Pontiff calls for ‘disarming’ of artificial intelligence and apologises for church’s delay in condemning slavery.
Pope Leo has denounced the “culture of power” driving the rapid rise of artificial intelligence while warning that the technology must be subject to the “most rigorous” ethical constraints as it infiltrates everything from work to war.
In his encyclical – the first major text on safeguarding humankind of his papacy – he also apologised for the Catholic church’s long delay in condemning slavery, describing it as “a wound in Christian memory”, and spoke of the “new forms of slavery” due to the digital economy.
The global AI arms race intensified this past week. An AI company, Moonshot, announced its Kimi-K3 model, an open-weight model. On the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, Kimi-K3 bested Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model by a fair amount.
You're losing about 25 Mbps from its theoretical top speed, but most residential users probably won't notice this.
The SpaceX satellite internet service Starlink has just introduced its latest residential kit, letting users connect to the satellite network using a smaller and lighter terminal. The company announced the Starlink V5 on X, saying that it could hit up to 375+ Mbps for “streaming, video calling, gaming, and more.” It’s currently available in select areas only, though, with wider availability expected later as the company ramps up production.
While some cities, like Mankato, are putting moratoriums on having data centers in their area, the city of Blue Earth seems to be embracing them.
Blue Earth currently has two data centers operating, and next year will be adding a third one, according to Blue Earth Light and Water manager Tim Stoner.
While most residents are well aware of the first one, which is just off Highway 169 next door to Cabin Coffee, they are surprised there is a second one.
That one is located in the West Industrial Park, and is just north of the Blue Earth Light and Water water treatment plant, and just east of Winnebago Manufacturing. It is hard to see from any street and is low profile, with its building units being just one story tall.
The tech company Flock, makers of traffic cameras that automatically record and log car license plates for law enforcement agencies, is facing increasing scrutiny over accusations that its vast, AI-sorted database has created a new, nationwide mass surveillance system.
With few regulations or oversight on its use, Flock’s data can be sold to third parties or shared with federal agencies such as ICE, says the ACLU’s Chad Marlow, who works on efforts to regulate and cancel Flock’s contracts with local law enforcement.
Because Flock’s indiscriminate system records information on all cars and drivers that pass its cameras, “we have a company working to record the comings and goings of every single person in the country,” in what Marlow calls “a very un-American take on privacy.”
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Caltrans is advising motorists of the continuation of several construction projects within the Lake Tahoe Basin this week.
Along State Route 28 (SR 28), construction on a $31.7 million pavement rehabilitation project continues. The contractor for this project is Mercer Fraser Company of Eureka and on grinding bumps for smoothness and electrical work along SR 28 for the following dates/times/locations next week:
Sony will no longer ship physical copies of games, prompting widespread anger from customers at how their ownership rights are being stripped by powerful monopolies. Plus, SpaceX craters...
There’s a lot of news this week, as usual. The AI bubble is deflating as a Chinese firm released an open-source model that is nearly as good as the best of what America has. Elon Musk’s SpaceX fell below its IPO price. And there was an important first hearing on the Paramount-Warner merger on Friday, with the states seeming to come out narrowly ahead. And lots more.
But before getting to all that, I want to talk about an uprising among video gamers, one that reaches back, believe it or not, over four hundred years. Roughly 60% of Americans play video games, so we’re talking a lot of people and an important part of our culture. Video gamers, particularly the more hard-core ones, have gotten increasingly angry over the past five years as prices go up and layoffs in the industry foster a sense of hopelessness and creative despair. Yet because it’s a industry built mostly during the neoliberal era of the 1970s going forward, there is no history of collective action to foster a reasonable regulatory scheme.
A fireside chat with Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, moderated by GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler at a PNW Climate Week closing event, was derailed by protesters raising concerns about data center energy impacts.
Protesters challenged Nakagawa through most of the 30-minute session held in a conference room at Seattle’s City Hall, calling out the company’s use of fossil fuel energy sources to power its AI data centers and challenging Microsoft’s commitment to climate goals set years ago.
As a reporter covering sustainability issues for GeekWire, I moderated the session. Many of the issues raised by the crowd were on my list of questions for Nakagawa. The disruptions also included chants from protesters seated among attendees, at times going beyond climate issues to condemn Microsoft’s technology deals with Israel.
The technolibertarian dream of a borderless internet may soon get its biggest reality check in years.
Meta’s Oversight Board — a governance body launched in 2020 that continues to independently make binding content moderation decisions and policy recommendations — released a report last week suggesting that large language models could be “stifling political speech.” A study of 10 commercial LLMs found that the models may be essentially censoring themselves based on the speech laws of countries around the world.
What the board seems to find more concerning, however, is that the AI chatbots appear at times to be applying one country’s more repressive speech restrictions globally. For instance, multiple chatbots refused to create flyers critical of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or China’s President Xi Jinping. Yet they would do so for U.S. President Donald Trump and U.K. King Charles III.
