 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Monday it is pausing leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction in the East Coast due to unspecified national security risks identified by the Pentagon. The suspension, effective immediately, is the latest step by the administration to hobble offshore wind in its push against renewable energy sources. It comes two weeks after a federal judge struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy projects, calling it unlawful. The administration said the pause will give the Interior Department, which oversees offshore wind, time to work with the Defense Department and other agencies to assess the possible ways to mitigate any security risks posed by the projects. The statement did not detail the national security risks. It called the move a pause, but did not specify an end date. The action comes two weeks after a federal judge struck down Trump's executive order blocking wind energy projects, saying the effort to halt virtually all leasing of wind farms on federal lands and waters was "arbitrary and capricious."
Fixed wireless access made another big dent in the broadband industry in 2025.
Three Democratic US senators announced on Tuesday that they are investigating whether big tech companies are passing the soaring utility costs of “energy-guzzling” data centers on to ordinary Americans. The trio sent letters to the heads of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as well as the data center operators CoreWeave, Digital Realty and Equinix asking for greater transparency, cost-sharing and accountability. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote that they were alarmed by reports that these data centers caused residential electricity bills to “skyrocket”.
The future of AI is dividing the Democratic Party, as potential 2028 presidential candidates and key stakeholders stake out clashing positions in what's already shaping up as a major policy battle in the primary. Why it matters: If Democrats win back the White House in 2028, where they land on AI will shape how the country approaches the new technology — with big consequences for the economy and workers. The big picture: Two main arguments are now playing out within the Democratic Party:
Following the announcement that Netflix would buy the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros for $72 billion, it has been difficult to find anyone who views this development as positive, with even Netflix investors displaying concern. Yet rampant speculation over what this might mean for consumers or even the art of cinema itself has risked overshadowing ominous portents for the workers who stand to lose the most — and what they might do in response. The entertainment industry may be brutal toward those it depends on, but it is particularly vulnerable to their power when they act together. Predictably, much attention has been consumed by the hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets, launched by Paramount Skydance after its own attempt to acquire WBD was beaten out. Despite Paramount chief executive David Ellison arguing that his company would be more likely to gain the approval of federal competition regulators (and Ellison reportedly promising the White House to clownify CNN à la CBS under the Bari Weiss regime), a formal response from the WBD board this week advised shareholders to reject the offer, though Paramount may still return with a higher bid. Regardless, a victory for either Netflix or Paramount would produce an industry-warping megacorporation that makes the word “monopoly” unavoidable. Whoever wins, we lose.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has hired a subsidiary of for-profit prison company GEO Group to aid in hunting down immigrants at their homes and places of work, according to records reviewed by The Intercept. ICE has secured a deal with surveillance firm BI Incorporated as part of a new program, first reported in October by The Intercept, to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. BI, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011, is one of several firms hired by ICE to provide “skip tracing” services, in which its teams of corporate investigators will use surveillance to track immigrants across the country to their homes and places of work so federal agents can easily swoop in and make arrests. Records show ICE has already paid BI $1.6 million, with the potential for the contract to grow to as much as $121 million by the time it concludes in 2027.
As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, Elon Musk sat staring at his phone, laughing. Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.
When the billionaire chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia threw a party in central London for Donald Trump’s state visit in September, the power imbalance between Silicon Valley and British politicians was vividly exposed. Jensen Huang hastened to the stage after meetings at Chequers and rallied his hundreds of guests to cheer on the power of AI. In front of a huge Nvidia logo, he urged the venture capitalists before him to herald “a new industrial revolution”, announced billions of pounds in AI investments and, like Willy Wonka handing out golden tickets, singled out some lucky recipients in the room. “If you want to get rich, this is where you want to be,” he declared. But his biggest party trick was a surprise guest waiting in the wings. At Huang’s cue, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, walked out as the crowd whooped at Huang’s pulling power.
The Village of Orland Park in Chicago's southwest suburbs has halted all construction permits for fiber-optic projects after a surge of complaints.
Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures. Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization. Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law. Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine. Nevertheless. If you tell me that you are anti-vax because you: a) believe that the pharma companies are rapacious murderers who’d kill you for a nickel; and b) believe that their regulators are so captured that every FDA official should probably be wearing a gimpsuit; I’d be hard pressed to argue with you.
The Berrien County Broadband Project, an effort by the county and several partners to expand the availability of broadband internet in the community, is this year’s recipient of the Graham Woodhouse Intergovernmental Effort Award from the Southwest
The legal firewall is gone. A 2024 court ruling just made your AI a direct liability. In November, I exposed the AI Deregulation Gambit as a strategic liability. Recently, I detailed how this plays out in practice through AI-driven defamation and misattribution—where algorithms weaponize unverified narratives. Now, a 2024 legal ruling makes the liability from both scenarios legally enforceable. The “AI made me do it” defense is bankrupt. "The case was simple: A customer asked Air Canada’s chatbot about bereavement fares. The AI hallucinated, inventing a non-existent discount. The customer, relying on this information, bought a ticket. When Air Canada refused to honor the chatbot’s promise, the customer sued." The corporation deployed the standard playbook: Deny, Deflect, Delay. They argued the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” and that customers shouldn’t trust its information. The tribunal’s response was a watershed moment:
NEW YORK — Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to sign a landmark artificial intelligence bill establishing New York’s first guardrails for tech heavyweights to mitigate catastrophic risks. The deal comes after intense talks between the governor and sponsors Assemblymember Alex Bores and state Sen. Andrew Gounardes over the details. Hochul redlined much of the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act last week and replaced it with language largely matching a comparable California law, while the bill’s sponsors pressed to keep as much teeth in the legislation as possible. In its final iteration, the RAISE Act requires developers of the industry’s most advanced AI tools, called frontier models, to report critical safety incidents within 72 hours and imposes a $1 million penalty for the first violation and $3 million for subsequent ones. It creates an oversight office within the Department of Financial Services to assess frontier models.
|
PALM BEACH, Florida/COPENHAGEN, Dec 22 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump reasserted on Monday that the United States needs Greenland for its national security and said a special envoy he appointed to the Arctic island would "lead the charge." Trump named Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry on Sunday as his special envoy to Greenland, drawing renewed criticism from Denmark and Greenland over Washington's interest in the mineral-rich Arctic island.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recently told Congress that he doesn’t believe that the FCC is an independent agency. The FCC went so far as to remove the term independent from its website. The bottom line of Chairman Carr’s opinion is that he believes the FCC should take direction from the White House. It’s an interesting an position that contradicts the long-standing intentions that the FCC, and many other federal agencies are independent, meaning that they don’t take directions directly from the Administration, but are required to follow whatever enabling laws and rules established by Congress. There are a number of independent agencies other than the FCC, including the EPA, SEC, Federal Reserve, NASA, CIA, FTC, SSA, and NTSB.
School districts from Utah to Ohio to Alabama are spending thousands of dollars on these tools, despite research showing the technology is far from reliable.
Former antitrust enforcer Roger Alford blasted the ABA Antitrust Section before Congress. Plus, Gavin Newsom raises electricity prices in California, the FTC sues Uber, and TikTok gets fake sold.
“60 Minutes” just suffered a severe blow to its credibility. Now one of its own correspondents fears the program is being “dismantled,” and some employees are threatening to quit.
The NCW Tech Alliance, in collaboration with the NCW Digital Access Coalition, is proud to announce the release of the 2024 Digital Access Plan, aimed at expanding access to skills, devices and connectivity for everyone in North Central Washington (Chelan, Douglas, Grant, and Okanogan Counties).
The Washington State Broadband Office funded the development of 4 county-level plans developed through the collective efforts of the NCW Digital Access Coalition. These plans provide a roadmap to address digital disparities, focusing on expanding broadband infrastructure, promoting digital literacy, and ensuring access to affordable devices.
