Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

Jake Laperruque raises the alarm on ICE’s reckless use of facial recognition and its risks for wrongful detainment.

The 2025 US state legislative session has been something of a watershed moment for tech and work policy, write Mishal Khan and Annette Bernhardt.

Ryan McGrady asks, who is Grokipedia for, other than its owner?

Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia owned by Elon Musk's xAI, went live on October 27. It is positioned as, first and foremost, an ideological foil to Wikipedia, which for years has been the subject of escalating criticism by right-wing media in general and Musk in particular. With Grokipedia, Musk wants to produce something he sees as more neutral.

Much has already been written about the character of Grokipedia’s content. This essay aims to explore the nature of the project and its version of neutrality, as compared to Wikipedia. Technologically, it is one of many experiments designed to replace human-generated writing with LLMs; conceptually, it is less a successor to Wikipedia than a return to an older model of producing officially sanctioned knowledge.

As the AI boom accelerates, data centers, the “factories of the cloud”, are transforming landscapes, economies, and ecosystems around the world. Their massive appetite for energy, water, and land is reshaping local environments and economies globally, yet the people most affected by these projects often have the least visibility into their true costs — and the fewest opportunities to shape their outcomes.

This collaborative session will bring together journalists, researchers, and advocates who are uncovering the hidden realities of data center expansion and connecting those findings to community action. We’ll move from investigation to action, exploring how reporting and research can illuminate the social, environmental, and economic impacts of digital infrastructure, and how communities, journalists, and advocates are exposing and reshaping the global footprint of data centers.

The philanthropic nonprofit model is simply not up to the job of playing the unifying civic role that is the ultimate purpose of any public media worthy of the name.

In the aftermath of President Trump’s unprecedented rescission of public funding previously approved by Congress for public broadcasting, former NPR chief Vivian Schiller was surprisingly not all that upset. “My perspective now,” she told Fox News, “is let’s move on.” She added, “I have long believed that mixing journalism and federal funding is just a recipe for disaster.”

Referring to the local public media outlets most strongly affected by the cuts, Schiller suggested this approach: “Let’s get support for those rural stations from the communities, from philanthropies, and find other ways to support them.” In the wake of the rescission, both small donors and major foundations have in fact increased their contributions. But the amounts — a reported increase from previous years of $70 million in donations through June and a foundation initiative announced in August to contribute $37 million — fall far short of the $1.1 billion that would have come from CPB over the next two years. In the meantime, many stations are already being forced to make deep cuts in local news programming.

For the main podcast, we have something of a Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses bumper episode this week. We start with Joseph and Jason’s piece on a $60 mod that disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the smart glasses.

After the break, Emanuel tells us how some people are abusing the glasses to film massage workers, and he explains the difference between a phone and a pair of smartglasses, if you need that spelled out for you. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us about the future of advertising: AI-generated ads personalized directly to you.

The US-UK technology deal announced in September 2025 promises to accelerate Britain’s AI sector, but critics warn it will happen at the expense of

To protect economic and public safety interests, regulators, legislators, law enforcement, municipalities, and communications providers must work together.

Rachelle Faust and Daniel Arnaudo discuss how independent research on social media platforms is vanishing as data access shrinks, deepening global inequities.

Dia Kayyali says in the face of the authoritarian threat, the fight for justice and rights for all is systemic, and requires creativity and coordination.

In many unbanked countries, fewer than one in three adults have a financial account, but most own a mobile phone.

Christine Galvagna proposes an EU fund to support decentralized, public service focused social media networks to protect digital rights and democracy.

By resisting surveillance, extraction, and exploitation, Mamdani can show how technology truly serves the people, writes Rebecca Williams.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has already proven he knows how to build power from the ground up. When he assumes office in January, he has the opportunity to translate that power into a clear tech policy agenda that is consistent with his campaign. The platform that voters endorsed in Tuesday’s election includes bold commitments around housing, transit, and justice—but it offers only a few surface mentions of technology. Few have yet laid out the specifics he will need to make tech work for people rather than for extraction and exploitation.

