The liberal-flavored Chamber of Progress is pressing Democrats to scrutinize the White House — but avoid probing tech giants that bankrolled and benefited from Trump's presidency.

Even AT&T’s 769,000 internet additions didn’t help, as investors are weighing satellite expansion against carriers’ pricing and bundling advantages.

AT&T, one of the nation’s three big cellphone carriers, added a record 769,000 home internet customers last quarter. Its stock fell anyway. Investors were looking past subscriber growth to a new competitor, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, said David Barden, a telecom analyst at investment research firm New Street Research.

SpaceX agreed to pay about $8 billion for 800 MHz airwaves held by Grain Management, an investment firm. These are low-band frequencies that carry phone signals through walls, and they let SpaceX serve mobile customers from satellites and from towers on the ground.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded $11.7 million to the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians to expand high‑speed internet access in rural Lincoln County, Ore., the agency announced. The funding comes through USDA Rural Development’s ReConnect Program, which supports broadband deployment in areas that lack reliable service.

The project will build a fiber network serving households south of Siletz, Fruitvale west of Toledo and homes along Yaquina Bay Road and Hidden Valley Road. USDA officials said the investment is intended to help rural residents access education, health care and economic opportunity.

The tribe said it expects the investment to improve access to telehealth, education, employment and business activity while helping build a workforce capable of maintaining the infrastructure.

Musk recently referred to Grok Bot as having "the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life."

And yet now, Elon Musk has throttled Grok Bot limits due to ‘unsustainably high’ costs

SpaceX is reportedly discussing a Boost Mobile acquisition. The satellites are the easy part. Musk still needs somebody’s terrestrial network.

Elon Musk wants to become a mobile operator. That is becoming increasingly difficult to dispute. SpaceX is buying spectrum, exploring access to tens of thousands of terrestrial cell sites, and now reportedly discussing either acquiring Boost Mobile from EchoStar or gaining access to its network arrangements.

These moves aren't random; they are different ways of solving the same basic problem: Starlink can cover enormous geography from space, but it cannot economically replace the capacity, indoor coverage, and uplink performance of a terrestrial mobile network in dense urban areas.

Lehi officially completed its city-owned, open-access fiber optic network in August 2025, marking a major milestone for the community after a year of work.

The extensive infrastructure project, built and operated in a public-private partnership with Strata Networks, concluded its main physical rollout over the winter, stringing more than 400 miles of fiber and spanning up to 2.1 million feet of cable. The network successfully brings next-generation connectivity and multi-gigabit speeds up to 10-Gig to approximately 23,000 homes and businesses across the city.

While engineering and construction milestones have been celebrated as a technical success, local attention has shifted toward consumer adoption rates and the network’s long-term financial viability.

The Capytistas, a secretive group claiming more than $1.2 million in backing, started with Elon Musk and Tesla’s board. Members argue that those who buy political power deserve the scrutiny they’ll impose.

An underground activist group says it plans to start openly doxing billionaires as part of a phased campaign against what it calls the American oligarchy—beginning this month with a release that maps the homes of Elon Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Tesla’s board, alongside investors and suppliers that keep the corporation afloat.

Two of its members, interviewed by WIRED on the condition of anonymity, say they spent the past year constructing dossiers on billionaires—and one trillionaire—and the people they consider their top lieutenants, using nearly every method available to a private investigator, and some that are not.

The pair say the group is international and includes grassroots activists, researchers, journalists, and artists, including some who received top honors in print, television, and digital media in their former careers.

• OpenAI wants to rebrand AI data centers using a new, more alliterative name.

• "Compute campuses" is their new-fangled term.

• An OpenAI spokesperson said it better represents the "role" of AI infrastructure.

OpenAI doesn't want to call them "data centers" anymore.

Instead, the ChatGPT maker plans to propose a new, more chic name for the behemoth factories that power your chatbot queries.

That new name is "compute campuses," an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider on Sunday.

The average American household paid a record $217 for electricity this July. That was no anomaly: Residential electricity prices climbed 37% in the last decade. Yet over the same decade, wholesale power prices barely moved in most places across the US. Take Oklahoma, where wholesale electricity cost $25 per megawatt-hour in 2015 and remained $25 in 2025. Compare that to natural gas prices, which rose from around $2.50 to $3.50 over the same period, an increase of 40%.

