The Shoggoth Is Coming for the Middle Class | Nobody Is Talking About It | by The BlackVeil Files

In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the subscription trap, a trillion-dollar financial blanket that is affecting your car, your neighborhood, your grocery store, and your wallet. Is the helpful AI productivity tool just a mask for something much darker?

Y105FK out of Rochester reports…

According to Data Center Map, Minnesota already has 81 data centers operating or in the planning phase across the state. The majority of the data centers are in the Minneapolis Market. The next biggest market for Data Centers is Duluth, with 6.

Others (KADOA, Aterio and others) have done counts and Data Center Map count falls the same ballpark.

The League of Minnesota Cities reports…

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering sweeping new rules that could significantly limit how cities manage wireline telecommunications infrastructure in public rights-of-way. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), Build America: Eliminating Barriers to Wireline Deployments (WC Docket No. 25-253), according to the FCC, is intended to accelerate broadband construction by reducing what the FCC characterizes as “excessive permitting delays, fees and other local requirements.”

On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a $108bn takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, the entertainment giant that owns Hollywood movie studios, along with CNN, HBO and other media businesses. The bid is led by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison – a prominent Donald Trump supporter and Republican donor. Netflix had already prevailed over Paramount in a previous bidding competition for the purchase, but Trump announced on Sunday that he would “be involved” in his administration’s review of the Netflix deal. The president suggested the sale “could be a problem” because Netflix is already dominant in the US streaming market.

Paramount left out a significant fact in the press release announcing its offer: the bid includes funding from the private equity firm owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as well as three Arab monarchies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which collectively have billions of dollars in ongoing ventures involving the Trump family business. Those details were buried in required paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As a follow-up to last week’s NTIA notice new eligible BSLs were on the way, I have received a draft document the NTIA is expected to present state broadband leaders later this week.

The Supplemental Deployment Policy Notice details how states can access “savings” (non-deployment dollars) to cover BSLs that NTIA says BEAD may have missed. Unserved BSLs that the NTIA is unaware of being covered by other state or federal dollars.

An important point, the NTIA additional locations are ONLY the UNserved (less than 25/3) and does not include locations with less than 100/20 connectivity. Why are they using unserved versus bot un- and under-served? Your guess is as good as mine.

With the addition of the NTIA’s remaining count of post-BEAD unserved is as many as 488 thousand BSLs. The actual number could be lessened by either discovery that these locations are currently funded through another program or, in fact, served. A challenge round will need to sort that out.

States will be permitted to allocate up to the (adjusted) number of unserved BSLs multiplied by the average per-location costs.

Doug Dawson (POTS & PANS) takes a look at the disadvantage to consumers when telecommunications customer cut the copper...

But there are still good policy reasons for not tearing down the networks. For many rural households, a telephone landline is the only way to reliably reach 911 or to make the daily calls needed to

connect to doctors, banks, and other necessities of daily life. The FCC and state regulators have all said they support tearing down copper as long as customers have an equivalent alternative for voice. And that’s where the rub comes. The Internet is full of stories of people who have lost their copper with no alternative available. Unless a telco is replacing copper with fiber, they generally tell customers to change to wireless broadband. Everybody who lives in rural America knows that cell coverage is poor or nonexistent in much of rural America. But the lack of cell coverage doesn’t seem to be a deterrent for the big telcos that want to get rid of the copper.

People can always change to Starlink, assuming they live in a place where they don’t have to cut down a bunch of trees or put up an expensive tall pole to receive service. But this means replacing a $30 landline bill with a $130 Starlink bill. 

Seattle-area startup targets early 2027 for first Pathfinder launch, with bigger Nova Block 2 due for 2029 debut.

Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.

To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.

“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.

The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.

Last month, a Claude user noticed his account was consuming tokens even though he wasn't working. Anthropic has since warned users about hackers.

On August 4, Grant De Swardt, an independent AI consultant in East Sussex, U.K., noticed something strange going on with his Claude Max 20x account. He hadn’t been working that day, yet his token usage was climbing.

The next day, he disabled everything he had attached to Claude and did not work with it. Token consumption again increased. “In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task,” De Swardt told TechCrunch.

What was eating up his token allowance? 

