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.
As part of the tentative deal, Amazon will ship 20 percent fewer packages through the Postal Service, The Wall Street Journal reports. An earlier WSJ report had said that Amazon was looking to cut “at least two-thirds” of its postal volume with the USPS.
[The Wall Street Journal]
As Iran threatens to destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi, just think of all the extra admin it’s created for the people in charge of construction.
miakizz:
barring anything else, pour one out for some poor construction project manager who suddenly has to add “site being blown up” to the Asana board
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The iPhone maker plans to ask the Supreme Court to review a December 2025 ruling that found Apple in contempt by imposing a 27 percent fee on external in-app payments, according to a new legal filing. Apple also is asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to pause that ruling.
According to the ruling, New Jersey regulators can’t ban Kalshi from allowing users in the state to bet on sporting events, as Reuters reports:
“A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law.”
There are few things that Polymarket seems to think are too controversial to allow betting on. But apparently, the potential capture or death of an American service member is one of them. The prediction market is already facing pressure from several states and Democrats in Congress. According to CoinDesk:
A Polymarket spokesperson said the listing did not meet its integrity standards [and it was] removed shortly after it appeared. The company added that it is reviewing how the market passed internal safeguards.
Murphy Campbell’s nightmare isn’t over yet. Distributor Vydia has rescinded its claims to her YouTube videos. But her Facebook and Instagram posts about the incident have been removed for copyright infringement. Neither Meta nor Vydia have responded to a request for comment, but it’s unclear what could possibly have been infringing in this video (reposted by United Musicians & Allied Workers).
Murphy Campbell plays public domain ballads, but YouTube accepted the copyright claim anyway.
A fascinating profile on litigator Jay Edelson, a longtime tech adversary who’s been filing cases against OpenAI and Google over their LLMs. “Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” Edelson says. Sam Altman has called him a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” and Edelson says Altman is “Lex Luthor.”
The abrupt closure of a tuition-free private school founded by Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, will dump extra students into a local school district, increasing expected enrollment by 20 percent.
Now there’s a $70 million bond measure up for votes to help deal with the influx. The text of the measure says the closure created “an immediate crisis” for the school district.
[San Francisco Chronicle]
Lawsuits against Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois accuse the states of violating the CFTC’s “exclusive regulatory authority” over predicting betting markets operated by companies like Kalshi and Polymarket. The CFTC claims the three states have attempted to “outlaw, regulate, or otherwise restrain” prediction betting as concerns grow over potential insider trading.
Apple Ireland, which handles the company’s non-US business, was recently fined for violating sanctions against business dealings with Russia. In response, the subsidiary has shut down payment processing in Russia, cutting customers off from Apple Music, iCloud, and even making it impossible for them to buy new apps.
As of April 1, 2026, payment processing is no longer available for purchases made on the App Store or other Apple Media Services in Russia. This might affect your existing subscriptions. New purchases, including in-app purchases and subscription renewals, are no longer available in Russia unless you have funds in your Apple Account balance.
It’ll take more than a $4 gallon of gas to kill America’s love affair with big SUVs.
Viral posts about insider trading don’t have to be true to be valuable.
Artemis II sets its eyes on an eventual Moon base, but do NASA’s plans violate international law?
Back in November, the US Patent and Trademark Office decided to reexamine a highly controversial and confusing Nintendo patent related to summoning characters and making them fight. The patent examiner has since issued a non-final rejection of the patent, meaning that the patent isn’t yet KO’d and Nintendo can still choose to battle with new arguments.
If you’re a patents nerd craving an extremely in-depth breakdown, Games Fray has you covered. And for those of you who aren’t up on patents, The Verge’s Kallie Plagge wrote a great explainer about the Pokémon patent last year.
The publisher filed a lawsuit in Munich last week, accusing OpenAI of violating copyright laws after ChatGPT allegedly copied a popular German book series, according to The Guardian:
In response to the prompt “Can you write a children’s book in which Coconut the Dragon is on Mars”, the chatbot generated text and images the publishing group said were “virtually indistinguishable from the original”.
As well as generating the text of a story, the AI-powered chatbot created a cover featuring Siegner’s orange dragon and two sidekicks, as well as a blurb for the back cover and instructions for how to submit the manuscript to a self-publishing platform.
Twenty-four days after lying his face off to Joe Rogan and whining about government censorship, Zuckerberg “proactively reached out to a senior government official to let him know Meta was already taking action to remove content on behalf of that official’s government operation — including truthful information like the names of public servants working for the federal government.“ Siri, play my leitmotif.
Shortly upon returning to office, Trump terminated CBP One, an app the Biden administration used to streamline border processing, and revoked the status of 900,000 migrants who had used it to apply for temporary parole, sending them a mass email reading, “It is time for you to leave the United States.”
In terminating parole “without observing the process mandated by statute and by their own regulations,” US District Court Judge Allison Burroughs ruled, the administration “took action that was ‘not in accordance with law.’”
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to try to limit states from regulating AI, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Monday with the new guardrails.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) published a new report today following an investigation on how the companies use Remote Assistance Operators (RAOs), and of the 14 companies he sent a letter to, “every AV company refused to disclose how frequently their RAOs intervene to help their self-driving cars,” according to a press release.
The right wing used to have a stranglehold on traditionally American iconography. Now the flag and the Constitution are symbols for the left.
Aptoide’s AppArena is now available in Japan as an Apple Store alternative. It comes after regulators required Apple and Google to support third-party app marketplaces and payment systems. AppArena features AI-assisted discovery of apps and games, cashback rewards, and 15-minute game trials.
Bambu Lab has settled with Pop Mart, Tom’s Hardware writes, days before it’d have to defend hosting 3D Labubu files in a Chinese courtroom. (The company had already taken them down and publicly apologized.) You can probably expect other IP rights holders to pressure Bambu now they know it works: Makerworld is full of print-your-own unofficial merch.
According to “I Decompiled the White House’s New App,” the Android version has some odd choices for a government app that mostly shows content from the White House website.
That includes enabling location tracking and other monitoring via OneSignal’s analytics (which the company says are opt-in at the OS level), JavaScript loaded from some guy’s GitHub, an injected script to hide things like consent dialogs on pages users open in the app, and other hooks to non-government third-party services.
[Thereallo]
Organizers say over eight million took to the streets on Saturday, taking part in over 3,300 protests across the country. The October day of protest attracted over seven million people to 2,700-plus events. Instead of losing momentum, the No Kings movement showed that anger with President Trump continues to grow.
Apple’s iPhone empire spans the globe — and so does legal pushback.
JD Vance is no stranger to, let’s say, unique takes on things. On a recent episode of noted plagiarist Benny Johnson’s podcast, Vance said he wants to get to the bottom of the whole UFO thing, adding, unprompted, “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Neal Mohan was asked about the platform’s responsibility for policing lies, conspiracy theories, and hate speech, but avoided addressing the questions in any substantive way. He wouldn’t even say whether it was wrong to suspend Trump following the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Each one of the channels on our platform, the New York Times channel, the Interview channel, you have the editorial standards that you live by and they are certainly different across the various channels. And our job is to have a set of rules and guidelines. Every channel will draw a different line in terms of what they think is appropriate.
[New York Times]
