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.
I like to think you can usually tell the difference between a Verge headline and an Onion one, but these days the lines are getting blurry.
endlessben:
I think you hit “Publish to The Verge” instead of “Publish to The Onion.” It’s ok, it happens.
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Yesterday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) publicly sent the director of the CIA an unclassified letter referring to a classified letter he had previously sent him, describing it as one “in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.”
Wyden is known to do this — as a legislator with a security clearance and a seat on the Senate intelligence committee, he is very careful not to disclose classified information — but when he sees something wild, he send up a vague signal flare that something is wrong. Spencer Ackerman recounts one of the previous times this happened, back in 2011: “It would take Edward Snowden, two years later, to reveal what Wyden was talking about.”
The fine, a measly £247,590 (about $335,000), is because Imgur owner MediaLab wasn’t checking users ages, and so handled young kids’ data without proper consent measures. After the ICO warned a fine was coming last September, Imgur started blocking UK users entirely — a ban which is still in effect.
The story of a man who spent 10 hours in a freezing federal building while his friends and family feared for the worst.
Egyptian regulators are planning a ban on the gaming platform to “protect children’s moral and educational values,” Bloomberg reports. Egypt will join a growing list of countries blocking Roblox, including Turkey and Russia. Some U.S. states are also eyeing restrictions on Roblox.
Fed up with increasing subscription prices, viewers embrace rogue streaming boxes.
There are many important safety reasons to support China’s move to ban hidden, electric door handles from EVs, but also a pettier one: they’re just bad, unintuitive, and inconvenient handles.
verge_user_m65nybmy:
Rejoice! Concealed handles are so dumb. What do you mean I have to press one side then pull the other? Just give me a handle ffs
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A Washington Post report digs into one 67-year-old man’s experience being targeted by a warrantless administrative subpoena that doesn’t need sign off from a judge or jury.
Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
The President announced a new $12 billion public-private partnership called Project Vault, meant to establish a strategic reserve of critical minerals. It’s expected to safeguard stores of rare earths and other materials used in batteries, smart phones, cars, planes, and more.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans for the ban on Tuesday, vowing to protect children “from the digital wild west,” the New York Times reports. The policy would bar users under 16 from social media platforms, mirroring Australia’s ban, and would require platforms to have “effective age-verification systems.”
[The New York Times]
Key privacy settings and best practices.
The Paris Prosecutor’s office announced that it’s abandoning X after French police raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media network on Tuesday, part of a year-long investigation into whether X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. Here’s a machine translation of its departing post:
“A search is being carried out at the French premises of X by the cybercrime unit of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, together with @CyberGEND and @Europol, as part of the investigation opened in January 2025. The Paris public prosecutor’s office is leaving X. Find us on Lkd and Insta.”
After ICE gassed a family-friendly protest in broad daylight, Portland is up in arms.
The Trump administration ordered five major offshore wind projects to pause construction in December, suddenly citing national security risks even though developers had previously secured approvals to start building. After the companies filed suit, federal courts have now allowed all five projects to start construction again.
The app began restricting access to users under 16 in compliance with Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age law. Though Snapchat says it will continue complying with the regulation, it argues that app store-level age verification is a better solution, helping to “ensure that young people encounter appropriate protections no matter where they go online.”
The Republican congressperson is reportedly so preoccupied with how the internet talks about her that she instructed staff to go to Reddit discussions about the “hottest women in Congress” to upvote and comment in support of her, according to a New York Magazine profile. Previous reporting also indicated that Mace’s staffers were asked to make burner social accounts to defend her.
[Intelligencer]
Internet shutdowns, smuggled Starlink terminals, and state-sponsored AI slop.
Under Eric Adams, NYC launched a chatbot to help businesses navigate government programs and regulations. Instead, reporting by The City and The Markup showed that it regularly encouraged illegal behavior, such as taking a portion of employees’ tips or refusing to accept cash payments. It apparently didn’t even know the minimum wage.
[THE CITY - NYC News]
Scenes from the general strike in Minneapolis.
The Trump administration is quietly weakening regulations meant to protect groundwater and limit radiation exposure to workers at new nuclear reactors, NPR reports. Trump has worked to speed up the deployment of new nuclear reactor designs to power AI data centers.
See below for what he had to say. (You can read that memo Cook is referencing here.)
The lack of an official public response so far is a noted contrast to a public statement on racism Cook shared in 2020.