So what’s behind the rising bills? Lee Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Resurety and a recent Energy Empire guest, points to a long list of causes: disruptive weather events, labor costs, resiliency efforts, and capacity costs driven up by AI. Understanding them starts with understanding what makes up your bill.

While more cities are canceling their contracts with Flock Safety, just as many are discovering how difficult that can be in some instances. Plymouth, Minnesota’s city council voted to terminate its contract with Flock in September, but failed to respond to the city’s request. For over a month, the cameras remained up, and the city had received no acknowledgment from the company. So, Police Chief Eric Fadden took matters into his own hands and physically disconnected the cameras.

“After hearing nothing for more than a week, I directed our staff to disconnect the power cords from the cameras in order to be sure that they are not functioning or recording plates,” Fadden told The Drive.

No company should sell AI chatbots ‘pretending to be their friend or more’ to kids, says Hochul as she signs New York’s new law for under-18s. 

New York has banned AI chatbots from pretending to be human with children. Bots also may not build emotional dependency, encourage self-harm or hold sexual conversations with them. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law on Wednesday, with a second law on baby monitor security.

The banned features are off limits to anyone under 18 and to any user whose age is unchecked, the governor’s office said in its announcement. Attorney General Letitia James can seek civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation.

When I saw Grokipedia’s articles about me, the memories came rushing back: my 19 years in minor league baseball, including that impressive season with the Montgomery Rebels when I hit 20 home runs. I was lean back then — 6 feet tall and 168 pounds — and earned a career batting average just under .300. I became a minor league coach and managed the Chicago White Sox for a short stint in 1970, which Grokipedia said “highlighted [my] readiness for higher-level responsibilities.”

I then attended Arizona State University, switched to a career in journalism, created the fact-checking site PolitiFact, won a Pulitzer Prize, and now teach journalism at Duke University.

Ah, the memories!…except that I never played minor league baseball, never managed the White Sox, and can only dream about being 6 feet tall. (I’m 5’8″.) Grokipedia, the AI-written encyclopedia of Elon Musk, has confused me with Marion Danne “Bill” Adair, who died in 2002.

That article and another one about “Bill Adair (journalist)” — which really is me — illustrate the many flaws of Grokipedia, which launched a year ago. The articles are littered with mistakes and superfluous details. They are terribly written and ridiculously long. If Grok, the AI engine that wrote this turgid prose, were a student in one of my writing courses, I would give it a D.

Still, the articles provide valuable lessons for Wikipedia editors who are debating how and when to use AI. Grokipedia adds new content and context that Wikipedia often lacks. It shows that AI is actually pretty good at finding tidbits in the far corners of the internet and summarizing them in sweeping prose. It can also provide balance to articles that need it.

Grok can’t write worth a lick, but it shows how Wikipedia can take advantage of AI at a time when overworked editors are trying to keep the encyclopedia alive.

Should we abandon the internet? Voice memos from Douglas Rushkoff, Bridget Todd, Robin Berjon, Janet Vertesi and more on leaving, rebuilding or saving it.

On October 6, the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law School hosted an event titled Life After Data: The Conference on De-datafication. The prompt for the event asked us to, "Imagine a future in which digital data is no longer the currency mediating all of our social, economic, and political systems, structures and practices. How might we get there from here?" One of the topics offered as a provocation concerned the internet itself and whether it might make sense now or at some point in the future to abandon it.

Now, there are many communities I travel in where the knee-jerk reaction would be to consider that suggestion a heresy. And yet there are many others where some flavor of the idea has been discussed before. There's a great deal of writing and thought that considers the idea of the personal choice to abandon the internet or some of the platforms that have come to define it. Logging off, digital minimalism, refusal to participate in social media. There are ideas about retreat to smaller or more private spaces from the small web and closed networks to group chats. There's nearly an entire internet's worth of content devoted to the idea of rebuilding the internet on protocols, federation, public digital infrastructure on community networks.

This week we’re highlighting Empire Fiber lighting up its first customers on the new Madison County, New York fiber network.

The Madison County Connect Project is made possible by a collaboration and partnership between the county, USDA, Empire Fiber Internet and local utility and engineering firms. Joining Empire are Comcast, Fidium, Gateway Fiber, Optimum, Spectrum, TDS Telecom, and WOW! 

On Oct. 30, Rebuild Local News, Local Independent Online News Publishers, Newsguild-CWA, National Association Of Hispanic Publications, Solutions Journalism Network, AAN Publishers, Institute For Rural Journalism and Community Issues, and the Society of Professional Journalists filed an amicus brief connected to The New York Times vs. Microsoft and OpenAI in the United States District Court Southern District Of New York.

