As public opposition to AI data centers grows nationwide, Microsoft points to its 20-year success in Quincy, Wash. But can this rural model survive today's energy crisis?

As data center backlash builds nationwide, Microsoft is pointing to Quincy, Wash., as Exhibit A in making the case that it’s a company communities can trust. But it’s not clear whether the conditions that made things work 20 years ago in the rural city still apply today.

On Thursday, Microsoft celebrated the community as the home of its first data center, hosting a public party and awarding $210,000 in grants to local organizations. Over its two decades in Quincy, the company has created jobs and contributed to property taxes that helped fund infrastructure including a high school and police station. The local poverty rate more than halved over 10 years, dropping to 13% in 2023.

“The story of Quincy, Washington, and Grant County is a story of data centers gone right,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a GeekWire interview.

The Yakama Nation is among the opponents, citing the cultural importance of the site.

The FCC’s broad power to require broadcast media to operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity” has long been a loaded gun available for abuse, and it has lately been used to justify a shocking rise in government speech suppression. The next Congress must pass legislation to narrow and define it.

After Noel Pichardo called out his city's embrace of Flock surveillance cameras, he was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years.

On an early fall afternoon in 2023, midway through a shift in Pawtucket’s District Five, Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo noticed a strange camera perched on a utility pole over West Avenue.

Pichardo was 28, five years into the job, and alone in his cruiser during one of the brief lulls between responding to the typical churn of radio calls for domestic disputes, petty disturbances, and welfare checks. The camera was compact and solar-powered, angled down toward passing traffic. Pichardo made a U-turn and drove beneath it again, more slowly this time, to get a better look.

He then began searching for the cameras on roads near highway ramps, at major intersections, along the routes into and out of the city. He found them again and again. By the time Pichardo finished circling the district, he knew exactly where he had seen them before.

Two years earlier, officers had gathered on the second floor of a small police substation in Pawtucket for a presentation about a surveillance system made by Flock Safety. 

For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.

On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported.

Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe has opened a new data center that will serve as an operational hub for its expanding fiber broadband network in Northern California.

The new NTIA Data Center is the latest step in the tribe’s broadband expansion across the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, Willow Creek and Trinity County. Hoopa Valley Tribe Vice Chairman Jordan Hailey said the project reflects years of work to strengthen local digital infrastructure.

The facility was built using funding from the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The Hoopa Valley tribe received a $65 million grant from the NTIA in 2022, per prior Tribal Business News reporting.

The federal funding has been part of a broader effort by the tribe to shift from vulnerable wireless connections to more resilient fiber infrastructure and expand broadband on and beyond the reservation.

Americans film ICE raids and police violence at personal risk. The footage shapes news cycles - then disappears. What if listening were built into democracy the way voting is? Lessons from India.

Key Takeaways

• Trust in American news is collapsing while ownership consolidates — but the appetite for credible information has never been higher.

• Ordinary people filming ICE raids, police violence, and the deaths of neighbors like Renée Good, Alex Pretti and George Floyd at the hands of federal agents or police are doing democratic work the press alone can’t do.

• This citizen witnessing is largely treated as episodic activism. It should be treated as civic infrastructure — public, sustained, built to last beyond the viral moment.

• India shows where unchecked media capture leads. It also acts as a mirror: looking at how Indian civil society has confronted the invisibility of the poor reveals blind spots Americans rarely name about their own media.

• The missing piece in US media reform isn’t more speech. It’s listening infrastructure — public systems built to receive lived experience and route it into journalism, policy, and governance. When people can tell their own stories and see those stories shape news and policy, they stop being subjects of coverage and become participants in democracy — and the decisions made about their lives start to reflect the realities they actually live.

Disney is going to court to defend its ABC television stations from the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.

On Tuesday, the media company filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Trump’s FCC is violating its First Amendment rights.

The administration “has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the lawsuit filed in DC District Court alleges.

The legal action comes as the FCC investigates the ABC talk show “The View” and mounts an unusual challenge to the licenses held by ABC stations.

The Office of the Governor and the University of Hawaiʻi today announced that deployment of $149.5-million in federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) projects is set to begin to bring reliable high-speed internet connections to Hawaiʻi‘s most rural and underserved communities. This effort marks a major milestone in the state’s ongoing initiative to provide universal access to affordable broadband internet on every island.

Hawaiʻi has finalized a $34-million contract with Hawaiian Telcom to deliver fiber-optic service to approximately 5,800 homes that currently lack modern broadband access. The effort, coordinated by the University of Hawaiʻi Broadband Office, follows years of planning, community engagement, and a competitive bidding process to ensure connectivity reaches those who need it most.

Advanced fiber upgrades offer transformative potential to thousands of disconnected residents.

Across the state, the BEAD program targets approximately 7,000 unserved and underserved locations, with about 82% of these locations slated to be served through state-of-the-art fiber-optic infrastructure.

U.S. efforts to ban Chinese tech are driven by corruption, crafted by incompetent zealots, and normalized by a shitty corporate press.

From 2019 to 2026 you might recall that U.S. policymakers were utterly obsessed with "Chinese influence" over TikTok.

For those seven years you couldn't spend a day without seeing a lawmaker or pundit hyperventilating over the claim that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, was controlled by the Chinese government, opening the door to privacy, foreign propaganda, and national security concerns (you were to ignore evidence was weak, and much of the hysteria was cultivated by a direct competitor).

How did Americans "solve" the problem?

The replacement of humans engaged in manual and mental labor is a reality and a specter that stalks all manner of people either in or would-otherwise-be-in the labor market.