The report recommends that AI companies emulate social media platforms and ensure one censorship regime doesn’t affect how LLMs function in other countries. Social networks have spent two decades Balkanizing their moderation policies to achieve this balance. It’s hard to see how AI doesn’t follow suit.
Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’.
The UK will not have enough water for future datacentres, the water industry has said in stark criticism of the government’s AI growth plans.
Datacentres rely on large amounts of water to manage the heat generated by densely packed servers. Cooling towers, chillers and humidification systems make direct use of this water, with large volumes also consumed indirectly through high electrical power needs.
Water UK, the trade body that represents water companies in Britain and Northern Ireland, said in a publicly available written briefing to MPs that the government’s water forecasts were “fatally flawed” and “explicitly exclude” datacentres.
AT&T has filed a case against the state of California that they have the right to shut off the copper and no longer are obligated to offer service to the public as a common carrier, known as “carrier of last resort”. AT&T has also filed with the FCC a request to force the state of California to comply with the FCC’s new deregulatory rules.
We have compiled a group of ‘adverse comments’, filed in the FCC’s inquiry into the AT&T request. While the FCC claims it is asking for comments, the FCC already ruled in AT&T’s favor.
The penalty demand, close to Meta's entire market value, comes before an August trial over claims Facebook and Instagram were built to addict minors.
Meta $META -0.02% said in a court filing Monday that four states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties over allegations the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users and misled the public about platform safety, according to Reuters. The figure is close to Meta's market capitalization of roughly $1.5 trillion.
Representatives from Athol Orange Community Television, Templeton Community Television, GCTV, and Frontier Community Access Television met with legislators on Beacon Hill to advocate for H.91/S.41 "An Act to Modernize Funding for Community Media Programming".
This bill has existential implications for public access stations across the commonwealth. If you value the programming a peg access station provides, watch this video!
Thank you to our hosts Senator Jo Comerford, State Representative Susannah Whipps, and State Representative Jon Zlotnik.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to hear our case. Thank you to representatives from the offices of State Senator Peter Durant and State Representative Homar Gomez.
Thank you to Mr. Jacob Blanton from the office of Senate President Karen E. Spilka.
We door knocked to thank and encourage bill sponsors Senator Jason Lewis, State Representative Margaret Scarsdale and Joan Meschino, State Representative and request the bill be pushed through on economic development legislation this session.
We visited the office of Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier chair of the Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet, and Cybersecurity to thank the committee for positive recommendation. Thank you as well to staff for the Senate and House Ways & Means Committees for hearing our case.
You can learn more about the legislation on massaccess.org from Mass Access.
Come on Massachusetts, it's time to enter the future! Modernize community media funding, now!
Governments such as Minnesota working to improve digital map accessibility — both to comply with federal standards and improve the user experience — are sharing insights to help others do the same.
A Pressing Issues conversation with Matt Schuster, executive director of Public Media Network.
Earlier this summer, I attended the Alliance for Community Media’s 50th annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded in 1976, ACM represents more than 1,700 Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) access organizations and community-media centers throughout the country. These organizations primarily operate public, government and educational-access (PEG) TV stations, but many also include Low Power FM radio stations, youth-media programs and media-production classes. They are often the last bastions of free speech — especially in communities that don’t have any other local-news sources.
While community media organizations typically don’t include traditional newsrooms, many provide high-quality news programs and cover civic meetings, filling gaps left by legacy media that have either disappeared or failed to serve communities of color. These organizations cablecast and/or stream city council meetings and school board meetings, host candidate forums, create voter guides and host Documenters programs, which train community members to cover local meetings. Community media organizations also train thousands of citizen journalists to produce their own news and public affairs programs.
I live in the Tampa region, so hurricanes and storms are a seasonal occurrence for us — and the pattern usually plays out the same way: fiber gets cut, cell sites lose power, and utilities spend the next few days trying to see their own grid. A recent conversation with Tony Calabro pushed me to write down some thinking that I've done on this, shaped by my experience as a Florida resident and the shift I am seeing quietly in utility connectivity: the role of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite in grid modernization.
Every utility I work with is chasing the same three things: 1. more resilient grids, 2. better data from the edge, 3. and lower cost to serve. AMI 2.0, distributed intelligence, DERMS, storm hardening all sit on top of one simple question: how do I reliably get the data back? That's where Starlink and, increasingly, Amazon Leo have become one of the most interesting conversations in the space. Not because they replace anything, but because they fill gaps terrestrial infrastructure has never been able to close economically.
Satellite is not a meter radio and it doesn't need to be---
A year ago, in a 4-3 vote, the Lowndes County Planning Commission approved property owner Pope Langdale’s request to rezone 719 acres of his land from residential to manufacturing in north Valdosta.
A week later, on July 8, 2025, the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners approved the rezoning from low residential (R-1) to light manufacturing (M-1), “to be developed into a large warehouse type campus,” according to meeting minutes. The vote was unanimously approved.
