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Candidates of every political persuasion are knocking themselves out trying to appease angry citizens wanting their lives and livelihoods put before Big Tech.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr announced today that the Commission will vote this month on a package of permitting reforms designed to modernize how the agency applies the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Carr said the changes would cut billions of dollars in regulatory red tape while speeding the buildout of high-speed internet infrastructure. Carr circulated an Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to his fellow commissioners for consideration at the FCC’s September 30 open meeting. If adopted, the Order would revise the FCC’s NEPA rules so they align with the amended NEPA statute and shorten the federal permitting process. A central piece of the Order would codify the statutory definition of “major Federal action” — the threshold that triggers a federal agency’s NEPA obligations — and clarify which FCC actions meet it. Under the proposal, more than 14,800 wireless deployments would no longer face evaluation under the Commission’s current NEPA checklist. The Order would also find that certain deployments tied to spectrum licenses and satellite earth stations — as well as space-based operations, such as the launch and operation of space stations — do not qualify as major Federal actions.
LLMs are real, AI is fake ( permalink) Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/ It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity": https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces): https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits: https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday it is moving to open more wireless spectrum for space-based broadband service. The FCC said its order to be voted on on September 30 would open more than 1,000 megahertz in the 12 GHz and 42 GHz bands for high-speed satellite broadband to home, in-flight and on-ship connectivity, and traffic-routing functions in satellite ground networks. The FCC also plans to advance a proposal to modernize its rules for ultra-wideband technology to assist in industrial uses, vehicle technologies and package tracking. Other systems include door locks, key fobs and ground- and wall-penetrating imaging systems that support public safety and rescue operations.
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. I feel the urgency personally. My own father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death, and I myself survived an early-stage cancer that would not have been treatable even fifty years ago. Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity. But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. I’ve written a lot about them too. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.
Ookla data identifies the individual Starlink satellites that powered Spain's emergency satellite service during its record wildfires, revealing how, where, and for whom the direct-to-cell layer worked. In the last week of July 2026, the Sierra Oeste fire complex burned more than 60,000 hectares across Ávila, Madrid and Toledo. Officials described it as Spain’s largest wildfire on record, prompting the country’s first national wildfire emergency and knocking out mobile coverage across dozens of rural communities. Within 48 hours, MasOrange and Starlink opened their five-month-old satellite direct-to-device (D2D) pilot, free of charge, to Movistar customers as well as MasOrange’s own, under an exceptional permit from Spain’s telecoms ministry. This analysis reconstructs the D2D activation from the device side using Ookla® background signal scan data, cross-checked against the constellation’s published orbital elements, official fire perimeters from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, and crowdsourced outage reports from Downdetector.
An independent study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city should protect the big tech employers it has while building a more diverse economy on top of them. The 127-page report also says Seattle's tax structure is unique among its peers in penalizing the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers. Overall, Seattle’s business taxes are actually in line with competing cities, write researchers from the economic consulting firm Formation in the new report. But Seattle’s taxes are “particularly distortionary when it comes to hiring high-wage employees,” they add. Mayor Katie Wilson helped design the tax, known as JumpStart, before taking office. But even the strongest supporters of new local and state taxes would concede that Seattle is “reaching the limits of how much it can tax the industries and people that it is depending upon to drive its growth,” the researchers write. Another risk for the city is the resulting concentration of the tax base. Three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers comes from 10 companies. Nine of them are in tech-related sectors.
Pending data centers will now need to strike community benefits agreements with host communities that align with state standards before state permitting can get underway. Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order Tuesday subjecting proposed data center projects to local approval before developers can move on to state permitting, representing her administration's latest crackdown on the facilities after halting tax breaks earlier this summer. As the artificial intelligence boom marches on, pending data centers in Massachusetts will now need to strike community benefits agreements with host communities that align with state standards before state permitting can get underway. The order also blocks the use of non-disclosure agreements between state agencies and data centers to "ensure a transparent and fair approval process," Healey's office said. "Unless a community says yes to a data center, we're saying no," Healey said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.
President Donald Trump’s directive to accelerate data center development on federal lands is facing public backlash and legal hurdles. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration is pushing full steam ahead and sparking concerns it is prioritizing corporate needs over the public good. The Bureau of Land Management has asked its state directors to identify public land ripe for data center development, according to two people familiar with the request, and those leaders have compiled lists for Interior Department leadership.
Five newspaper publishers in New York City agreed in 1846 to pool resources in order to speed the delivery of news about the U.S. war with Mexico using a pony-express relay through Alabama to a telegraph office. Those beginnings gave birth to an organization that in many ways became the backbone of the news industry. The AP claims some 4 billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, see news produced by the company on a typical day. Many don’t realize that. For most of its history, the AP has effectively been a utility, providing material for other news outlets to print, broadcast or carry online, its journalists largely anonymous. AP reporters weren’t even identified with bylines until World War I. But the company has chronicled the nation’s big moments for much of the 250-year history of the American republic. Although horses long since gave way to the internet, the journalism remains. Here are some stories behind the stories the AP has chronicled.
