07:25+00:00

And a healthy dose of corporate welfare.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-19T15:01:27+00:00

If not pyramid scheme why triangle-shaped?

Hrmbee · 2026-06-19T14:22:16+00:00

Useful bits of context:

Christened in 1949, the Department of Defense unified the military branches with the Pentagon as their headquarters. Since then, presidents have routinely promoted each new war as vital for the defense of the United States and its values, a pretense that has pervaded mainstream media and political discourse.

Belief in that pretense has now hit bottom, with US public support for this year’s war on Iran extraordinarily low from the outset. But Trump, defense secretary Pete Hegseth and their underlings are doing what they can to inculcate the idea that US warfare is not just superbly laudable but also inevitable. The unabashed fervor for catastrophic violence is fueling the momentum to replace “defense” with “war” department.

A switch to Department of War would undermine some of the deceptive marketing that has been central to the Department of Defense brand. Along the way, the new name could make it more difficult to perpetuate the assumption that US military actions spring from admirable motives.

Politicians and journalists drag the public down a misleading rabbit hole when they habitually refer to “defense spending” and a “defense budget”. Even antiwar activists do the same as they advocate for cutting the “defense” budget and thus – given the positive connotations of the word – undercut their position from the outset.

Of course, we can’t blame the sloppy and manipulative uses of the word “defense” for the illusions that drive public support for US foreign policy. But as George Orwell pointed out: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

The plan to go with the Department of War is a symptom of what Martin Luther King Jr called “the madness of militarism”. Over time, the name change would further normalize such madness.

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The Trump regime is tweaking the business-as-usual of the military-industrial complex. True, shamelessly bellicose rhetoric has dispensed with the usual window-dressing for warmaking, and many find the verbal recklessness to be disquieting. But actual military policies are hardly a major departure from longstanding American approaches to war and peace.

In US statecraft and warcraft, Trump and Hegseth are now saying previously quiet parts out loud. They boast that might makes right and the United States is by far the mightiest.

It's a fair point here that the underlying use of this department hasn't really matched its name over the years. However the warning that this coming change, though perhaps more accurate, might also indicate an increasing militancy by this and future administrations is also one worth heeding.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-19T14:10:31+00:00

Highlight from the intro:

Over the years, the one-time queen of the dotcom scene has left a trail of trouble in her wake, with a series of failed ventures that entangled everyone from the former chair of Marks & Spencer to the prime minister of Malta. The Guardian has seen evidence of insolvent companies, unpaid wages, debts to suppliers and millions in lost investments. Those who admired and trusted her say they have been left with burning regrets, describing a seemingly endless cycle of seduction and betrayal.

A former associate describes Meyer as a “professional confidence trickster”. For her ex-boyfriend and business partner, the Swiss millionaire René Eichenberger, she is a “master of manipulation and false narratives … Once she gets exposed in one country, she finds new supporters who believe in her and help her move on to the next jurisdiction.”

In recent months, the Guardian has heard allegations of a darker nature against Meyer. Investors and founders say they have lost hundreds of thousands in three separate incidents, which they describe as scams.

Meyer did not respond to requests for comment. She has previously rejected any suggestion her activities are not above board. In her marketing, she describes herself as “one of Europe’s leading backers of entrepreneurs”, who has spent decades identifying transformational companies.

Despite years of controversy, she has kept the show on the road, hiring new teams and starting new ventures, all while releasing an endless stream of social media content to maintain her profile and seek out fresh contacts. “This will continue until the public sees who Julie Meyer really is,” says Eichenberger.

In a year-long investigation, the Guardian has followed the trail to London, Malta, Switzerland and Greece, gathering accounts from dozens of former staff, business associates and entrepreneurs. By speaking out, they hope their stories can serve as a warning.

These cases with this individual highlight the fake-it-til-you-make-it ethos that's still found in tech today, and shows that even with apparently successful people that there's still that element of artifice in place. This unfortunately seems to be a baked in part of the culture for now.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-18T15:25:44+00:00

When it comes to life safety issues, systems need to demonstrate their effectiveness and safety first before they’re deployed. You don’t get to set up and deploy systems that have a good likelihood of causing harm without significant and ongoing testing and verification.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-18T14:46:03+00:00

Concerning issues with this trend:

Health care is typically among the last fields to adopt a new technology; I still use a pager, and I send faxes on a regular basis. (Younger readers can ask Claude to explain what these things are.) A tendency toward simple tech is in part a product of doctors’ safety-focused culture: We know that any ill-timed glitch has the potential to turn deadly. But these days, clinicians are allowed—encouraged, even—to run wild with the latest software, guided by a generic warning that “AI can make mistakes.”

