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Category: Technology

Trump cuts are killing a tiny office that keeps measurements of the world accurate

Trump cuts are killing a tiny office that keeps measurements of the world accurate

Wired reports: Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US’s framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth’s gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former…

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Trump’s memecoin dinner welcomed guests holding tokens linked to alt-right symbols and racist language

Trump’s memecoin dinner welcomed guests holding tokens linked to alt-right symbols and racist language

Wired reports: As US president Donald Trump left the stage at his golf club near Washington, DC, on Thursday night, he pointed to the crowd, brought his index finger to his temple—as if to say: You know what’s coming—then began to dance. To the beat of “Y.M.C.A” by The Village People, Trump shimmied, gyrated, and pumped his arms above his head. Looking on were more than 200 people who had been invited to the Trump National Golf Club for a…

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Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Fortune reports: Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk, widely viewed as the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, is inflicting serious damage on the image of his companies. On Tuesday, a new Axios Harris annual reputation poll showed that Tesla has continued to fall in the eyes of Americans ever since Musk waded full-on into the nation’s hyper-partisan political debate with the acquisition of Twitter. Prior to the $44 billion deal, the electric vehicle manufacturer came in eighth place in…

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Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Kate Knibbs writes: As I waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less. Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber…

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Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

The Washington Post reports: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found. Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime….

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Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

An outrigger canoe would typically have several paddlers and one navigator. AP Photo/David Goldman By Richard (Rick) Feinberg, Kent State University Wet and shivering, I rose from the outrigger of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. We’d been at sea all afternoon and most of the night. I’d hoped to get a little rest, but rain, wind and an absence of flat space made sleep impossible. My companions didn’t even try. It was May 1972, and I was three months into doctoral…

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The day Grok told everyone on X about ‘white genocide’

The day Grok told everyone on X about ‘white genocide’

Ali Breland and Matteo Wong write: Yesterday, a user on X saw a viral post of Timothée Chalamet celebrating courtside at a Knicks game and had a simple question: Who was sitting next to him? The user tapped in Grok, X’s proprietary chatbot, as people often do when they want help answering questions on the platform—the software functions like ChatGPT, except it can be summoned via reply to a post. And for the most part, Grok has performed reasonably well…

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The Trump administration leaned on African countries. The goal: get business for Elon Musk

The Trump administration leaned on African countries. The goal: get business for Elon Musk

By Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk. Starlink,…

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AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

Adi Robertson writes: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.” The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already…

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Silicon Valley is bracing for chaos

Silicon Valley is bracing for chaos

Matteo Wong writes: On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was…

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The risks from chemicals in our food may be even worse than Kennedy suggests

The risks from chemicals in our food may be even worse than Kennedy suggests

Julia Belluz writes: The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes toxic chemicals in food are behind the U.S. explosion in rates of obesity and a range of other chronic illnesses. “A facade of normalcy has masked this meteoric rise in chronic disease, and we can no longer ignore it,” he said recently. He intends to rid the U.S. food supply of nine chemicals — all petroleum-based, synthetic food dyes — in as soon as 18 months. Mr. Kennedy has…

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Musk’s regulatory troubles have begun to melt away in Trump’s second term

Musk’s regulatory troubles have begun to melt away in Trump’s second term

NBC News reports: Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s regulatory problems have started to fade into the past. Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to…

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U.S. pushes nations facing tariffs to approve Elon Musk’s Starlink, cables show

U.S. pushes nations facing tariffs to approve Elon Musk’s Starlink, cables show

The Washington Post reports: Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho, the country’s communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink. The satellite business, owned by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly…

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Tesla sales plunge across Europe

Tesla sales plunge across Europe

CNN reports: Tesla’s sales continue to dive across Europe even as car buyers there increasingly buy electric vehicles. Tesla sales were down sharply in April in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Portugal, as well Sweden and France, according to monthly sales figures. Just like in the United States, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s politics has inspired backlash and protests across Europe. Musk has backed some far-right political candidates in Germany and the UK. And given his high-profile role in…

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DNI Tulsi Gabbard appears to be a security clutz

DNI Tulsi Gabbard appears to be a security clutz

Wired reports: Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the US spy chief. WIRED reviewed Gabbard’s passwords using databases of material leaked online created by the…

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Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

  ‘The rise of end times fascism‘ by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor was published in The Guardian on April 13. The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med…

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