Almost every conversation and vendor pitch in telecoms now suggests orchestration as the necessary fabric to exploit AI. It implies abstracting away the growing complexity and numbers of integration touch-points between sub-systems, as well as external issues such as regulation, identity, 3rd-party tools or apps, and security. The term itself isn't new in telecoms, its use seems to have proliferated in recent months. I think that many vendors have recognised that:
Can local governments build modern public safety infrastructure without sacrificing citizen privacy or handing millions to private cloud vendors? Former Shreveport CTO Keith Hanson joins Chris to break down the hidden costs of vendor-owned surveillance, the realities of municipal IT bureaucracy, and how cities can use creative, low-cost solutions to retain control over their own data. The conversation begins with Keith’s experiences leading technology initiatives in Shreveport, including the establishment of a civilian-led Real-Time Crime Center and the deployment of local camera systems. Keith explains why he opted to build low-cost, off-the-shelf camera systems rather than paying steep subscription fees to private vendors who harvest public data into centralized cloud databases.
The delay comes amidst a firestorm, if not hysteria, set off by Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon, who just quit to call attention to what he considers the threat of human extinction posed by fast developing and ever more powerful AI models. To fan the flames of concern, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s own Lead for Alignment Science, agreed with Coxon but went further: Former AI Czar David Sacks even floated the idea Anthropic must delay its IPO to sort out Coxon’s comments, although it looks like Sacks is being facetious:
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Anthropic is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
The only solution that I see for the proper control (and public risk management) of large A.I. and related companies is partial nationalization. At the moment, too much of the fate of the world is in the hands of a few self-interested billionaires and trillionaires, almost all men, with a myopic focus on and fetishization of efficiency, speed, and innovation that do not align with the needs, histories, and spiritual aspirations of authentic human cultures and real human beings. Or we will watch these companies morph from private enterprises into veritable states (a process that has already begun), taking on the power and indicia of nations, with cultures, standing armies, and diplomatic powers not seen since the days of expansive Dutch and British commercial control, hundreds of years ago. This could be done through national legislation, preempting the corporation laws of the states in which they are domiciled, and forcing the companies to issue to the federal government special non-diluting equity with special voting rights, designated board seats for cabinet-level officers (who could exercise veto power), and internal government officers, placed on-site, to oversee specific societal and systemic risks. If this sounds extreme, you may not be paying attention. We have already arrived at the extreme.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorised a new R&D zone at Iowa State University, giving researchers a platform to develop wireless technologies to connect rural communities and test use cases for precision agriculture across crop and livestock farms. The agency explained the zones are designated locations where experimental licensees can test advanced wireless technologies, applications and prototype networks outside of traditional campus or lab settings. The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology also expanded spectrum bands available at an existing innovation zone at Northeastern University in Boston, alongside widening the geographic boundaries of sites at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and in Salt Lake City. FCC chair Brendan Carr stated the move at Iowa is intended to support rural wireless research.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did not grade the models. He graded the story. “They’ve been tone deaf to the communities” and stakeholders. “I was known for being a tough grader, but I would give them, on a curve, a D-minus.” U.S. Department of the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
At the Charlotte Economics Club on September 2, he said the industry had done a “terrible job, terrible job of explaining themselves,” called companies “tone deaf to the communities,” and, “on a curve,” gave them a D-minus. Days later he sharpened the national-security frame: the United States cannot pause the AI race with China, and “there is no day after tomorrow if China wins.” Both things can be true at once. The buildout is strategic. The pitch to the American public has failed.
That failure is not a communications problem on the margin. It is a design problem at the center. They are selling the wrong product to the wrong audience.
How batteries, grid connections and AI are turning energy from a network cost into an infrastructure asset. What got me looking at this was Verizon. During Verizon’s second-quarter call, Dan Schulman explained that the company is removing old copper equipment from thousands of central offices. That is freeing up buildings that already have power, permits, backup systems, and network connections. Verizon is starting to reuse some of them as small data centers for AI inference, and Schulman said an early trial sold out its available capacity within 24 hours. At Goldman Sachs Communacopia this week, he went further. Verizon is already signing agreements around some of those decommissioned sites and expects the business to start generating noticeable revenue from inference and edge computing next year. Mobile operators probably consumed around 310 TWh of electricity in 2025, roughly 1% of global electricity use, and spent around $52 billion on energy. Operators also consume billions of liters of diesel and gasoline every year, while networks account for more than three-quarters of their electricity use.
Elon Musk agreed This week was filled with doomsday concerns about human extinction caused by powerful AI models. Two Anthropic researchers fanned the flames of this controversy. Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and then went on nearly every news program to discuss why, outlining doomsday scenarios of AI causing human extinction such as by enabling bad actors to produce extinction-level biological warfare agents. To add fuel to the fire, Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger, the Lead for Alignment Science, agreed that AI could lead to human extinction within the decade, presumably, by 2030. Their concerns did not seem outlandish after Anthropic issued its September 2026 report on the serious threats that the company stopped from malevolent uses of its AI model by bad actors.
