Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.
‘I have been fighting about fixing this for months with people who didn’t think the harms are severe enough.’
Governor Greg Abbott announced a permitting pause for data centers in September. But state agencies are still processing permits, according to an analysis of public records by advocacy groups Public Citizen and FracTracker. The governor’s office, however, denies approving any data center-related permits.
After 15 years at Meta, the George W. Bush White House alum is exiting, Axios reports, amid a midterm election where Democrats are expected to win back more control in Washington. Kaplan will stay through 2027 to help with the transition, though, which will include bipartisan external affairs executives.
A market asking, “Any of the Cornell 7 charged with a felony sex crime?” racked up more than $450,000 in trading volume before it was removed by Polymarket, Front Office Sports reports. The prediction market defended the market, saying in part that it brought “objective, data-driven insight into how a matter like this is moving through the legal system.”
The Department of Homeland Security ordered the agencies to remove any technology created by the Chinese AI company over concerns that its models may transfer “sensitive data to the PRC,” according to Reuters. The ban also prevents civilian agencies from using third-party services that integrate DeepSeek’s AI models.
A massive review of local contracts by NBC News found 55 places where Flock entered no-bid contracts that escaped public scrutiny by claiming its products couldn’t be compared to others on the market. Another 11 were priced just below thresholds that would have required local council votes.
Navigating local procurement laws is up to each public agency, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said in statement, and the company provides “sole-source letters” when requested that help agencies determine if they meet the criteria.
Update: Added statement from Flock.
The request from political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was never fulfilled, ProPublica found, but staffers were shocked at the directive not to report flaws back to the voting machine company. It demonstrates why state officials’ trust in CISA has eroded.
The Illinois governor on AI, data centers, privacy, and Trump.
At a moment when voters are fearful of AI, Democrats are finding their footing.
In February 2025, US District Court of Delaware Judge Stephanos Bibas ruled against Ross Intelligence, which argued that training its legal AI on data scraped from Thomson Reuters was fair use. Now an appeals court has upheld that decision, though it remains sealed.
Frustrated by federal gridlock, cities and states across the political spectrum are taking matters into their own hands to rein in autonomous vehicles.
A spokesperson told MS Now that Meta pulled the organization’s account and locked out its admins during today’s protests. The profile page is back up, but the organization says it still doesn’t have access to the account. Neither Meta nor No Kings immediately responded to a request for comment.
Update October 18th: Meta’s Andy Stone posted on X that the suspension was part of an automated response that sometimes happens when accounts post at “very high frequencies.” He continued to say that the “automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”
The midterms edition of No Kings is underway, primarily focused on boosting early voting turnout rather than flooding the streets. If you want to keep up with all the news about the latest day of action as it’s happening, follow along at the States Newsroom live blog.
The latest day of action for the protest movement is today, but unlike previous rallies, this one is focused on increasing early voting turnout ahead of the November elections. Thousands of events are planned or already underway; as usual, there’s a map available on the site.
In July, we told you how the FCC — and its subcontractor TÜV Rheinland — didn’t bother to do basic Google searches before legally approving banned DJI technology for import and sale. But a new game of whack-a-drone was more successful. Public records show TÜV Rheinland asked the FCC to block applications from another “DJI front company,” Jovistar. The FCC agreed, and Jovistar is now on notice.
According to The Guardian, the campaign they’re funding is spending over $1 million per day trying to defeat Proposition 40, which would enact a one-time 5 percent tax on California’s billionaires. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is reportedly the biggest donor, contributing at least $102 million, alongside other tech executives:
The donors to the no campaign are a who’s who of Silicon Valley, including the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, crypto magnate Chris Larsen and several prominent venture capitalists.
According to the NYT’s sources, White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is out after just five days in the role, or, by our count, less than half of a Scaramucci. Her time in the role included prediction market intrigue and claims she may have misrepresented herself as an attorney despite failing the bar exam.
Cody Wilson says his AI model can generate new gun designs for 3D printing. We saw him fire the first one.
Beijing is reportedly considering adding 23 AI technologies to its export-control list, including chip designs, agents, model weights, and source code. China has been steadily gaining on the US with recent releases like Kimi K3, and has been the target of Western AI-related export controls amid growing competition to maintain control over the strategic technology.
[Bloomberg.com]
The law prevents kids under 14 from creating an account on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, while requiring parental permission for teens aged 14 or 15. The tech trade group NetChoice won an injunction blocking the law in 2025, but a judge later paused the injunction during the appeals process, as reported by NBC 6 South Florida.
It also demanded documents related to the AI companies’ safety practices, consumer privacy policies, and marketing materials, as part of “a probe focused on potential consumer protection violations,” Axios reports. Its sources also say the FTC “plans to compel top AI executives to testify about their products.”
In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.
The FCC would like you to know that its DJI ban is justified — because of the contents of sealed letters from the Pentagon that it has now forwarded to 16 congresspeople. Do they know something they’re not saying out loud? So far, the government hasn’t revealed a single shred of public evidence about a national security threat.
The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.
[London Review of Books]
County election officials claim they largely cleared the backlog by Wednesday, but the incident still raised alarms and prompted a lawsuit from voting rights groups. According to the New York Times:
The lawsuit, which named Mr. Howden and Freeman F. Martin, director of the Department of Public Safety, among its defendants, said the backlog had resulted from a programming error on a website for driver’s license applications that was also supposed to allow applicants to register to vote.
Because of the error, voters who checked “yes” to register to vote between December 2025 and February 2026 received a receipt confirming their choice, but their data was never recorded, the lawsuit said.
The export-restricted equipment for making RAM would go to SK Hynix’s Dalian, China facility, Reuters reports. Its sources say increasing SK Hynix’s production in China would help fund a US factory. SK Hynix is also separately reportedly in talks about making chips at an Intel facility in Ohio.
A Ukranian official tells Axios that Starshield — SpaceX’s government-focused internet service that runs on Starlink satellites — has been “restored to full capacity.” Sudden restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield services disrupted the military’s drone operations, officials said on Wednesday.
The musician and YouTuber on investigating the surveillance state and becoming the face of the anti-Flock movement.
