Briefly stopping by because closings in US v Google are today! And I sifted through the thousands of pages of stuff unsealed Tuesday so you dont have to:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Before Tesla's EV charging team got the plug pulled, it was earning more federal EV $$ than anyone

Still, says the Biden admin: 'we don’t expect individual business decisions to impact EV charging projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.'
fastcompany.com/91116917/elon-…

Major investor in this platform continues to imprison people for posts made on this platform.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

For the last few years, was almost as though 'militia' became a dirty word...but that seems to be changing.

I have a story in WIRED today about how militias, after laying low since Jan 6, have been quietly re-organizing and rebuilding on Facebook.

wired.com/story/extremis…

Tesla Lays Off Entire Team Behind Brakes

theonion.com/tesla-lays-off…

Uber patent on a driver dispatch system based on driver profiles that include age, height, weight, gender, eye color, hair color, country of origin, family background, 'work ethic', 'affiliation' with 'scandalous' groups, 'propensity' towards 'irresponsible behavior' etc. Wild.

NEW: Border communities in Texas have purchased a technology that tracks people through their Bluetooth and WiFi signals. It can track you through your wireless earbuds. The product is called Trafficatch & it's integrated into license plate reader systems
notus.org/technology/war…

Today the FCC has fined US telcos $200 million for illegally sharing phone location data. This comes after a NYTimes investigation into how corrupt law enforcement were using this data, and then my investigation on bounty hunters being able to buy it docs.fcc.gov/public/attachm…

The Russian government copy pasted Wikipedia to a new site, censored the articles, then banned the original Wikipedia. Head of new Russian government Wikipedia is the old admin of real Russian Wikipedia

404media.co/russia-clones-…

And of course, TikTok swings back. Great story from Makena Kelly and Tori Elliott wired.com/story/tiktok-b…

Keep an eye on this tactic as elections near globally. Remember that IRGC went after the content management systems of media companies in 2020 as part of their bigger campaign. therecord.media/hackers-breach…

'My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since Jan, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly...GM’s spokeswoman [said] this data collection happened only to people who…

Husk Power has built more than 200 solar #minigrids (profitably!) in India + Nigeria, w/ an interesting model: to stimulate demand in places where electricity access is novel, they made an Amazon-like app where customers can buy appliances & electronics 🔌fastcompany.com/91030561/husk-…

Today's newsletter is the story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground.

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…

The magic lantern really was a breakthrough technology—it was a precursor to film—but it was popularized by illusionists, charlatans, and grifters, who traveled from town to town claiming to be able to do things like conjure the dead and commune with the devil.

NEW - AI is now writing up police reports, via multi-billion dollar cop contractor and Taser maker Axon.

What could go wrong?

w/ Richard Nieva

forbes.com/sites/thomasbr…

Amazing that a chip bricked in 46-yr-old Voyager I, preventing it from sending data, and NASA figured out how to split up and reallocate its functions to other hardware, sending code 15 billion miles away (45 hours round trip!)--and Voyager's back online. blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/0…

So many incredible details here about TSMC's efforts to bridge Taiwanese and American worker divides at its new Arizona chips factory

restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-ariz…

It was a great pleasure to edit the first (of what I hope are many) issues of Compiler, a new magazine of global tech policy, helmed by Michael B. Farrell.

Last March in Wisconsin, an AI program used to analyze police bodycam footage detected alleged police misconduct that helped get a case dismissed. I dug into AI speech startups seeking to analyze the glut of police bodycam footage for MIT Technology Review technologyreview.com/2024/04/16/109…