Adi Robertson has been covering the intersection of technology, culture, and policy at The Verge since 2011. Her work includes writing about DIY biohacking, virtual and augmented reality, copyright law, online free expression, and the history of computing. You have probably seen her in a VR headset.
Apple’s iPhone empire spans the globe — and so does legal pushback.
Anthropic is seeking a preliminary injunction to block its designation as a military supply-chain risk, and it just faced off with the Trump administration before Judge Rita Lin, who’ll be making the call. A decision is anticipated in the next few days — for a sense of how the hearing went, you can check out Lawfare’s Molly Roberts Bluesky live-post.
A modest proposal from law professor Kate Klonick: acknowledge the failure of the ubiquitous “accept cookies” screen and abolish it posthaste:
Government can point to the highly visible cookie banner and declare its promise met in addressing data privacy issues. Industry, now that a compliance solution has been agreed on and normalized, prefers a known system with which they can easily comply and are unmotivated to push for a reform. While users, faced with endless click-throughs, learn not to assert their rights but to surrender them reflexively.
Tumblr’s unwelcome post-Ides of March gift to its userbase has been unceremoniously returned, as changes that dramatically altered the function of the site’s reblog feature are being reverted — though apparently the site still plans to introduce some kind of future update with more community input.
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A journalist from The Times of Israel writes about an escalating harassment campaign to make him falsely “correct” a story at the center of a Polymarket bet — and says a colleague at another outlet was even duped into helping:
He said that someone he knew asked him to ask me to change the report on the missile impact in Beit Shemesh, and that it would be “negligible” for me if I did make the change. The journalist had no idea why his acquaintance was demanding the change to the article until I told him what I understood was going on. He then confronted the acquaintance, who admitted to placing bets on Polymarket and confirmed my theory.
David Morris expands on his Verge story about Jeffrey Epstein and cryptocurrency in an interview with writer Wajahat Ali:
Invasive government and corporate surveillance isn’t inevitable — but Congress needs to act.
