404 Media, which has been all over ICE’s spying ways, has two pieces worth reading this week. Yesterday, it documented how the agency is gleaning personal information from credit card applications. Today, it has a an eye-popping piece on the scale of the agency’s surveillance tools. As always this stuff reminds me of Glenn Grohe’s 1942 poster: “He’s Watching You.”
OpenAI can’t afford another lawsuit, especially not with a company like Apple.
A typical account on the prediction market platform also tended to primarily bet on a single topic, according to research from Pew. Sports are huge categories for both Polymarket and its competitor, Kalshi.
Over the last few years, the two companies have sought to differentiate themselves from traditional sports betting — and have tried to undercut one another as they fight for market share in the US.
[Pew Research Center]
The conservative backlash is about jobs, the environment, quality of life — and China.
While Paramount’s $110 billion WBD merger is suddenly on hold in the US, in Europe, the European Commission is ready to allow it after Paramount agreed to concessions including giving up its stake in United International Pictures within 13 months of the deal closing.
[European Commission]
The push to solve issues, including the soaring energy demands of AI data centers, using AI, revealed “more than $5 billion in Federal commitments” across 278 awards and 342 institutions in its list of awards.
Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google have announced millions in compute and AI credits for the effort, but this WSJ report says the administration could give political appointees more power over grants, while prioritizing fellowships and awards for individuals could hurt large universities reliant on federal research funding.
[Nextgov.com]
The former Federal Trade Commission chair under Biden will help lead the city’s Economic Development Corporation, alongside newly announced president Anthony Shorris, who recently worked as a partner at McKinsey.
Khan was known at the FTC for pursuing antitrust action against Big Tech, which often riled up the business community.
Michael Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director, writes on X that Moonshot accessed Nvidia’s high-end GB300 processors in Thailand, which are subject to strict export controls. Kratsios also accuses Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable AI model to build Kimi K3, an open-source AI system claimed to rival flagship models from US companies.
A federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against the web-scraping service SerpApi after finding that the tech giant’s allegations were “insufficient” to prove a copyright violation.
Google accused SerpApi of using “deceptive means” to scrape its search results, to which SerpApi argued that it’s just doing “what Google does to everyone else.“ The judge is giving Google 21 days to amend its complaint.
[Search Engine Roundtable]
Executive agencies including the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation are joining the app once declared a national security threat. Following the close of the deal to bring TikTok US under a US entity, the Justice Department said government employees are free to download it.
Both houses of France’s Parliament voted to approve a new law that could restrict under-15s from social media as soon as September 1st, while also banning cellphone use in high schools. Australia began restricting kids under 16 from social media last year, though a recent study found that many underage users can still access the platforms.
