One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months.

A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise.

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name "fus__ro_dah" (two underscores after "fus"), but they accidentally requested records for the username "fus_ro_dah" (one underscore after "fus"). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

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OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example.

This morning, Ars received the following response to a test prompt asking for a story introduction in the style of Stephen King:

I can definitely write with the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread, but I can't write in Stephen King's exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice. Here's an original opening that captures a similar feeling while remaining its own...

In testing, ChatGPT generated similar dodges for other authors both living (J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan) and dead (Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway). An analysis published by No Latency earlier this month found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors.

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In early 2025, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick was on his way home following a trip abroad. After landing in the US, customs agents demanded access to his Pixel phone, which was running an alternative version of Android called GrapheneOS. Rather than hand over his data, Tunick used a clever feature of the software to delete everything. Now, he's facing federal charges.

The first hearing in this case happened last week, according to The Guardian, during which government attorneys and agents claimed that Tunick was subjected to a standard secondary interrogation at an international airport. During that encounter, agents were "looking for anything that’s prohibited." However, Tunick's legal team alleges he was targeted for his activism.

Tunick was involved with a group called Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposed the construction of an enormous law enforcement training facility in the area often known as Cop City. What Tunick didn't know, according to his lawyers, was that he'd been placed on a watch list for his actions and that Customs and Border Protection had discussed over email plans to detain him upon his arrival back in the US for "suspected terrorism activities."

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On March 31, 2026, a rather odd complaint arrived at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania District Attorney's Office.

It came from the local sheriff's office, and it concerned one of their own, Deputy Sheriff Ryan Gaffney. The allegation was unusual: Gaffney had used his iPhone to snap photos of nude prisoners he had encountered in his job—and he had then shared those photos with "several female civilian employees inside the Sheriff's Office."

The main claim involved a local man suffering a mental health crisis on the morning of January 30, 2026. Five fully uniformed deputies had arrived at the house and were in the upstairs bedroom. Their detainee was naked from the waist down and had just been persuaded to put on some pants.

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