On Wednesday, a rumor began popping up in Washington about a momentous policy change: the White House, it was said, would issue an executive order on Friday that would finally preempt state AI laws, handing over those regulatory powers to the federal government. The minute it leaked online, lawyers and policymakers began to scour every […]
“It’s a wrap … Don’t forget to buy an ‘i survived Belém’ shirt,” reads the opening line of an email I got Saturday, the final day of highly anticipated United Nations climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil. The email was sent from Shravya Jain-Conti, the US climate diplomacy lead at the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC), […]
The Department of Justice has announced a settlement with RealPage, the widely used rent-setting software that it accused of engaging in collusion to drive up rent prices by sharing previously private information from competing landlords. The settlement puts limits on RealPage’s ability to collect and use that data, and blocks it from being used to […]
Meta allegedly gave accounts engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex” 16 chances before suspending them, according to testimony from the company’s former head of safety and wellbeing, Vaishnavi Jayakumar. The testimony — along with several other claims that Meta ignored problems if they increased engagement — surfaced in an unredacted court filing related […]
In April, Elon Musk began backing away from his role as head of DOGE. By June, he was more or less fully gone from DC. In his wake, he left a power vacuum and significant ill will that has apparently led to the dissolution of DOGE eight months before its charter expires. To call Musk’s […]
It’s long been known that X (and Twitter before it) is a major venue for foreign influence campaigns to meddle in American politics. Much of the focus has been on Russian troll farms, which the US government has targeted on several occasions. But the launch of X’s About This Account feature may have revealed the […]
NBC News’s David Ingram analyzed a month’s worth of Elon Musk’s X posts (our condolences). While what he was able to glean wasn’t too surprising, it was still interesting to see the numbers all laid out. Between September 17th and October 17th, he posted 1,716 times, averaging a little over 55 posts a day. 49 […]
The more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein emails released earlier this month by the House Oversight Committee have been enough to prompt more investigations into the convicted child sex offender and the people around him, like former Harvard president and OpenAI board member Larry Summers. Now, Luke Igel and Riley Walz have reformatted the […]
Google and the Justice Department had their last chance to make their case before Judge Leonie Brinkema Friday before she decides whether Google needs to be broken up to remedy its ad tech monopoly. Brinkema expects to issue her ruling next year, but understands that “time is of the essence,” as Reuters reported. While the […]
For a long, long time, Windows looked like Windows. The version numbers and features changed, but the basic structure of the computer didn’t. With Windows 8, Microsoft tried to completely change things… and we know how that went over. So Windows, by and large, went back to being Windows. And people were mostly grateful for […]