The goal is to empower all individuals in the community to fully participate in the digital world.
Like their conventional counterparts, quantum computers can also break down. They can sometimes lose the atoms they manipulate to function, which can stop calculations dead in their tracks. But scientists at the US-based firm Atom Computing have demonstrated a solution that allows a quantum computer to repair itself while it's still running.
The artist’s hand refers to the evidence of an artist’s personal and unique touch left in a work. This can be seen in the specific brushstrokes of a painting, the modeling of a sculpture, or even the overall emotional quality of a piece. The proof left behind reveals or provides insight into the artist’s role in creating the art. But can the artist’s hand emerge in AI art? Aaron Hertzmann first mentioned the artist’s hand to me in a chat thread (see below). Hertzmann is a principal scientist at Adobe Research and he specializes in computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning. Hertzmann argues that computers do not make art; people do. He consistently rejects claims of machine creativity, emphasizing that art is a social phenomenon and that AI algorithms, despite their impressive capabilities, are tools used by human artists.
I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers — chairman of IBM’s board of directors — to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history. IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they’d just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as “Antitrust’s Vietnam”): https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/ The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history’s scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM’s software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this “the race to build the world’s heaviest airplane.”
Over the past year, major US tech companies have spent more than $350bn on AI-related infrastructure, with projections of over $400bn for 2026. This far exceeds the spending of any other nation — most notably China, where total investment is closer to an estimated $100bn. For many in the West, it may be reassuring that we have companies bold enough and capital markets deep enough to dominate a spending contest. If artificial intelligence is — as prophesied — the one ring to rule them all, then it would seem the west has the future in hand. That is the optimistic story. Yet there is another possibility: that Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI could mean winning the AI race but losing a broader contest for economic pre-eminence. That follows because the US has gone all-in on AI, while China is spreading its bets across several plausible futures. It all depends on the bet on AI being the right one. Despite all the talk of an existential AI race, China is somewhat less committed to AI than sometimes portrayed. Beijing regularly describes AI as a “national strategic priority” and has invested to avoid falling too far behind. But the state and its major companies are spending much more money to secure dominance in other domains, such as electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of advanced manufacturing. These sectors may be less glamorous, but their returns are far less speculative.
It is the US that is truly infatuated with AI, with investments influenced by goals that are as mystical as they are commercial, especially the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence and “the singularity”. There is a strong belief in continued exponential progress — a rarity in the history of technology. The deeper one digs, the more otherworldly it becomes, among both AI proponents and doomsayers. The concentrated, monopolized nature of the US tech sector adds to the risk: with so much spending power in so few hands, the danger of groupthink grows.
What to do?
This morning the BEAD Progress Dashboard shows five more states final proposals approved. These approved states are Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah.
This means that to-date, 34 states & 3 territories have been NTIA approved and moved on to NIST. These final proposals account for ~2.29M locations. This leaves 16 states plus the District of Columbia yet to be approved. I know the NTIA and SBOs are burning the midnight oil (great 90s band, check them out) to get these approved by year’s end. Once again, the OG “fiber-first” BEAD is seeing fiber decline, now at ~64% of BSLs. LEO is at 22.18%. Pessimistically, if LEO doesn’t end up with ANY uptake, that leaves a digital divide of a half a million BSLs. That we know of so far.
As companies race to adopt AI, they’re sidelining the very people trained to spot red flags—and the consequences could be costly. In October, Lisa Talia Moretti, an academic who specializes in the ethical dilemmas created by emerging technologies, found that jobs in her field had fallen off a cliff. Based in the U.K., she had been helping conglomerates and medium-sized businesses understand how to adopt AI in a humane and profitable manner. Or, more succinctly, Moretti had been working as an AI ethicist—someone who, as she puts it, helps businesses understand “what this technology is and what it can do.” But as the AI arms race intensifies and tech giants lock into a battle to beat each other not only in creating the most sophisticated model but also in cornering the market, ethics is becoming an afterthought.
|
