🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

🦔Leonardo is a $17 billion defense contractor. It built a system called SignalTrace that clips sensors onto the license plate readers already mounted on street poles, overpasses, and police cars across the US. Every time you drive past one, the sensor grabs the Bluetooth and WiFi signals from every device in your car, ties them to your plate, and logs the time and location. Your phone, your AirPods, your kid's tablet. All of it goes into the same file. A friend rides with you once and their devices are linked to your plate. Leonardo has sold this to police departments since at least 2023. There is no federal law covering it, no opt-out, and no warrant requirement. My Take None of the pieces here are new. Your phone has always broadcast a signal. The license plate cameras were already there. Leonardo just connected them and found a buyer. Nobody had to break a law or build anything from scratch. They assembled a surveillance system from parts already in place and sold it before anyone noticed. Most people found out this week from a 404 Media investigation. Leonardo received the patent in 2024. By the time you hear about something like this, the deals are done and the sensors are on the poles. That's how it works now. Hedgie🤗 404media.co/this-company-wil…