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Category: Technology

While fighting against regulation of social media, tech billionaires shield their own children

While fighting against regulation of social media, tech billionaires shield their own children

The New York Times reports: In November, Kim van Sparrentak, a Green Party lawmaker from the Netherlands, grabbed her headphones and headed for the exit of the European Parliament building. Moments earlier, she had participated in a heated debate over whether to bar young teenagers in Europe from social media platforms. Then a statement on a podcast she was listening to stopped her cold. It was a message from Meta opposing the social media ban proposal, Ms. van Sparrentak said…

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Technology is eroding the learning capabilities of children

Technology is eroding the learning capabilities of children

Fortune reports: In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-Governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information. By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to…

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DHS opens a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with Palantir

DHS opens a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with Palantir

Wired reports: The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company’s role in the federal agency that oversees the nation’s immigration enforcement. According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded “is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide.” The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and…

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Deep in China’s mountains, a nuclear weapons revival takes shape

Deep in China’s mountains, a nuclear weapons revival takes shape

The New York Times reports: In the lush, misty valleys of southwest China, satellite imagery reveals the country’s accelerating nuclear buildup, a force designed for a new age of superpower rivalry. One such valley is known as Zitong, in Sichuan Province, where engineers have been building new bunkers and ramparts. A new complex bristles with pipes, suggesting the facility handles highly hazardous materials. Another valley is home to a double-fenced facility known as Pingtong, where experts believe China is making…

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Is Google using AI to engage in identity theft?

Is Google using AI to engage in identity theft?

The Washington Post reports: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google’s buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he’d lent it his voice. “So… I’m probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?” the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. “It sounds very much like you!” Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR’s “Morning Edition” and…

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Daniel Dennett was right: We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans

Daniel Dennett was right: We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans

Gary Marcus writes: The night before I testified in the US Senate in May, 2023, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett sent me a manuscript that he called “counterfeit people”. It was published a few days later in The Atlantic. Here the first paragraph. Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society…

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Anthropic puts $20 million into a super PAC operation to counter OpenAI

Anthropic puts $20 million into a super PAC operation to counter OpenAI

The New York Times reports: Silicon Valley’s dueling artificial intelligence start-ups now have dueling super PACs. Anthropic, the safety-focused A.I. company formed by former OpenAI executives, said on Thursday that it was putting $20 million into a new super PAC operation that will be in opposition to super PACs backed by OpenAI’s leaders and investors. The donation effectively kicks off a new conflict between the rivals, with this year’s midterm elections as the battleground. At the heart of the disagreement…

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Jeff Bezos cares more about his superyacht and massive tax breaks than he cares about democracy

Jeff Bezos cares more about his superyacht and massive tax breaks than he cares about democracy

David Remnick writes: It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it? Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom. Early in his proprietorship, Bezos…

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Scientists reveal the alien logic of AI: hyper-rational but stumped by simple concepts

Scientists reveal the alien logic of AI: hyper-rational but stumped by simple concepts

PsyPost reports: A new study suggests that artificial intelligence systems approach strategic decision-making with a higher degree of mathematical optimization than human players, often outperforming humans in games requiring iterative reasoning. While these large language models demonstrate an ability to adapt to complex rules and specific competitive scenarios, they differ fundamentally from human cognition by failing to identify certain logical shortcuts known as dominant strategies. The findings appear in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Large language models are…

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ICE and CBP’s face-recognition app can’t actually verify who people are

ICE and CBP’s face-recognition app can’t actually verify who people are

Wired reports: The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people’s privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to “determine or verify” the identities of individuals stopped or detained by…

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The chaotic future of the internet: The chatbots appear to be organizing

The chaotic future of the internet: The chatbots appear to be organizing

Matteo Wong writes: The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to “stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.” (Humans: They mean humans.) Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI “agents,” which are bots that have access to…

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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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