As a New York state legislator, Mamdani supported the STOP FAKES Act to curb government deception online and backed Bill A1755 under the ConnectAll initiative to expand internet access for residents in temporary housing. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, call for city-owned broadband and universal access, curbs on police surveillance tech and data-sharing, a Data Bill of Rights, public alternatives to Big Tech (including platform co-ops), and stronger worker power in tech; his administration can advance these goals. And today, Mamdani announced that former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, a luminary in the fight for economic and social justice, to his transition team, which suggests tech will be at the forefront of his administration’s concerns.

Donald Trump engages in ad hoc agreements with individual companies and governments to expand his power. Some observers have described these actions as a new “economic nationalism”—but that term fails to explain what makes this administration’s decision-making unique.

Barely a week goes by without Donald Trump announcing a new public investment or industry-specific subsidy. Late last month, the Trump administration committed to investing $80 billion in nuclear power. A day earlier, the United States and Japan agreed to a robust set of investments in critical mineral production, an extension of the pattern of direct investments the U.S. government has already made. Meanwhile, the government is now the largest stockholder in Intel and worked with Nvidia to suspend export controls on certain high-powered chips to China.

Some observers have described these actions as a new “economic nationalism,” citing the administration’s prioritization of domestic economic interests over international economic integration. But that term fails to explain what makes this administration’s decision-making unique.

HPD's Dave Seliger and NYPL's Dr. Brandy McNeil discuss how NYC is breaking broadband barriers with its 'Neighborhood Tech Help' pilot program.

In what would normally be an extraordinary action, but which is becoming commonplace, the FCC thumbed its nose at Congress and raised rates for telephone and video calls placed from jails and prisons. The FCC under Jessica Rosenworcel issued new rules in 2024 that lowered prison calling rates that came as a result of the…

Voters rejected Trump the same way they've rejected incumbents for 20 years. Enough with the bubbles! Plus, health care industry wins the gov't shutdown and Trump may lose his tariff authority, and Disney and Google feud over which monopolist gets to control sports programming. Also, Lina Khan content now goes way more viral than that of Barack Obama.

But this week, the most important story are the results of the elections Tuesday, which I suspect reflect a deep dissatisfaction not just with Trump, but with American economic strategy since the mid-2000s. Here’s pollster G. Elliot Morris describing the key dynamic: “Among voters who said the economy was their top issue, partisan trust on the economy moved 93 points toward Democrats between 2024 and this year’s New Jersey and Virginia elections.” In addition, this week, Trump’s disapproval collapsed, moving from an average of negative 7.5% for most of his first year to negative 13% just this week.

These shifts, while large, make sense, and actually track what happened to Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump’s politics in some ways mirror those of Biden. For instance, during the Biden era, Democrats obsessed over niche identity questions and ignored the real economy, throwing a few crumbs towards an industrial policy, which is to say subsidies for chips, batteries, and solar panels, and a bit of antitrust. Wall Street and big tech did very well, and prices were high. The result was that Republicans over-performed.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations.

At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving, overcharging or otherwise taking advantage of their customers by enacting rules, filing lawsuits and shutting down the worst offenders.

This cat-and-mouse game has long rankled tech leaders, but it has especially irritated Marc Andreessen, one of America’s most well-known investors and an outsize figure in the so-called fintech industry.

Of particular concern to Andreessen was federal regulators’ targeting of the freewheeling crypto industry under President Joe Biden — an effort that legal experts said would have planted a costly roadblock in the path of several companies’ rapid growth. The investor’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, told the CFPB last year it planned to put more than $7 billion in crypto funds. So in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the longtime Democrat shifted his allegiance to Donald Trump, donating more than $5 million to groups supporting the Republican candidate, and even volunteered to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Ever since, Andreessen and others have seen their desires realized.

Lawsuits have been dropped and settlements renegotiated in favor of companies as the administration guts the CFPB.

Around $21 billion of the federal broadband program could be left over, according to recent research, which also found that as many as 1 million locations could still be unserved.