They argue that AI companies’ uncompensated scraping of news content threatens the economic foundation of community journalism, with civic, economic and social consequences for the community that depend on it.

Summary of the Argument

At first glance, it may seem like the outcome of this case impacts only the biggest media companies and the biggest technology companies. But in the view of the amici, the fate of community media – the outlets that cover local schools, county government, and neighborhood parks – hinges upon this case. Community media are a critical, but often overlooked, component of the American news sector.

Character.AI, which lets users create custom chatbots for immersive roleplaying, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy following a string of legal challenges and the loss of top talent.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

A prominent AI company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Character.AI makes a role-playing app that lets users create custom chatbots. Now they can play it being broke. Here's NPR's John Ruwitch.

JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: In an ad on YouTube, Character.AI advertised its platform as a kind of virtual choose-your-own-adventure.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Character.AI is an AI entertainment app where you don't just watch a story happen. You create it.

RUWITCH: And in the ad, a woman creates an animated companion that she can either talk to or text.

Vanity Fair recently published an excerpt from longtime investigative reporter Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East.

The excerpt alleged that during President Trump’s first term, Saudi and Emirati leaders secretly put at least $2 billion into bank accounts and gave access to Kushner. At the time, Jared Kushner was serving as senior adviser to President Trump, his father-in-law. He is now Trump’s special envoy. Kushner’s lawyers responded by demanding that Vanity Fair retract the article and threatening legal action against the book publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Jared Kushner denied the report, saying, “The allegations made by this author are completely insane, categorically false, and never happened. We denied every one of these claims on the record, yet the author failed to provide a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of them.” His lawyers say no such bank accounts existed and that the allegations are unsupported by the verifiable evidence.

In an extended interview with Democracy Now!, author Matthew Cole stood by his reporting.

Gateway Fiber is reporting strong interest from banks and institutional bond investors following the securement of a $578 million financing platform that combines Gateway Fiber’s inaugural $333 million asset-backed securitization with a $245 million development financing facility.

According to Gateway’s October 29 press release provided to Broadband Communities, the asset-backed securitization (ABS) is backed by a diversified portfolio of high-quality operating fiber and fixed wireless assets, including associated customer contracts and recurring revenues.

Gateway described the financing as a pivotal step forward in their mission of helping communities in Missouri, Minnesota, and Massachusetts thrive through reliable, high-speed internet experiences.

"There are no exceptions that would allow this major source of air pollution to evade the law, and citizens have the right to defend themselves in Court against illegal pollution."

GREENVILLE, Miss. —

On Friday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi denied xAI’s motion to dismiss a Clean Air Act lawsuit brought against the company by the NAACP. The lawsuit seeks to hold the tech company accountable for its continued operation of an illegal, unpermitted power plant that supports its Colossus 2 data center. The ruling comes shortly after the Court denied a similar motion from the U.S. Department of Justice.  

With the rapid growth in data centers, federal policymakers have been focused on how to make sure that adding large data centers to the electric system does not increase electricity bills for other customers. Recently, a bipartisan group of senators introduced an energy permitting reform bill, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), which would be a major shift in the current paradigm for transmission pricing policies.

BAAJA would require electric utilities to charge data centers more for transmission service and use those extra costs to reduce transmission charges to other customers. BAAJA also offers additional policies through its “Ratepayer Protection Floor” that could be implemented by states to ensure further ratepayer protection.

Grid Strategies estimates $55 billion in transmission costs could be collected from data centers under BAAJA.

You may have noticed the headline earlier this year in May that said that bot traffic had surpassed human traffic on the Internet. The bigger news since then is that, in a matter of months, bot traffic has grown to be nearly two-thirds of the traffic on our networks. Mitch Wagner wrote an opinion piece in Fierce Network that describes the foreseeable future impact of the growth of machine-to-machine traffic on our networks. It’s not a future that is going to be comfortable for the many small ISPs I work with.

Wagner correctly observes that the growth of bot traffic poses a problem for telcos that have built their networks to provide services to people and companies. I remember, early in my career, conducting traffic studies to understand the busy-hour on clients’ voice networks to help them make sure they had sufficient capacity. That’s still standard practice in sizing backbone connections and in designing fiber network electronics.

However, the growth of bot traffic changes the equation of sizing and managing networks.