On July 16th, I convened my second London workshop on Indoor Wireless Evolution, aided by colleague Andrew Collinson and supported by #NeutralHost Freshwave. I wrote up some immediate findings straight after the event, but have now had a chance to reflect on the day itself, subsequent discussions and the wider direction of the sector.

The event itself was run under the Chatham House Rule, so I can't disclose attendees or specific attributable comments. But it featured a mix of service providers, neutral hosts, regulators, enterprise users, vendors / data providers and other analysts. There was a considerable amount of discussion and collaborative exercises - it was not just lean-back listening to presentations, although I had a fair amount of slide content as catalyst for discussion.

Some key takeouts:

Three years after Amazon caught a federal monopoly lawsuit, sellers say the company’s fees and policies are even worse.

Amazon has put Jack Nekhala through the wringer.

Since 2014, Nekhala and his business partner have sold a product through Amazon’s dominant online marketplace they called the “Bed Scrunchie,” a band that helps keep fitted sheets in place while you sleep. But two years ago, Amazon kicked Nekhala and his product off of the platform for dubious reasons the company has failed to fully explain. He was soon contacted by a woman on Chinese messaging app WeChat who said she could get his seller account restored—for a price. The woman had information about his account that only an Amazon employee would know. Insiders were selling knowledge to middlemen, who were using it to exploit sellers.

It was a window into a world of international bribery that would lead to convictions and jail terms for rogue Amazon workers. But Nekhala’s experience with account hijacking is just an aggressive example of the cascade of abuses Amazon inflicts on the online sellers that make its e-commerce platform run.

It starts with the fees Amazon charges sellers, which have grown so high that the company now takes around half of every dollar a seller earns on the site, according to research by my organization and others. New changes, not widely reported in the general press, have seen Amazon invent methods to withhold seller earnings for days or weeks longer than in the past, and otherwise handcuff sellers’ ability to manage their own cash flow, pay their workers, buy supplies, or otherwise afford what they need to run their business in a timely way.

Anthropic says it has identified and disrupted attempts to use its AI model for "malicious activity" that could support biological and conventional weapons development.

The company's AI model Claude was also used in a Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and by an Iranian propaganda institution, according to Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report.

The cases of concern detected over the past eight months ranged from fake dating apps and hotel Wifi scams, to surveillance built to identify dissidents.

The revelations come after warnings from a top safety researcher at Anthropic about AI's potential risks to humanity.

Anthropic has also accused Chinese AI firms of trying to replicate Claude's capabilities.

The Department of War just announced at the end of August that it is expanding GenAI.mil with ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government, adding more corporate AI directly into the daily infrastructure of the American military. Both systems are accredited to handle Controlled Unclassified Information at Impact Level 5, and GenAI.mil has already reached more than 1.7 million unique users since launching in December 2025.

This is not a small test anymore. The Department has openly called for an “AI-first” force and says that these tools are meant to accelerate planning, policy, logistics, administration, acquisition, supply chains, and other routine work. The goal is to make AI normal, make it fast, and put it in the hands of as much of the force as possible. That may produce real advantage, but it also creates a basic security problem that every risk analyst at the Nation Security Agency should be modeling every day. Rapid adoption means more users, more credentials, more stored projects, more data movement, more software connections, and more opportunities for someone outside the United States to find a way in.

The largest risk is not some science-fiction AI turning against the United States, or AI becoming self-aware and misleading users. The risk is data, people, and discipline.

One of the most common tasks required when building a new fiber network, particularly when burying fiber, is fixing the damage caused during the construction process. In the industry, we refer to this work as remediation, which means, in plain English, putting everything back to the way it was before the start of construction.

There is a huge list of things that can go wrong and messes that can be made during the fiber construction process. The problem that often gets headlines is when the construction crews hit and damage other buried utilities like water, gas, electric, or other communications lines. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) issues periodic reports that tally the reasons for damaged underground utilities, and one of their recent reports said that one-fourth of all damage to underground utilities has been coming from fiber contractors.

We keep building newer technology with older management habits.

We are constructing AI campuses, hyperscale facilities, liquid-cooled infrastructure, high-density electrical systems and utility-scale power plants disguised as buildings.

