Iran threatens to target Elon Musk's SpaceX facilities in the Middle East, including Starlink ground stations, amid IPO success.

While Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets have typically had no trouble exploding on their own accord, they could soon get some assistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Tehran’s state-run Fars News Agency reported on Thursday that Iranian officials have added assets owned by Musk throughout the Middle East to their target lists, noting the US and Israeli military’s use of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite services in operations against Iranian infrastructure.

Tomorrow's IPO of SpaceX could turn out to be the universe's largest Ponzi scheme, and you and I are paying part of the price whether we like it or not.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX goes on the market tomorrow. Rather than provide a range and then price the deal based on demand, as is customary in Initial Public Offerings, Musk has set a take-it-or-leave-it price of $135 per share.

He anticipates that the resulting corporation will be valued at $1.77 trillion. That’s an extraordinary amount for a company that generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year and recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion.

In other words, Musk is offering SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This is ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals. But it’s a great deal for Musk. He comes out of it with nearly a trillion dollars.

The FCC has approved the NCTA's petition for expedited waivers on 'covered' consumer modems, gateways and routers that implement relatively minor changes.

The FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology wasted little time in partially approving a petition filed by the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association that sought an expedited waiver for foreign-made consumer broadband routers that require relatively small changes, including alterations to memory modules and other types of substitute "substrate materials."

The FCC order, which was filed and adopted on June 9, effectively allows NCTA cable operator members and their suppliers to make limited and permitted Class I and Class II hardware changes to consumer grade routers that currently are on the FCC's "Covered List" in the wake of the Commission's ban on new, foreign made routers that was implemented in March. Generally, Class I changes include minor modifications that don't change the RF characteristics of a device, and Class II includes more substantive modifications that may alter RF performance or device emissions.

Amid public outcry over water-guzzling server farms, a Guardian analysis indicates trouble ahead.

A record-shattering drought has racked much of the United States. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned data centers set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found.

About two-thirds of upcoming data centers, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.

Of 809 planned data centers, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year, according to data from Cleanview and the federal government, which grades drought across four levels of severity. A similar proportion of existing data centers are already situated in drought-affected areas.

North Korean hackers posing as remote IT workers and recruiters remain a major threat to U.S., European, and Asian companies, accounting for about half of all attacks over the past 12 months.

New York has implemented a law requiring advertisements featuring AI-generated people to clearly label them as “synthetic performers.”

Any advertisements in New York that feature artificial intelligence-generated people in place of actors will now be violating state law if they don’t clearly label that they have used a “synthetic performer.”

The law, signed in December by Gov. Kathy Hochul, went into effect Tuesday. Her office is calling it a “first-in-the-nation law” that will boost transparency at a time when it says AI generated performers are popping up across all forms of media, including on social platforms and in digital advertising.

Synthetic performers are defined under state law as “digitally-created media that appear as a real person.” The law applies to ads in any medium.

“In New York, we are setting the rules of the road instead of letting AI run the show,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement. The “simple, honest disclosure” required by the law “protects consumers, respects our creative workforce and keeps New York at the forefront of responsible innovation,” she said.

Paul Bunyan Communications reports...

Paul Bunyan Communications started construction in late April on expanding the all-fiber optic network, the GigaZone®, to over 600 more locations in Itasca and St. Louis County across five townships. This project includes areas south and west of the city of Cook including parts of the following townships: Alango, Carpenter, Field, Sturgeon, and an unorganized township east of Carpenter.

“Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction,” Thiel said.

Panthalassa, a U.S.-based start up betting on ocean waves to power a fleet of floating data centers, announced $140 million in funding earlier this month led by Thiel.

The funding pushes Panthalassa’s valuation close to $1 billion, the Financial Times reported, citing a person familiar with the terms of the deal.

The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments over the arrest of a Fort Myers man in a child-abduction case, saying officers treated a flawed face-recognition match as a near-certain ID.

One could not invent a more diabolical conspiracy for mass mind control than the one playing out openly, daily, everywhere there is a personal computer or screen-phone and a signal connecting users to the digital matrix. The conspiracy is all-encompassing, world-girdling.

