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Category: law

The Texas House of Representatives has passed the third reading of SB 21, a bill that seeks to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve in the state. The bill passed in a 101–42 vote and will now go to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to either sign into law or veto.

SB 21, authored by state Senator Charles Schwertner, establishes a Bitcoin reserve that is managed by the state’s comptroller. The legislation allows the comptroller to invest in any cryptocurrency with a market cap above $500 billion over the previous 12-month period. Currently, the only cryptocurrency fitting the requirement is Bitcoin.

Before the vote, state Representative Giovanni Capriglione said to the chamber that the bill was a “pivotal moment in securing Texas’s leadership in the digital age with the passage of our strategic Bitcoin reserve. Now, we embrace a modern asset with traditional properties for future promise.” The bill passed in the Texas Senate in a 25–5 vote on March 6.

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Is Gemini 2.5 Pro the AI breakthrough that will redefine machine intelligence? Google’s latest innovation promises to solve one of AI’s biggest hurdles: true reasoning. Unlike chatbots that regurgitate data, Gemini 2.5 Pro mimics human-like logic, connecting concepts, spotting flaws, and making decisions with unprecedented depth. This isn’t an upgrade—it’s a revolution in how machines think.

What makes Gemini 2.5 Pro unique? Built on a hybrid neural-symbolic architecture, it merges brute-force data processing with structured reasoning frameworks. Early tests show it outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3 in complex tasks like legal analysis, medical diagnostics, and ethical dilemma navigation. We’ll break down its secret sauce: adaptive learning loops, context-aware problem-solving, and self-correcting logic that learns from mistakes in real time.

How will this impact you? Developers can build AI that understands instead of just parroting, businesses can automate high-stakes decisions, and educators might finally have a tool to teach critical thinking. But there’s a catch: Gemini 2.5 Pro’s \.

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Japan on Friday enacted a new law that would permit the country’s authorities to preemptively engage with adversaries through offensive cyber operations to ensure threats are suppressed before they cause significant damage.

The new law, which was first mooted in 2022, is intended to help Japan strengthen its cyber defense “to a level equal to major Western powers” and marks a break from the country’s traditional approach to cyber defense, which had tracked closely to its Article 9 constitutional commitment to pacifism.

The new Active Cyberdefense Law mirrors recent reinterpretations of Article 9, providing Japan’s Self-Defence Forces with the right to provide material support to allies under the justification that failing to do so could endanger the whole of the country.

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Persuasion is a fundamental aspect of communication, influencing decision-making across diverse contexts, from everyday conversations to high-stakes scenarios such as politics, marketing, and law. The rise of conversational AI systems has significantly expanded the scope of persuasion, introducing both opportunities and risks. AI-driven persuasion can be leveraged for beneficial applications, but also poses threats through manipulation and unethical influence. Moreover, AI systems are not only persuaders, but also susceptible to persuasion, making them vulnerable to adversarial attacks and bias reinforcement. Despite rapid advancements in AI-generated persuasive content, our understanding of what makes persuasion effective remains limited due to its inherently subjective and context-dependent nature. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of computational persuasion, structured around three key perspectives: AI as a Persuader, which explores AI-generated persuasive content and its applications; AI as a Persuadee, which examines AI’s susceptibility to influence and manipulation; and AI as a Persuasion Judge, which analyzes AI’s role in evaluating persuasive strategies, detecting manipulation, and ensuring ethical persuasion. We introduce a taxonomy for computational persuasion research and discuss key challenges, including evaluating persuasiveness, mitigating manipulative persuasion, and developing responsible AI-driven persuasive systems. Our survey outlines future research directions to enhance the safety, fairness, and effectiveness of AI-powered persuasion while addressing the risks posed by increasingly capable language models.

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Countries in the Global South risk being left out of the quantum revolution — along with its economic, technological and security benefits — due to growing export controls, siloed research initiatives and national security concerns, a new policy analysis argues.

In the first of a series of articles on quantum technologies published by the policy journal Just Securit y, researchers Michael Karanicolas, of Dalhousie University, and Alessia Zornetta, of UCLA Law, examine how the geopolitics of emerging quantum technologies are replicating long-standing patterns of technological exclusion. The authors argue that absent meaningful interventions, quantum could become another engine of global inequality, one that threatens to lock poorer nations out of the next era of technological and economic development.

The authors trace the roots of this divide to export control regimes that are quickly expanding in response to the strategic potential of quantum systems. Since 2020, governments in the U.S., EU and China have implemented targeted restrictions on quantum-enabling hardware, software, and communications systems.

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Adriano V. Autino gave a Technical Presentation at U.N. COPUOS Legal Subcommittee, the 6 May 2025, on behalf of Dennis O’Brien, Chair of the Space Renaissance Academy Space Law Comittee: “Clarifying ambiguities of the Outer Space Treaty”

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Researchers from ETH Zurich have carried out the largest field study to date, to find out whether heat pumps are running efficiently. When looked at in operation, it turns out that these units are often not optimally configured. Monitoring systems and legal standards could provide a remedy

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The juridical metaphor in physics has ancient roots. Anaximander, in the 6th century BCE, was perhaps the first to invoke the concept of cosmic justice, speaking of natural entities paying “penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time” (Kirk et al., 2010, p. 118). This anthropomorphizing tendency persisted through history, finding its formal expression in Newton’s Principia Mathematica, where he articulated his famous “laws” of motion. Newton, deeply influenced by his theological views, conceived of these laws as divine edicts — mathematical expressions of God’s will imposed upon a compliant universe (Cohen & Smith, 2002, p. 47).

This legal metaphor has served science admirably for centuries, providing a framework for conceptualizing the universe’s apparent obedience to mathematical principles. Yet it carries implicit assumptions worth examining. Laws suggest a lawgiver, hinting at external agency. They imply prescription rather than description — a subtle distinction with profound philosophical implications. As physicist Paul Davies (2010) observes, “The very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm” (p. 74).

Enter the computational metaphor — a framework more resonant with our digital age. The universe, in this conceptualization, executes algorithms rather than obeying laws. Space, time, energy, and matter constitute the data structure upon which these algorithms operate. This shift is more than semantic; it reflects a fundamental reconceptualization of physical reality that aligns remarkably well with emerging theories in theoretical physics and information science.

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