Yet on too many projects, the management structure still operates like commercial construction did 20 or 30 years ago.

And then everyone wonders why execution is falling behind.

There is an execution gap growing across this industry.

It is the distance between what corporate leadership believes is happening and what is actually happening in the field.

Independent fiber providers Clearwave and Visionary Broadband have signed a definitive agreement to merge, forging a combined fiber platform that spans 17 states and reaches roughly 700,000 residential and commercial.

Clearwave—which operates under both the Clearwave Fiber and Point Broadband brands across the Southeast and Midwest—will lead the combined entity under CEO David Armistead, the companies announced Sept. 8.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2026 – A Penn State University professor is urging policymakers to consider regulating how much internet service providers can charge consumers, arguing that broadband prices remain out of reach for many households. The idea would represent a significant shift in how policymakers

approach the nation’s broadband market.

Christopher Ali, the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State, said in an essay for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society that policymakers should consider setting maximum broadband rates.

Ali pointed to the roughly $78 median monthly broadband bill in the U.S. and argued that affordability should be measured by what households pay each month, rather than by the amount of bandwidth they receive.

“No household pays per megabit. They pay a bill once a month,” Ali wrote.

The company says that the Ellisons and RedBird will control the voting stock, but that "indirect foreign ownership of equity interests in Paramount will be approximately 49.5 percent."

Paramount has asked the Federal Communications Commission to sign off on its equity investment from three prominent Middle East sovereign wealth funds that are backing the company’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

In a petition for declaratory ruling to the FCC signed by Paramount legal chief Makan Delrahim, Paramount asks the Brendan Carr-led commission to sign off on the deal involving Saudi Arabia’s PIF (public investment fund), L’Imad, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and a Qatar Investment Authority fund.

Paramount notes that David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison, as well as RedBird Capital, will control all voting shares in the company, and that the sovereign funds are only acquiring non-voting equity shares.

Paramount Skydance Corp. is reportedly considering selling off cable and real estate assets as it looks to settle a multistate antitrust lawsuit threatening to derail its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.

Initially agreed upon in February, the all-cash merger was challenged in court by 12 state attorneys general in July on antitrust claims, led by California’s Rob Bonta. The deal, though already approved by the Department of Justice and at least 68 international authorities, reached an impasse in California’s northern district court as the last hurdle.

Alleging that the merger could give the combined company an illegally large market share in movies and cable TV, the attorneys achieved a temporary restraining order to halt the progress before a March trial date. That pause could cost Paramount, who must pay Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders about $7 million a day if the merger ticks beyond Sept. 30 this year.

To reach a settlement, Paramount has started weighing multiple options that include “structural changes to the deal,” according to Bloomberg.

The Exploration Company (TEC) has raised $450 million to build reusable spacecraft, in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.”

The queue to send objects into orbit is growing, but space infrastructure isn’t keeping up with demand. As the realization sinks in that Elon Musk’s SpaceX can’t be the sole answer, other companies are raising their hand — and money.

These include The Exploration Company (TEC), which operates out of Germany, France, Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy, and which has raised $450 million in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.” But the race is global, with U.S.-based rival Stoke Space currently raising a $1 billion Series E round.

Rivalry aside, these rounds show that investors on both sides of the Atlantic are willing to back companies seeking to build reusable spacecraft. That’s a category pioneered by SpaceX, but that many players, both public and private, now believe it shouldn’t solely control as space gains strategic importance.

These sovereignty-related concerns create extra tailwinds for an EU-headquartered company like TEC. Led by Hélène Huby, a French national who spent two decades at Airbus and ArianeGroup, the company intends to use its funding to build the foundation for a reusable European heavy-lift launcher offering an affordable alternative to SpaceX.

Meta's new personal AI agent Muse wants access to users' email, calendars, payments, health services, and more — making the company's biggest consumer AI bet yet a major test of whether people still trust Meta with their data.

Less than two weeks after Meta agreed to a massive $18 billion multistate settlement in a lawsuit over social media’s consumer harms, the company announced its biggest bet on consumer AI to date — and one that requires significantly more trust than social media ever did. On Tuesday, the company introduced Muse, its new personal AI agent that helps consumers with everyday tasks and projects for users in the U.S.