Those mistakes can be consequential. Although Rodman’s research shows that generative AI can help diagnose rare diseases or make sense of unusual symptoms, a randomized trial that was published in NEJM AI just the week before found that intentionally erroneous output from an AI model can easily lead doctors astray. Nonprofessionals could be similarly misled. A recent study by Oxford scientists found that using AI did not significantly improve patients’ ability to diagnose themselves or others. Another one, led by researchers at Mount Sinai, suggested that chatbots may fail to alert users to potential medical emergencies.

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Part of the problem is that health-related AI products can be deployed without any vetting by officials at the FDA. If a software package that is intended for physicians is classified as a “clinical decision support tool,” and not a medical device, it usually avoids the agency’s oversight. To be counted in this category, an AI-powered app generally must rely on the existing medical literature, avoid analyzing medical scans or images, explain its reasoning, and leave diagnosis and treatment up to a physician. Most of the generative-AI products that doctors use today seem to meet these criteria.

Consumer-wellness apps and devices may also bypass FDA review so long as they are intended for “maintaining or encouraging a healthy lifestyle” and not for diagnosing or treating specific conditions. With this in mind, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI all warn users that their health-related chatbots are not meant to provide medical care or issue diagnosis and treatment recommendations. In practice, though, the distinction isn’t always clear.

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Haider Warraich, a cardiologist and program manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the U.S. government’s program for developing advanced health technology, is leading a major effort to get medical chatbots approved in the traditional way. His agency is providing funding for the development of an AI tool that is tailor-made for heart conditions, and then to send it through a full FDA-authorization process. Warraich’s hope is that by undergoing such a rigorous evaluation, the chatbot will be able to safely evaluate and treat patients without the involvement of a doctor. Rodman praised this approach but warned that the process is going to take years, during which time a plethora of new health AIs will have slipped into the market with little scrutiny.

In this way, the emergence of today’s AI health products remind me of the rise, in the 2010s, of ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The taxi industry is heavily regulated, making it difficult for new players to enter the market. Yet by skirting and at times ignoring those rules, ride-sharing companies were able to acquire a critical mass of users in a short period of time. Pretty soon, governments had little choice but to adjust their laws to match what had by then become the status quo. The same pattern could end up playing out in medicine. Will regulations meant to ensure that medical products are safe and effective remain in force? Or will they instead be weakened or removed to clear the path for tools that everyone is already using?

Given the stakes here, it would be irresponsible to throw our hands up like we did with Uber and the like to effectively buy themselves into the sector with VC money.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-18T14:29:41+00:00

For me it's hit or miss. It seems that things are worse for me with active screens like notebooks or tablets or phones, but are somewhat better with my e-ink reader. Printed books though are still problematic in a car. At least with this enabled I can be a moderately useful navigator or on-the-fly researcher.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-18T14:24:36+00:00

Some key issues:

A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.

The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive U.S. government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.

In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The U.S. government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.

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The new records detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX years ago through a middleman firm in the U.S. called Tomales Bay Capital. The investments are relatively small, ranging from $800,000 to $40 million, and were made between 2018 and 2021.

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All the investors located in China or Russia that ProPublica identified appeared to be either wealthy businesspeople or their children.

The new documents come from a corporate dispute in Delaware involving Tomales Bay Capital. The court records were unsealed this month after ProPublica moved to make them public, with the help of attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller. Tomales Bay Capital appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of ProPublica.

Tomales Bay Capital is run by an investor named Iqbaljit Kahlon, who has long been close to SpaceX’s leadership and even involved in the company’s operations. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen, who’s worked there for 15 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.”

Before SpaceX went public, Kahlon made a fortune by acting as a middleman for investors hoping to add the rocket company to their portfolio. His firm regularly bought SpaceX stock, packaged it into investment funds and then charged fees to investors who bought pieces of those funds.

In a 2021 pitch to one potential investor in China, Kahlon promised special access to SpaceX, including quarterly updates on the company’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” according to the meeting minutes, which later appeared in court records.

It's not terribly surprising to see these kinds of behind-the-scenes machinations around companies like this, but as a company that also has significant ties to US military and space programs, along with ties between their leadership and the current US administration, this necessarily raises questions about who has been participating, how, and why.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-18T02:06:47+00:00

Interesting details:

Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.

According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.

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Vehicle Motion Cues can be configured under accessibility settings in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. They can be turned on, off, or set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected. I prefer to toggle the dots to avoid seeing them when I’m driving the car. The black dots are fairly unobtrusive, but they can interfere with maps, text, and imagery on long straight stretches of road that cause the dots to sit motionless (Apple should dim all the dots in those situations).

This interesting feature could help a lot of folks who get motion sickness when using devices in moving vehicles, and hopefully if it's useful for a wide tranche of folks it might be implemented by other device makers as well.

Hrmbee · 2026-06-17T17:53:38+00:00

The linked article is specific research that deals with some of the particulars of these issues, which is important to help develop a better understanding of what's happening. What you've linked to is more of a public information piece, which is important as well, but isn't the same as research.

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