Thieves are increasingly targeting the copper wires that keep America’s power grids and phone networks running.

Often strung from utility poles or buried beneath our feet, copper wire has played a critical role in powering America’s electrical grid for more than a century.

But brazen thefts are threatening the grid, with thieves climbing onto car roofs to cut down telephone lines or prying open manholes in broad daylight to strip copper wiring.

The effects have been felt nationwide: roads and bridges going dark, 911 calls that fail to connect and higher utility bills as replacement costs get passed on to consumers.

The price of copper has driven the thefts, said one detective at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who requested anonymity due to the undercover nature of his role.

After the US Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, investment firms are in line for a whopping return on a niche trade.

Investment firms are on track for an enormous payday after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) struck down President Donald Trump’s signature tariff policy on Friday.

When Trump introduced sweeping tariffs on foreign goods last April, hedge funds and specialist investment firms began to bet on the possibility that the courts might rule that he had violated the law. They did that by purchasing the right to theoretical tariff refunds at cents on the dollar from struggling importers who wanted to swap the possibility of a future refund for an immediate cash payment.

Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security’s proposal to build “mega” detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation.

A PDF that Department of Homeland Security officials provided to New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte’s office about a new effort to build “mega” detention and processing centers across the United States contains embedded comments and metadata identifying the people who worked on it.

The seemingly accidental exposure of the identities of DHS personnel who crafted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mega detention center plan lands amid widespread public pushback against the expansion of ICE detention centers and the department’s brutal immigration enforcement tactics.

Metadata in the document, which concerns ICE’s “Detention Reengineering Initiative” (DRI), lists as its author Jonathan Florentino, the director of ICE’s Newark, New Jersey, Field Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations.

How the financialization of government policy blurs the line between public power and private sector profits.

Last year, reporting in Wired revealed that Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street investment bank, was buying up the rights to potential tariff refunds from companies at steep discounts, often for around 20–30 cents on the dollar. It’s a type of litigation finance in which sellers get quick liquidity and certainty, and the buyer, Cantor Fitzgerald in this case, assumes the legal risk.

Spotting financial anomalies is the name of the game. Cantor bet that if the Supreme Court struck down how Trump’s tariffs were imposed, those claims could suddenly be worth 100 cents on the dollar.

Yesterday, that bet may have paid off.

The attempted censorship of Stephen Colbert’s late-night interview with Texas’s U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico backfired so completely, with millions watching the interview on YouTube, that it may have made Talarico more likely to win his Democratic primary against Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Yet regardless of how you feel about the electoral outcome, the episode is another example of David Ellison and the new ownership at Paramount, parent company of CBS, signaling its intention to use one of the nation’s major broadcast networks as a tool for the Trump regime, with only sanctioned content going out over the airwaves.

That’s always been the fear associated with Paramount’s numerous attempts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), parent company of CNN. If that ever went through, the majority of the nation’s main cable news networks would be in the hands of conservative partisans.

Satellite companies want easier access, while carriers say that could upend licenses they purchased.

It's the latest twist in the saga of Blackstone’s attempted purchase of a utility that will serve 800,000 customers in New Mexico and Texas, and which has run into vociferous opposition.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 2026 – Researchers claim California regulators made misleading conclusions in a recent broadband study.

Analysts at both the New York Law School and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said the California Public Advocates Office’s (CPAO) January report, claiming Californians could save $1 billion annually with increased broadband competition, was false and misleading. 

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 2026 –  Boston's top official urged the Federal Communications Commission to preserve existing broadband price transparency requirements, arguing that proposed changes would weaken consumer protections and undermine affordability.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, D, said in recent comments with the FCC that the proposed revisions to broadband label rules would not enhance consumer choice and would be inconsistent with congressional intent. 

There is nothing publishers like more than to complain about platforms. Specifically, the tech giants whose apps are on your phone — right where they’d rather you had The Daily Gazette’s app installed.

