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.
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.
Shortly after US District Judge Edward Davila said he was “highly likely” to grant Apple’s injunction, OpenAI voluntarily conceded instead. It agreed not to use Apple’s proprietary information for product development while the rest of the lawsuit plays out, and will hand over forensic images of the drives of 14 employees who defected from Apple.
“TP-Link would begin assembling these Wi-Fi 8 devices in the United States by next year,” it claims in a letter to the FCC — if the FCC will exempt its routers from the foreign router ban. Notably, both Netgear and Asus got exemptions without promising to make routers in the US, even though the FCC’s paperwork requires companies to commit to US manufacturing to get that exemption.
US District Judge Edward Davila said during a hearing on Wednesday that he’s “highly likely” to grant Apple an injunction preventing OpenAI from using proprietary information allegedly shared by the iPhonemaker’s former employees, according to a report from Bloomberg.
At the same time, OpenAI is accusing an ex-employee of taking confidential product plans and presenting them to Apple execs.
In the wake of a spate of ICE shootings, the Government Accountability Office recommended that ICE agents’ body-worn cameras automatically activate whenever an officer draws a weapon — but DHS disagrees.
Though DHS agreed with other recommendations in the GAO report, the department’s financial management director said auto-activated body cameras would pose “significant operational risks, including advertent or false activations during routine movement,” and could lead to the “unauthorized recording of sensitive interactions with informants or victims.”
[The Washington Post]
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
District Judge Timothy Kelly extended his 14-day restraining order to last the duration of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MS Now, and Politico against Donald Trump’s White House after their press access was revoked. Kelly said the publications are “likely to succeed not only on their due process claim, but also on their two First Amendment claims.”
[UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA]
The Entertainment Software Association says in a “notorious markets” filing to the US Trade Representative that Anbernic’s emulator handhelds normalize “hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product,” as reported by TorrentFreak. The ESA is nominating Anbernic and other online marketplaces for the USTR’s “2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.”
One year after a judge dismissed wiretapping charges against Burke, a federal grand jury has indicted him based on similar claims, as reported earlier by The Desk. Burke was arrested in 2024 in connection with an alleged hack on Fox News, which leaked parts of an unaired interview between Tucker Carlson and Ye (formerly Kanye West).
Following Trump’s attempt to rename AI, which Silicon Valley is falling in line with, si.gov is the “official home of America’s work to lead the world in Super Intelligence.” It has a lot of Fancy Web Design animations that are honestly really distracting.
Also, ai.gov now redirects to the new site.
So far, so Sony, Nintendo, or Logitech. The twist? Technically GoPro never claimed the refunds either. In February this year, just ahead of the Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s tariffs were illegal, it sold its tariff refund claim for an immediate cash payout. The company had raised prices on many of its products in summer 2025.
[Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy]
Hackers are increasingly using vulnerable civilian cameras to track, surveil, and aid attacks on opposing military operations, with an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras impacted globally. That ranges from Iran watching through chicken coop cameras in Israel, Ukraine monitoring Russian submarines via external building surveillance, and corporate teleconferencing devices being hacked through unsecured apps.
[Wall Street Journal]
The state just released the complete version of a redacted suit first filed in January, with specifics on harmful conversations including encouraging one user to starve themselves. Character.AI has faced repeated lawsuits over the issue, some of which it has settled, and added restrictions on teen usage. State AG Russell Coleman told The Verge:
“If the United States is going to lead the world in developing AI, it can’t be with graphic and dangerous chatbots that prey on children.”
Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
The FCC has been cracking down on some Chinese test labs that improperly helped authorize gadgets for import into the US — now, it wants to get rid of Chinese labs altogether starting December 2028, only authorizing labs if they have a reciprocal economic relationship with the US. It’ll vote on October 29th; you can read the whole argument here.
Trump today announced that Katie Zacharia, a conservative commentator, will be his new press secretary, and three small bets were placed yesterday and today about her appointment, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The two bets placed today for approximately $74 and $80 happened at about 1:41PM ET, which was shortly before press reported on the appointment, and are “expected to pay out $3,689 and $4,023,” the WSJ says.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Another person was doxxed because of the Cornell rape lawsuit — this time, it was a man who shares a name with one of the defendants, and who didn’t attend Cornell at all.
In the order to seal the complaint and other documents, judge Phaedra F. Perry Bond wrote that “everyone involved, be it the public, parties, or their attorneys, needs to do their part in bringing the temperature down before someone gets hurt.”
