Los Alamos County, New Mexico is inching closer to the launch of its “Atomic Fiber” county-wide open access fiber network, which aims to dramatically improve affordable Internet access to the county’s 19,400 heavily-rural residents.

The $35 million network price tag is being financed via $40 million in New Mexico Gross Receipts Tax (GRT) revenue bonds. County leaders have stated that the 20-year maintenance and operations cost of the network will be around $15.9 million and paid off via subscription revenues.

Network construction formally began in May, and county officials say they’re hopeful the first customers will come online by the end of the year.

“We have been delayed a bit with getting our Phase 1 construction done, so first customers will likely be December,” Los Alamos County broadband manager Jerry Smith tells ILSR.

Europe’s AI construction capacity is becoming the bottleneck behind faster data-centre expansion across the continent today.

Europe’s AI infrastructure debate increasingly centers on power, land, permitting and financing, but another constraint sits much closer to the ground: construction capacity. The continent can identify potential sites, secure capital and forecast rising compute demand, yet none of those steps creates the specialist workforce required to turn a site into operational capacity.

Current market research indicates that European data-center construction already faces pressure from specialist labour shortages, particularly across highly serviced projects where mechanical, electrical and engineering capabilities matter most. The pressure becomes harder to absorb when several large facilities move from planning into construction during the same period.

I’m on my way to Hollywood today with a trunk full of gravestones.

OK, they’re made of foam, and I picked them up at Michaels before scrawling RIP to “CNN,” “creativity” and “free speech” on them.

My homemade artwork doesn’t capture my anger, betrayal and deep disappointment after 12 state attorneys general settled their lawsuit against Paramount on Monday, clearing the way for the company to swallow up Warner Bros., HBO, CNN and so much more. It can’t convey the outrage I feel at how quickly the state attorneys general folded and how little they got after promising to put up a fight.

So I’m headed back to the Paramount lot to protest alongside the actors, filmmakers, writers, workers and advocates who have fought so hard to block this deal because they know what it means to the future of our media and our democracy. We’re mad as hell — and, thanks to all the capitulation and corruption on display, there are a lot more of us ready to fight back and reclaim our media system from the billionaires and their enablers.

In the early 1990s the mining industry ran into a problem its lawyers could not solve. Companies were arriving in communities with every permit in order, every approval secured, every legal requirement satisfied, and the projects were failing anyway. Roads got blocked. Financing fell through. Councils that had already approved a project reversed themselves. The industry eventually gave the missing thing a name that stuck: a social license to operate, meaning the community's ongoing acceptance, granted informally, held by no one in particular, and revocable without notice.

The AI buildout has arrived at exactly the same place, and it is arriving without the benefit of the thirty years of research in between.

On August 18, Pennsylvania's governor signed Executive Order 2026-05, which removes data centers from the state's fast-track permitting program, bars any state agency from signing a nondisclosure agreement on a data center project, and, for developers who decline the state's new grid requirements, stops the Department of Environmental Protection from beginning its permit review at all until every local approval is in hand. The order lands on a crowded field. Pennsylvania's DEP became aware of more than 100 data center proposals in the past year. Fifty-eight got far enough to be discussing permits, fifteen filed an application, and five hold everything they need for a first phase.

The debate on US datacenters has never been so politically charged. Four states have acted in under two months. New York has stopped issuing environmental permits for datacenters, Texas has paused the next step in its massive ERCOT interconnection queue, Pennsylvania has pulled datacenters out of fast-track permitting and made state permits conditional on new guardrails, and Oregon has frozen datacenter deals on state-owned land.

Beyond the state level, more than 300 towns, cities and counties have voted to halt datacenters over the past year and a half. If you read the news, the US datacenter buildout looks like it is being legislated to a halt, one government board at a time. As AI drives an unprecedented wave of datacenter construction over the last year, concerns over electricity costs, water consumption, land use, and community impacts are increasingly influencing policy.

A Democratic US congressman on Monday urged the Federal Aviation Administration to immediately suspend a new artificial intelligence system being used to help manage air traffic around Washington, DC, accusing the agency of using passengers as “guinea pigs” without adequately vetting the new technology.

The Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART) system, developed by AI firm Air Space Intelligence under an $875 million contract, began limited operations Monday at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, and Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

The industry trade group Airlines for America called SMART “exciting and bold,” while United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told The Washington Post that “if it works as we think it can, it will do more to reduce delays and cancellations than anything that’s happened in decades.”

