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Category: Technology

UAE ‘spy sheikh’ bought secret stake in Trump company

UAE ‘spy sheikh’ bought secret stake in Trump company

The Wall Street Journal reports: Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities. The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by…

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ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare

ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare

Moustafa Bayoumi writes: The lethal force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meting out on American streets is rightly drawing loud condemnations from politicians and editorial boards across the nation and around the world. Now is the time we must start paying attention to another highly damaging part of ICE’s arsenal: the agency’s deployment of mass surveillance. I’m referring specifically to Mobile Fortify, a specialized app ICE has been using at least since May 2025. (Usage of the app was…

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The AI bubble will burst. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly

The AI bubble will burst. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly

Mark Surman writes: It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished, and the broader economy took a $5tn hit. Yet something remarkable emerged from the wreckage. The post-crash internet wasn’t defined by speculation, but…

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India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

Rest of World reports: On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident. The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley. Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. Nine months prior, he’d landed a coveted job at…

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For Silicon Valley’s fawning CEOs their lucrative partnership with Trump is all that matters

For Silicon Valley’s fawning CEOs their lucrative partnership with Trump is all that matters

Lila Shroff writes: Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president’s wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady’s name. Silicon Valley’s top…

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Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk

If you’re going to record ICE agents, recognize that the risks go beyond physical confrontation. Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images By Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface. Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements, while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer…

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AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

Wired reports: In 2016, hundreds of Russians filed into a modern office building on 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg every day; they were part of the now-infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. Day and night, seven days a week, these employees would manually comment on news articles, post on Facebook and Twitter, and generally seek to rile up Americans about the then-upcoming presidential election. When the scheme was finally uncovered, there was widespread media coverage and…

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Science is drowning in AI slop

Science is drowning in AI slop

Ross Andersen writes: On a frigid Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo, decided to stay in and complete a tedious task that he had been putting off for weeks. An editor from a well-known journal in his field had asked him to review a paper that they were considering for publication. It seemed like a straightforward piece of science. Nothing set off any alarm bells, until Quintana looked at the references…

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Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

The Guardian reports: Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and…

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‘Minority Report policing’: UK believes that through AI ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’

‘Minority Report policing’: UK believes that through AI ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’

The Telegraph reports: Criminals could be stopped before they strike under Minority Report-style policing plans. Police chiefs are evaluating around 100 projects in which officers are trialling the use of AI to help combat crime. The expanded use of AI and technology by police – with the aim of putting the “eyes of the state” on criminals “at all times” – is expected to be part of police reforms by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, in a white paper next…

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The tech billionaires behind Trump’s push to acquire Greenland

The tech billionaires behind Trump’s push to acquire Greenland

Lois Parshley writes: President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the “aggressive and confrontational” conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news…

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Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

The Guardian reports: Tech companies have been meeting government ministers at a rate of more than once per working day, enjoying high-level political access that dwarfs that of child safety and copyright campaigners, who called the pattern “shocking” and “disturbing”. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexualised images of women and children, were among the US tech companies holding hundreds of meetings with people at the heart of government,…

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The real AI talent war is for skilled tradespeople

The real AI talent war is for skilled tradespeople

Wired reports: AI companies like Meta and OpenAI have been offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to top talent, hoping to lure the best researchers and engineers away from their competitors. But there’s another dimension of the AI talent wars that has garnered far less attention: the massive shortage of electricians, plumbers, and heating and cooling technicians in the US who can build the physical data centers that power AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2024 and 2034, there…

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The AI debt surge: How tech’s borrowing binge may drive up interest rates

The AI debt surge: How tech’s borrowing binge may drive up interest rates

WebProNews reports: The artificial intelligence boom is fueling an unprecedented wave of capital spending, but it’s not just innovation that’s accelerating—it’s debt. Major technology companies, often dubbed hyperscalers, are issuing bonds at a record pace to finance the massive data centers required for AI advancements. This borrowing frenzy, while enabling rapid expansion, is raising alarms among economists and investors about potential upward pressure on interest rates. As these firms tap debt markets to fund their ambitions, the sheer volume of…

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Eoin Higgins: How tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left

Eoin Higgins: How tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left

  In this episode of Dystopia Now, we talked to journalist Eoin Higgins about his book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” which examines how Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk have used their wealth to shape media narratives, especially through journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

AI companies’ large language models don’t learn. They steal

AI companies’ large language models don’t learn. They steal

Alex Reisner writes: On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition…

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