It's now consensus that we're in a bubble of investment in AI data centers, and that it's a risk to our economy. If the stock market declines, how bad could it get? Where are there areas of contagion?

Today I want to ask what the popping of the AI bubble would look like, and whether it would precipitate a broader financial crash. And if it does so, what shape will it take? The right way to start is by analogy, as there are lessons from previous crashes and the governance that came out of them that we can learn from. For reasons I’ll get into, while 2008 and Covid could be useful to look at, the best analogy is dot com era.

First, it’s important to scope out what I’m not going to talk about, which is the governance of AI as a technology. It certainly matters whether we are creating a God-like system, a useful general purpose technology, or a moderately useful toy. There are many fascinating questions around copyright, liability, monopolization, and so forth, but it’s hard to offer persuasive tech policy arguments in the midst of a bubble.

In many ways, the key important question facing us today is the financing of AI, and the fact that we have placed a economy-sized bet on the enterprises claiming to focus on this technology. Just seven stocks - all linked to AI - comprise a third of the stock market, and AI capital investment is likely to be between $750 billion and a trillion dollars this year, which is big enough that it affects macro-economic growth numbers.

"The result," said the author of a new Public Citizen analysis, "is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back."

Eighty-eight corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on US campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles, a report published Thursday revealed.

The report, “The Current Price of Zero,” was authored by Eileen O’Grady, a researcher at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. The publication draws upon an analysis published in April by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showing that at least 88 of the nation’s largest companies paid no federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting combined US pretax income of around $105 billion.

AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon have formed a unified front with the cable industry when it comes to fighting copper theft and other forms of network vandalism.

The most AI-obsessed firms are spending roughly $7,500 monthly per employee on AI, per Ramp AI Index. That's not more than an engineer's salary — yet.

An Nvidia executive recently said that the cost of compute is now greater than the salaries of his employees. Last week, Mercor’s CEO said the startup is spending more on tokens for internal agents than on employee headcount.

As enterprises blow through their token budgets, a big question is: Are companies actually spending more on AI than on humans?

The data center build out, and the subsidies underpinning it, are becoming hot-button issues in key races.

Data centers are popping up throughout the country — including in my home state of Michigan. As of December, there were at least 16 in the works, with MLive dubbing 2025 “the year of the data center” for the state. Nationwide, data centers have grown at least 150% between 2010 and 2025.

But this isn’t inevitable — or happening solely because companies are pushing to build them in their race for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance. Instead, Michigan lawmakers — along with a majority of other states — are accelerating this trend, offering billions of dollars in tax breaks to incentivize technology and utility monopolies to build large data centers.

These tax breaks impose significant costs on the community, and Michiganders are fighting back. According to Howell, Michigan board member Tim Boal, Michiganders backlash to data centers is something he’s “never seen before.” Will this anger change policy, or will lawmakers in the state continue to unfairly prioritize big money interests over their other constituents?

From production crews to local caterers, Hollywood's mega-merger reflects the same monopoly squeeze hitting farmers, pharmacists, and grocers.

If you’re not closely tracking Paramount’s attempted takeover of Warner Brothers, it’s easy to see it as a fight between Hollywood millionaires vs. MAGA billionaires. The media has focused on A-listers’ opposition to the deal and Paramount’s corrupt efforts to push the merger through by lavishing President Donald Trump with gifts and promises — since fulfilled — to silence his critics in the media they control.

As a result, too many people are still missing the economic devastation that this deal would almost certainly wreak upon small business owners and working people — not just in Los Angeles, but also in New York, Jersey City, Atlanta and any place where the companies have a substantial presence. This merger will lead to thousands of people losing their jobs and livelihoods.

After all, the last time David Ellison bought a media company — all the way back in 2025 — it was Paramount. In an effort to cut $3 billion in costs, he laid off thousands of people, including 20-year veterans of the company and pregnant moms on their due dates.

Now, Ellison is buying Warner Brothers Discovery for 13 times the amount he paid for Paramount, he’s loading up the combined company with almost $80 billion in debt, and he wants to cut twice the amount in “synergies” as he did when he bought Paramount.

The first of dozens of IKE Smart City digital wayfinding kiosks planned for downtown and around Seattle was unveiled on Tuesday at the busy intersection of First Avenue and Pike Street.