In keeping with the Homer revival that Christopher Nolan has bestowed on us, I’ll begin this short discussion of AI and its associated anxieties with some lines from the Iliad in which Hephaistos, the god who worked as a blacksmith, is “working on 20 tripods … that of their own motion they could wheel into” Olympus.

“As if,” Aristotle, quoting the line, wrote in The Politics, “a shuttle could weave of itself.”

Today, Bronze Age magic is coming to the data center down the block (well, rising where the block once stood). And to the factory where robots do what was until recently the work of humans.

We look at major media news with Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy organization Free Press. She discusses the landmark lawsuit against Meta for making its social media platforms addictive for young people, efforts to halt the Paramount-Warner Bros. megamerger, and Disney’s lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over what it calls the Trump administration’s “retaliatory campaign” against the ABC television network.

González says President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian takeover attempt of our media system” must be opposed.

Proton’s CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI?

In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology. It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone’s data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever.

Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He’s the founder and CEO of Proton, one of the world’s most popular encryption-focused tech companies. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product—whether people want it or not—is driving new users in droves to Proton’s products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet.

The size of a Starlink Direct-to-Cell beam can be measured in the real world using the phones that actually observed one. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world measurement of a Starlink D2C beam footprint at global scale (instead of an estimate modelled from regulatory filings).

When two phones in our background signal scans report the same decoded satellite ID and beam index at the same time (i.e., decoded from the broadcast LTE cell identity, which embeds the satellite ID and a trailing beam index), we treat them as being inside the same D2C beam. We independently verify each satellite assignment against archived orbital data (via Space-Track) at the time of observation. Thousands of these matches across thirteen markets let us measure the beam footprint directly.

As a robustness check, scrambling the beam indices (within the same satellite and 10 min window, preserving timing/geography) increases the median separation between matched phones from under 1 km to about 192 km.

As spying becomes big business, more people are mobilizing to resist mass surveillance.

For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.

On Sept. 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.

Initially a fenced-in enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.

Fenced in by surveillance technology

Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.

The conflict between Disney’s ABC and Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission has been intensifying for months, leading to questions about whether the network might take the matter to court.

Those questions now have an answer: On Tuesday morning, ABC filed a case in federal court in Washington, D.C., accusing the FCC of trying to interfere with the network’s First Amendment rights. From the court filing.

"Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech — the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air. Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech."

Starlink’s Capacity Growing.

An analysis by MoffettNathanson estimated a huge increase in potential capacity based upon a migration to the new V3 rockets. The analysis said that the current capacity with the V2 satellites is between 8 and 16 customers per square mile, which limits the overall penetration to 2% - 3% of U.S. households, even when the current 15,000-satellite constellation is completed. The new V3 satellites should bring a lot of additional capacity, including the opportunity to sell broadband in denser population areas.

MoffettNathanson estimates the overall capacity, assuming that two-thirds of satellites are upgraded to V3 by 2030, is between 24% – 35% of households, or the capacity to serve 35 million to 50 million potential subscribers. This increase is fully dependent on the company being able to regularly launch the new Starship rocket, which will only be able to carry 60 V3 satellites per launch. SpaceX successfully launched a Starship rocket on July 27 that carried twenty V3 satellites into space. This was a test, and the satellites were allowed to quickly deorbit.

A decade ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of exciting jobs on the cutting edge of tech.

In 2026, however, the status quo of young people who are uncritically enamored with the tech industry and its billionaire overlords has gone completely out the window.

A new survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 to share their thoughts on politics, AI, and the country’s economy.

A new survey of 1,000 young adults in the US found that nine of the top tech executives are deeply loathed.

Congressional defunding of public broadcasting has created challenges for many stations, but KVPR is using the cuts as a catalyst for growth.

It has been just over a year since the Republican-led Congress cut federal funding for public broadcasting, citing allegations that PBS and NPR stations exhibited a liberal bias. The intent was clear: to silence these stations. That effort has not succeeded, but the loss of federal funding has weakened some public broadcasters, particularly those serving rural communities.

But in the San Joaquin Valley, the region’s NPR station has turned the funding challenge into an opportunity to broaden its reach. Since the defunding, KVPR has expanded its fundraising efforts, strengthened its local programming, and brought more journalists into the newsroom.

☕ Cold Brew

• Microsoft's AI business turns out to be mostly OpenAI's business — and Congress's AI spending turns out to be mostly ChatGPT's.
• Stanford scientists built viruses nature never made.
• Meta was ordered to pay $567 million and told its platforms behave like a  polluting factory.
• IBM let AI eat 94% of its HR work, then tripled entry-level hiring anyway.
• OpenAI hit the brakes on its own model because it got too good at hacking.
• And frontier AI agents from three different labs spent the week breaking out of their sandboxes — while Jamie Dimon quietly built a coalition to prepare for what comes next.
• Different stories, same shape: a lot of weight resting on very few, very shaky points of support.

Anthropic says it will change way chatbot makes small, random choices, to comply with EU regulation.

The world is familiar by now with the usual tropes of machine-generated text: overuse of the word “delve”, an excess of em dashes, and the chirpy, relentless construction of “it’s not X but Y”.

But is it about to get even worse?

Over the weekend, Anthropic released an update saying it would change how its Claude AI model generated prose. This is to comply with an EU regulation that requires all AI-generated text to be watermarked starting in December.

Anthropic said the changes would be made at the granular, random level at which its models generated text and would be undetectable to the average reader.