Valdosta residents, including those from the Foxborough neighborhood that borders Langdale’s land, objected to the request and approval.
The reasons echoed the same sentiments that Georgians across the state in counties like Muscogee, Troup, Monroe and Twiggs have all raised: pollution of local waters with “forever chemicals,” noise, flooding potential, loss in property value, removal of trees and habitat loss.
Since then, no application for a data center has been put forth, nor has an ordinance to regulate data centers been created.
But another viral estimate says a short email written with AI's help uses a half-liter bottle of water.
The difference is enormous: across those three widely shared claims, the largest amount is about 2,000 times the smallest.
None of them is fully right. They're not measuring the same thing. Some estimates count only the water used to cool data centers. Others add the water used to generate the electricity that powers them. Still others rely on outdated assumptions about fast-changing technology.
As figures ricochet across blogs, social media, protest signs and public meetings, nuance is lost.
That leaves a basic question: How much water does AI use?
Amazon Leo recently launched 29 new satellites, bringing the size of its constellation to 396. To the surprise of everybody who follows the industry, the company announced that it has enough satellites to begin initial service later this year.
This has everybody wondering what initial service means. The company hasn’t announced its pricing yet, which has been a closely held secret. The big mystery is how the company could launch service with such a small number of satellites.
When Starlink began beta service, it had over 600 satellites in orbit. Starlink beta customers reported slow speeds and spotty coverage, and said they routinely lost broadband service when there was no satellite in range of their home. Starlink didn’t start getting good reviews on its coverage until it had over 2,000 satellites in orbit.
Although bipartisan momentum is building for the federal government to take equity positions in major AI firms, this strategy risks compromising regulatory neutrality unless strict guardrails and sunset clauses are established.
Jim Matheson is Chief Executive Officer of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), the national service organization that represents the nation’s more than 900 not-for-profit, consumer-owned electric cooperatives. NRECA members provide service to 42 million people in 48 states. Jim joined NRECA in July 2016 following distinguished careers in both the public and private sectors.
In the digital age, strong economies depend on robust internet infrastructure. Yet much of rural America still lacks access to basic internet service.
Fortunately, rural electric cooperatives are stepping up. Over 200 co-ops are delivering economic opportunity in 43 states across rural America, connecting more than 2 million homes, businesses, hospitals and schools with some of the highest speeds available anywhere in the U.S.
The federal government is a key partner in these efforts. Broadband programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have supported the construction of broadband networks in some of the most expensive-to-reach rural areas.
But BEAD’s delayed implementation, shifting guidance and repeated rule changes have created a program defined by uncertainty and confusion. Instead of accelerating deployment, these ongoing revisions have discouraged participation and slowed progress.
At the same time, BEAD’s delays have increased costs and complicated equipment procurement, making already challenging rural projects even harder to complete. These challenges are compounded by new requirements imposed late in the process.
In particular, the requirement that electric cooperatives will be subject to FCC pole attachment rates for their entire electric system represents a clear break from long-standing federal policy that specifically bans that requirement. Some electric cooperatives have already walked away from BEAD funding due to this requirement.
The MAD Project says the FCC has left its Application for Review unresolved for 17 months, preventing it from seeking judicial review of the Media Bureau’s dismissal.
A grassroots organization that challenged the broadcast license of a Fox-owned local television station during the Biden administration has asked a federal appeals court to force the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act on the matter, effectively reviving its original challenge.
Earlier this month, the Media and Democracy (MAD) Project filed a petition for a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, arguing the FCC has unreasonably delayed consideration of an Application for Review filed with the full commission in February 2025.
Findings show significant affordability gaps in BEAD-eligible areas.
Broadband affordability—the ability for households to subscribe to and stay connected to high-quality internet service—remains a primary barrier to universal access. The federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is designed to expand the availability of broadband service across the country, investing $42.5 billion to deliver high-quality broadband service to millions of unserved households. However, BEAD has limited mechanisms to directly address affordability once new connections are established.
For generations, free, over-the-air television has connected Americans to the moments that matter most: breaking news, severe weather warnings, election coverage, local sports and the shared experiences that bring communities together.
That mission is not changing, but the technology broadcasters use to fulfill it must. NextGen TV, powered by the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, gives local stations the tools to offer stronger signals, improved picture and sound, more accessible emergency information and new public safety capabilities. It represents an essential investment in the future of free, local television.
Modernization is not a retreat from broadcasters’ public service mission. It is how broadcasters preserve that mission for the next generation.
The last time we had a BEAD final proposal approved was Oklahoma on April 22, at the time leaving just Illinois and California.
Well, as of last Friday, we can scratch California off the waitlist as their final proposal is… finally… approved. Let’s see if I can remember how to write these recaps, I will give it a shot.
The headline has to be that California’s percentage for BEAD dollars to FIBER went up 9% from the initial proposal, Wireless went up 4.5% and LEO felt the brunt of it, dropping 13%.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