Sometimes the complaints are couched in terms of theft — theft of ad dollars, theft of audience, theft of content. Sometimes it’s about power — the unparalleled reach they have into the minds of humanity. They’re like tollbooths plopped down onto the open internet, so deeply ingrained in modern life that they’re nigh unavoidable. (Go ahead, try to go a week without somehow engaging with a Google product. Heck, even a day.) There are few problems in contemporary journalism that a motivated publisher couldn’t somehow blame on Facebook.

But despite all those complaints, you don’t see a massive publisher exodus from these platforms. Sure, pulling your site from Google search isn’t a feasible option for a media company in 2026. But publishers still, for the most part, dedicate precious resources to filling up Facebook, Twitter, and the rest with #content. Despite the profound asymmetry in the relationships, news companies still feed those beasts.

One of the fastest-growing uses of the Internet is coming from AI scrapers. These are companies that crawl the web and scrape content to sell to AI companies to train models or sell to others looking for specific kinds of content. The scraping is done by bots that visit a website and copy the content.

This is all machine-to-machine traffic with no human involvement. This traffic doesn’t reach to homes or businesses but instead impacts the Internet by increasing the traffic between data centers on backbone fiber routes and at Internet hubs.

According to a report from Tollbit, at the beginning of 2025, there was one visit by an AI bot to a website for every 200 human visits. By the end of the year, that ratio dropped to one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits.

Scraping websites for content is a controversial activity since it often involves grabbing copyrighted materials from news sites and other sources.

The Meta CEO stuck to a playbook of repetitive answers and buzzwords in a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Mark Zuckerberg walked somewhat stiffly into a courtroom of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County at 9 am on the dot on Wednesday, having first been escorted into the building by a security detail that included two Department of Homeland Security officers. The venue, overseen by Judge Carolyn Kuhl, was bursting with spectators and media, many crammed elbow-to-elbow on benches, all there to witness the Meta CEO testify before a jury about allegations that his company’s products pose serious risks to younger users.

Specifically, Zuckerberg was on hand to answer questions as to whether Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram were intentionally engineered to be addictive—as well as allegations that the tech giant had deliberately targeted tweens and teens with engagement-boosting strategies that led to mental health crises. It was to be a crucial showdown in a lawsuit brought by a now 20-year-old Californian identified as K.G.M. (although her counsel usually referred to her by her first name, Kaley) and her mother against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok back in 2023. They allege that her compulsive use of those platforms accounts at an extremely young age caused severe psychological damage.

Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.

Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm’s use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff.

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.

A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.

AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages last year.

“If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir’s work across DHS, please reach out,” a Palantir executive wrote to employees about the massive purchasing agreement.

The industry news is always full of big events like mergers, bankruptcies, new regulations, or regulations killed. I’ve written many blogs about these kinds of issues, but I have rarely written about the unintended consequences of big industry changes. Today’s blog looks at two examples of unintended consequences.

The first is the decision  by EchoStar was to abandon the facility-based cellular business. There were several factors that led to the company’s decision to abandon the business line, but the company says the primary reason was pressure from the FCC to use the spectrum it owned or return it to the FCC for auction. The FCC was also pressuring the company to build faster and to get more customers.

One of the unintended consequences of the FCC nudging EchoStar out of the cellular business is that the company decided in 2025 that its best option for maximizing value was to sell the spectrum it planned to use for cell towers. 

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law today new legislation that aims to provide tens of thousands of low-income households in “The Land of Enchantment” an Internet lifeline similar to the now-expired federal Affordable Connectivity Program.

It makes the state the first to step up in the absence of federal action to support households that just can’t afford to pay for monthly service, and will directly support 173,000 households, offering up to a $30/month for qualified households to pay for Internet service.

Over the past year, I’ve watched rural broadband operators wrestle with an uncomfortable truth: growing USF dependency and intensifying competition are forcing a serious conversation about long-term sustainability. The knee-jerk response? Add more value-added services through vendor platforms.

Cities around the country are debating whether to keep their automatic license plate readers. Concerns about privacy and federal immigration agents accessing local data are driving these debates.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its data centers with unpermitted gas turbines, according to a Floodlight visual investigation. Thermal drone footage shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Miss., despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don't require permits. However, the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all,” the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

However, thermal images captured by Floodlight — and analyzed by multiple experts — show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA's recent ruling.