Abstract Using artificial intelligence (AI) in local journalism is more likely to yield civic benefits if it begins with the culture and needs of the community. AI should be used not simply to reproduce traditional journalism more efficiently but to improve residents’ lives by providing useful information and enhancing local representation. Those hoping to use technology to “save” local journalism should shift the discussion about AI in local news away from efficiency and replacement, and toward highlighting the concerns and observations of community members. Drawing on theories of service journalism, civic AI, and political accountability, I argue that adopting AI tools in local journalism should go hand in hand with implementing more equitable, civically-focused, participatory forms of journalism. This approach is exemplified by the “Documenters” program from City Bureau in Chicago, which pays regular residents to take notes at government meetings and uses those notes as the basis for local news. Using several recent examples and a chatbot trained on Documenters’ notes, I show how these participatory approaches offer several concrete civic benefits that AI and traditional journalism alone cannot provide. The AI-assisted journalism of tomorrow should not look like a propped-up version of the stories, narratives, institutions, and inequities of the past. AI should shape and accelerate journalism’s transition, which is already underway, into a force for promoting civic empowerment and political accountability.
When Congress created FirstNet, it required FirstNet to build “a nationwide, interoperable public safety network.” Section 6202(b) of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 (47 USC 1422(a)) (emphasis added). In light of numerous concerns with regard to the construction, management, and integration of FirstNet into the broader first responder ecosystem, the House reauthorization bill amends existing Section 1422 to include separately, as a mandatory network component: “such technologies and services as necessary to enable secure,
interoperable, resilient, and prioritized broadband communications for public safety entities.” H.R. 7386 Sec. 6. Instead of embracing this standard and complying with the statutory interoperability requirement, FirstNet and the FirstNet Contractor (AT&T) have resisted. The Federal Communications
Commission has repeatedly refused to enforce the FirstNet statute’s explicit interoperability requirement – and closed the pending proceedings on the subject in December 2025.1 Congress must therefore use the reauthorization process not merely to emphasize interoperability (as the House bill does).
This past spring, Canvas, the learning management system software I use to teach courses at Rutgers University, was hit by a global security breach that affected thousands of colleges and universities. The company that operates Canvas rolled back features while it addressed the breach. The timing of the hack couldn’t have been worse. For several days, software rollbacks prevented students from accessing course materials and kept instructors from proctoring exams and uploading final grades during the last weeks of the spring semester.[1] Two weeks before, the infrastructure Rutgers owns failed when the university’s data center lost power for most of a day, and nearly all our cloud-based software systems, from course registration to payroll and financial aid, were inaccessible. The campus-wide wireless internet networks and Rutgers’ Clinical Research Data Warehouse were also impacted.[2] For students, staff, researchers, and faculty at a university serving tens of thousands of people, most work stopped due to the outage. I teach archives, digital curation, and public interest technology to graduate students training to become public librarians and archivists. I work at one of the oldest (and largest) public research institutions in the U.S. The word “public” means many different things today, and we can see these differences depending on how it’s applied and by whom. Public can mean the way that Benjamin Franklin’s post office meant public: a service any person could use to reach any other person. Public can also mean a resource held in common, funded collectively by a geographically connected community, open to whoever walks in the doors, the way we might understand our local libraries. Public can also mean the ways that corporate firms serve people online. For platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, public means the online “town square” that millions of Americans use every day and that firms can reconfigure at will. Importantly for the computing services sector, the modifier public in “public cloud” does not mean public ownership, or universal access, or public governance with obligations to act in the public interest. So, when I ask how public the public cloud really is, I’m asking us to think about which definition applies to our computing infrastructure, and at the same time, I am pointing to how dependent our institutions have become on this technology to meet obligations to their stakeholders.
Los Angeles, Cali. (September 10, 2026) — Connected Nation (CN) today announced that Netflix is supporting the national nonprofit's attempt to earn a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ title for the “longest internet literacy live stream.” Netflix joins more than 25 national and international organizations participating in “25 Hours. One Connected World,” a global event aimed at expanding access to digital skills training and raising awareness of the Digital Divide. "Every community deserves the chance to connect, learn, and be entertained by great stories – and that starts with reliable access to the internet," said Gina Haspilaire, Vice President of Open Connect Partnerships and Infrastructure, Netflix. "We've long worked to strengthen internet access and quality for our members, and we're proud to support Connected Nation in bringing this world record attempt to life, shining a light on the importance of turning access into opportunity for communities across America."
Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics. This week, NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered if the company had used their work with Codex to produce its own groundbreaking proof over a marathon weekend of inference. On Thursday, OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university. While the ability of AI models to solve the world’s outstanding mathematical challenges could be a boon to humanity, the signatories of the new letter argue that will only be the case if those solutions can be understood and communicated by the math community and, ultimately, the rest of the world.
MPR reports… A Virginia-based developer has withdrawn from a deal to transform the former Star Tribune printing facility in Minneapolis into a data center. The proposal drew heavy criticism from residents of the city’s North Loop neighborhood. Minneapolis spokesperson Jess Olstad confirmed that Legacy Investing withdrew a land use application for the proposed facility, which would have included a 20-megawatt data center as well as other developments at nearby parcels. More info…
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Scoop.it!