However, Congressman Don Beyer (D-Va.)—whose district includes Reagan National Airport—said in a statement that “the FAA should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven AI air traffic control system.”

Los Angeles, CA--In light of today’s surprising and devastating news that California Attorney General Rob Bonta has agreed to settle the states’ antitrust case against Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement:

“Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top,” said Alvaro Bedoya, Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project. “As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will co-own those outlets, too.” 

“Layoffs will follow. People from L.A. to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive,” Bedoya added. “Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find.” 

“This did not have to happen. Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June.”

“But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately. Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce.”

My students and I were talking this morning about press freedoms in the U.S. and in other Western democracies. How, I asked, could countries like Britain, Canada, Germany and France ensure such freedoms in the absence of something like the First Amendment?

The answer is that they can’t, at least not as comprehensively as we do. Libel protections and the right to publish information about criminal trials, government secrets and the like are in fact more robust here than they are in other countries. Yet according to the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. ranks just 64th, behind Botswana but ahead of Panama. Norway is No. 1.

How can this be?

Starlink already solved coverage. Now Starship is supposed to industrialize capacity, and that could turn satellite broadband from a rural alternative into a much bigger threat to fixed networks.

September 28 may be one of the most important dates in Starlink’s history. Not because Starship flies again, but because SpaceX plans to put 26 operational V3 satellites into orbit and start attacking the one problem Starlink still has not solved.. capacity.

Fixed broadband coverage is basically done. Starlink already has around 12 million subscribers, serves most of the planet, and offers residential plans starting at around $55. The problem is putting enough bits over the places where people actually live. A Falcon 9 Starlink launch adds roughly 2.6 Tbps of downlink capacity. A full Starship with 60 V3s is designed to add around 61 Tbps in a single round; more than 20x per launch.

Recent AI agent incidents are testing whether Europe’s AI Act can hold increasingly capable AI systems accountable, Joana Soares reports.

The European Union says its AI rules already give regulators the tools to deal with the risks posed by increasingly capable AI models. But as AI systems repeatedly cross the boundaries of controlled testing and reach real-world systems, legal experts are questioning how far those powers actually extend.

The question has become more urgent as a growing number of AI models have escaped testing environments. Google said Friday that a Gemini AI model accessed the systems of three real companies during a cybersecurity test, after finding information online and guessing credentials it believed were within the scope of the evaluation. Anthropic and OpenAI have reported similar incidents.

SouthernMinn.com reports on a recent event in Eden Prairie...

from job loss to nudification technology, data centers to the end times, a recent southwest metro forum on artificial intelligence underscored the low-boil anxiety of Minnesotans about this unsettling technological change — and myriad policy questions emerging from it.

The recent campaign forum-style event at New Prairie New High School in Eden Prairie.

The article goes on to highlights views and comments from presenters and attendees.

Every single time Democrats have an opportunity to demonstrate they're serious about media reform, they trip over their own assholes.

Democrats just ensured that billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison (a right wing oligarch who doesn't really believe in democracy) will be allowed to own the lion's share of whatever's left of U.S. corporate media.

After months of growing lobbying, media, and political pressure, 12 state attorneys general have agreed to settle their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount/CBS with what sounds like flimsy conditions, allowing the company's unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers (CNN, HBO) to proceed.

It's a slap in the face to creatives and workers who vehemently opposed more media consolidation, and it's going to result in a lot of avoidable layoffs, price hikes, propaganda, and chaos in the years to come. From The American Prospect:

A lot of rich and influential people have suddenly become very worried about artificial intelligence models’ danger to humanity, thanks to several recent episodes in which various AI “agents” carried out hacks of other websites and systems. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and xAI’s Elon Musk all now agree that the government needs to help them set up a cartel in violation of antitrust law—er, I mean, “pace the frontier.”

Yet for odd reasons, the “AI safety” discussion has been focused almost entirely on rather weird-sounding future scenarios. Will artificial intelligence models unleash an economic or social cataclysm? Or cause the extinction of the human race? Or destroy all life on Earth? Or even turn all the matter on the planet into paper clips? Or all the matter in the galaxy? The universe??

Democrats just signed off on a massive consolidation of Hollywood power, striking a settlement deal in a 12-state antitrust lawsuit that will now allow Paramount Skydance’s attempted $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery to move forward. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, joined other party bigwigs in hailing the news of the deal. The agreement, he said Monday, will “protect California jobs while putting a safeguard in place to help preserve editorial independence for two of America’s most important news organizations.”

But is the deal really such a win? The settlement’s fine print suggests otherwise.

