Sharks are innocent. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 subsea cables that carry almost all of our intercontinental traffic—supporting just about every swipe, tap, Zoom, and doomscroll anywhere on the planet—have a love-hate relationship with this myth, which has persisted for decades. They might even hate that I’m starting this piece with it.If a cable is suspended over the seabed,…
“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the prosecution’s filing reads. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisonings.”Yet portions of the defense’s memos related to Lin’s sentencing point to several specific…
Imagine trying to run an autonomous car through this traffic more than a century ago. Imagine now that there are locales exactly like this through which an autonomous L4 car needs to traverse. The lifeblood of AI (at least until we reach a point where computers can actually think like…
The US Supreme Court on Friday overturned most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which could lead to more than $175 billion in tariff refunds for American companies. In a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—the law that the Trump administration used to justify…
Zuckerberg repeatedly fell back on accusing Lanier of “mischaracterizing” his previous statements. When it came to emails, Zuckerberg typically objected based on how old the message was or his lack of familiarity with the Meta employees involved. “I don’t think so, no,” he replied when directed to clarify whether he…
After hundreds of workers were laid off in early February from Jack Dorsey’s Block, some of the people remaining at the company say the internal culture has devolved to a point where performance anxiety is running rampant, using generative AI is required, and overall morale is rapidly deteriorating. Block is…
Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led…
A group of 23 Democratic US senators sent a letter Friday to the top federal regulator overseeing prediction markets, urging the agency to avoid weighing in on pending court cases over the legality of offerings on the platforms tied to “sports, war, and other prohibited events.”Prediction markets, which sell contracts…
This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. “We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom,” CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he expects things to improve only marginally in…
OpenAI’s president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn’t consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump’s biggest individual donors of 2025.Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc—a super PAC that supports President Trump—in September of last year. The pair also gave…
Today, Meta went to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The state claims that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by implementing design features and algorithms that created dangerous conditions for users.…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency.The letter specifically cites the “recent…
For Elon Musk, the US Justice Department’s release of 3 million additional files related to criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein last month was immediately embarrassing. Attention in particular fell on emails Musk sent the financier several years after he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and of procurement of minors…
The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai.On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta,…
Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web.Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.Leah…
Spotlight
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Ahead of the launch of the Pixel 10a in February, Google has…
