When Skydio, a young maker of drones in San Mateo, California, sent a customer proposal in 2023 to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, its chief of staff, Mike Gennaro, forwarded the email to VC Ben Horowitz. “Which deployment are you looking to do?” Horowitz wrote back. “Whatever you want, Ben,” Gennaro replied, according to […]
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are continuing their fight against fines for selling user location data, with two of the big three carriers submitting new court briefs arguing that the Federal Communications Commission can't punish them.
"Verizon's petition for review stems from the multiple and significant errors that the FCC, in purporting to enforce statutory consumer data privacy provisions, made in overstepping its authority," Verizon wrote. "The FCC's Forfeiture Order violated both the Communications Act and the Constitution, while failing to benefit the consumers it purported to protect."
A Michigan man who ran chat rooms and Discord servers targeting children playing online games and coercing them into self-harm, sexually explicit acts, suicide, and other violence was sentenced to 30 years in prison Thursday.
According to the US Department of Justice, Richard Densmore was a member of an online terrorist network called 764, which the FBI considers a "tier one" terrorist threat. He pled guilty to sexual exploitation of a child as "part of a broader indictment that charged him with other child exploitation offenses." In the DOJ's press release, FBI Director Christopher Wray committed to bring to justice any abusive groups known to be preying on vulnerable kids online.
“This defendant orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence,” Wray said. “If you prey on children online, you can’t hide behind a keyboard. The FBI will use all our resources and authorities to arrest you and hold you accountable.”
President-elect Donald Trump looped in Elon Musk on his phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to Axios. As one of Trump’s top campaign donors, Musk has forged a strong alliance with the incoming president. The Tesla CEO has been rumored as a candidate for a position in Trump’s cabinet, and his […]
The lawsuit was filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He feared that Meta might sue to block his tool, Unfollow Everything 2.0, because Meta threatened to sue to block the original tool when it was released by another developer. In May, Zuckerman told Ars that he was "suing Facebook to make it better" and planned to use Section 230's shield to do it.
Zuckerman's novel legal theory argued that Congress always intended for Section 230 to protect third-party tools designed to empower users to take control over potentially toxic online environments. In his complaint, Zuckerman tried to convince a US district court in California that:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has notified Chinese chip design companies that it will suspend production of their most advanced artificial intelligence chips, as Washington continues to impede Beijing’s AI ambitions.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, told Chinese customers it would no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometers or smaller as of this coming Monday, three people familiar with the matter said.
Two of the people said any future supplies of such semiconductors by TSMC to Chinese customers would be subject to an approval process likely to involve Washington.
The Republican who is likely to lead the Federal Communications Commission under President-elect Donald Trump detailed how he would run the agency when he wrote a chapter for the conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Carr, a longtime opponent of net neutrality rules and other broadband regulations, has also made his views clear numerous times when opposing rulemakings initiated by the current Democratic majority.
If Trump makes Carr the next FCC chairman after his inauguration, the FCC is likely to ditch consumer protection initiatives, like a recently announced inquiry into data caps, and attempt to regulate Big Tech companies while reducing regulation of Internet service providers. That could include forcing Big Tech companies to pay into a fund that subsidizes ISPs' broadband network construction.
A Carr-led FCC could also try to punish news organizations that are perceived to be anti-Trump. Just before the election, Carr alleged that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live was "a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC's Equal Time rule," and that the FCC should consider issuing penalties. Despite Carr's claim, NBC did provide equal time to the Trump campaign.
One frustrated customer wants to force Intel to pay untold millions in damages, claiming the company deceptively marketed faulty 13th- and 14th-generation CPUs as "enabling amazing experiences to happen on the PC," when instead products were prone to crashes and blue screens.
In a proposed class action, a New York man, Mark Vanvalkenburgh, said that he regretted falling for Intel's marketing of its 13th-gen CPU as "the world’s fastest desktop processor" capable of delivering "the best gaming, streaming and recording experience" available today.
He and possibly millions of others "reasonably" believed both the 13th- and 14th-gen CPUs would "perform as advertised"—only to discover they'd purchased a reliably "unstable" product triggering "random screen blackouts and random computer restarts" that PC Mag warned perhaps caused "permanent" CPU damage.
With all eyes on how a new Trump administration in the U.S. will interface with China Tech in the years ahead, its neighbor to the north has leveled a blow to one of the biggest apps to come out of the country. Canada has ordered the closure of ByteDance’s operations in Canada — specifically the […]
Following Donald Trump’s election victory, thousands of bettors anticipate a potential $450 million payout from online betting sites, says Reuters. As Trump’s odds surged on so-called prediction markets near the end of the race, platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket gained attention for diverging sharply from traditional polls, which suggested a much closer race. Talking with […]
"Right now, China is afraid of Google," Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have "great companies" to compete.
Trump's comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.
Early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump became the presumptive winner of the 2024 US presidential election, setting the stage for dramatic changes to federal AI policy when he takes office early next year. Among them, Trump has stated he plans to dismantle President Biden's AI Executive Order from October 2023 immediately upon taking office.
Biden's order established wide-ranging oversight of AI development. Among its core provisions, the order established the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and lays out requirements for companies to submit reports about AI training methodologies and security measures, including vulnerability testing data. The order also directed the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidance to help companies identify and fix flaws in their AI models.
Trump supporters in the US government have criticized the measures, as TechCrunch points out. In March, Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) warned that reporting requirements could discourage innovation and prevent developments like ChatGPT. And Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) characterized NIST's AI safety standards as an attempt to control speech through "woke" safety requirements.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday that it will be taking action against the online cash app and neobank Dave, which it says used “misleading marketing to deceive consumers.” At issue is how Dave marketed $500 cash advances to consumers that it rarely offered, and the “Express Fee” it charged if customers wanted […]
On Tuesday, two AI startups tried convincing the world their AI chatbots were good enough to be an accurate, real-time source of information during a high-stakes presidential election: xAI and Perplexity. Elon Musk’s Grok failed almost instantly, offering wrong answers about races’ outcomes before the polls had even closed. On the other hand, Perplexity offered […]
Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of "when" not "if" companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.
During Trump's last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.
As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60 percent tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.
Elon Musk — the billionaire CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and the owner of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X — took a sharp swing to the right this election to support President-elect Donald Trump, using his vast wealth, influence, and megaphone on X to influence the outcome of the election. Musk’s support came […]
A grueling election cycle has come to a close. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S., and, with Republicans in control of the Senate — and possibly the House — his allies are poised to bring sea change to the highest levels of government. The effects will be acutely felt in the […]
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