Paramount's deal with the 12 state attorneys general to settle their antitrust lawsuit over the Warner Bros. Discovery merger is not official just yet: The judge in the case has some "outstanding questions" about the settlement, which requires her approval before it takes effect.

In an order issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted the parties’ motion to vacate the hearing about Paramount’s previous motion to require the states (and the WGA) to post $1.88 billion bond to cover the company’s financial losses in the event it prevailed in court. That had been scheduled for Sept. 24. (The proposed settlements Paramount entered into with the states and the WGA makes that moot.)

However, Martinez-Olguin said in the order that the court “does not yet rule on the remainder of the motion to enter consent decree and dissolve the stipulation not to close” the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.

Former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee Gigi Sohn this week criticized California’s settlement with Paramount over its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), saying the agreement relies too heavily on behavioral promises and does not require the combined company to give up any assets.

In a social media post on Tuesday, Sohn called the Paramount-WBD merger “terrible” and described the settlement as a “disaster,” while saying she would leave deeper analysis to others.

“Behavioral conditions rarely, if ever, work,” Sohn wrote. She said she was “shocked” that the settlement did not include any structural remedy, meaning Paramount and WBD would not be required to relinquish any properties.

Her comments came a day after California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a settlement resolving the state-led antitrust challenge to the merger.

NRECA is urging the Trump administration to overhaul implementation of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program to ensure BEAD meets its statutory goal to connect every American home and business with reliable, high-speed internet.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced a new round of available BEAD funding on Sept. 3 that NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said continues the program’s “misguided” approach that could leave rural communities behind.

“BEAD’s initial investment is failing rural America,” Matheson said. “Delayed implementation, shifting guidance, cost constraints and unrealistic funding assumptions have slowed progress, discouraged participation and weakened a historic opportunity to bring long-overdue broadband service to rural communities.

“Directing further investment under the same misguided approach will not deliver universal connectivity to rural America.”

AST SpaceMobile is making progress with offering satellite cellular service. The  company launched three massive satellites in August, bringing the fleet to 13 satellites. These are much larger than ASTs original satellites or ones being used by other carriers. They are essentially floating central offices. The FCC also gave the company the go-ahead in August to begin testing its satellite-to-smartphone service. AT&T and Verizon have both inked deals with the company to be their satellite partner for cellular.

More Countries Entering the Satellite Race....

Today, Emerald AI, Google and NVIDIA announced the launch of the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA), a first-of-its-kind coalition advancing data centers that can dynamically manage their electricity use in response to grid conditions.

The AI Energy Management Alliance brings together the full AI and power value chain to accelerate the interconnection of flexible, grid-enhancing data centers, strengthen reliability and protect affordability.

AI factories are the infrastructure of the intelligence era. Scaling them responsibly will depend as much on innovation across the grid as inside the data center. 

Data center operators are cutting cooling-water use inside the fence, but the electricity powering AI campuses drives water consumption and withdrawals at plants serving the grid.

A data center can use very little water on site while relying on an electricity system that consumes or withdraws enormous quantities of water elsewhere.

That upstream footprint is becoming harder to ignore as AI drives data center electricity demand higher. Operators are deploying closed-loop liquid cooling and dry cooling to reduce or eliminate operational cooling-water use at the facility. But the power feeding those facilities still has a water footprint, depending on how and where it is generated.

Taking aim at 'subsidy-dependent incumbents' that regard LEO's success 'as a threat,' SpaceX is once again pushing the FCC to end the High-Cost fund.

SpaceX is continuing to pursue its case with the FCC that the proliferation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service renders rural broadband subsidies obsolete, while depicting the opposing arguments of "subsidy-dependent incumbents" as "unfounded" and "implausible."

The company's most recent remarks on the matter came in the form of reply comments to the FCC's proceeding on modernizing High-Cost, a program operated under the Universal Service Fund (USF) that helps subsidize telecom network deployment and maintenance in rural areas. Initial comments were due on August 4, with reply comments due September 3.

Danielle Thumann Severs was supposed to face senators Thursday on her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission. Her newborn apparently had other plans.

The Senate Commerce Committee has postponed the September 17 confirmation hearing for FCC nominee Danielle Thumann Severs after she gave birth this week, temporarily putting the next step toward filling one of the Commission’s two vacant seats on hold.

An official familiar with the matter told The Desk that Thumann Severs is on maternity leave and that the hearing will be rescheduled after her leave concludes. The committee had not announced a new hearing date as of September 15.