Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Featured stories
The Senate passed a bill cracking down on sexually explicit deepfakes
The DEFIANCE Act would let victims of nonconsensual intimate AI-generated images go after those who created them.
Meta cracks down on ‘Yahoo Boys’ and thousands of sextortion accounts
The company said it used new signals it developed to detect and disrupt the scam.
It’s a busy day in DC: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address Congress this afternoon, and Musk is in attendance.
Dozens of Democrats have vowed to boycott his speech — and protests are happening today — as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza stretches into its ninth month. Nearly 40,000 people have been killed.
Update: Musk told a reporter he’s there as a guest of Netanyahu’s.
Vice President Kamala Harris now has the support of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for the top job. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden said he would issue an Oval Office address at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, “on what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people.”
Alongside the FTC and the DOJ, the UK and EU’s antitrust authorities have issued a joint statement saying they will work to ensure fair competition in the AI industry.
One potential issue highlighted by the enforcers is the possibility that AI chipmakers could “exploit existing or emerging bottlenecks,” giving them “outsized influence over the future development” of AI tools.
[Federal Trade Commission]
JD Vance’s former coworkers say the vice presidential candidate wasn’t very good at being a venture capitalist. One person said he was too consumed with his book tour around Hillbilly Elegy to show up to work.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) backed her fellow Californian Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. The announcement shores up support from a key member of the party, further easing Harris’ path to the Democratic nomination. In a statement on X about Harris, Pelosi said she has “full confidence that she will lead us to victory in November.”
[Twitter]
In her first X post since President Joe Biden’s endorsement to lead the party’s ticket, VP Harris said she would “do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Democrats are slated to choose their nominee at the national convention in August.
By endorsing Trump, Elon Musk is gambling with Tesla’s future
The CEO of an EV company goes all in on the candidate who has made anti-EV sentiment a cornerstone of his campaign.
Open source developers dismissed OpenAI from their 2022 lawsuit alleging that it violated copyright law by reproducing their code without attribution.
As Bloomberg Law writes, the lawsuit will continue against GitHub and Microsoft (although without the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims that the judge dismissed this month).
I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.
One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?
[maxread.substack.com]
The watchdog says that Meta violated upon local consumer protection and data privacy laws, reports Reuters. The company has 60 days to pay the fine, according to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s order.
You can read documents associated with the case on the watchdog’s website.
The FTC called Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it had predicted ahead of the company’s Activision-Blizzard buy.
Microsoft’s response (PDF) claims that with included multiplayer and the upcoming day-and-date release of Call of Duty, the offering isn’t degraded at all.
In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:
As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.
We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.
Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.
The State of Connecticut DMV reported a return to normal services this afternoon, while CyberScoop points out some of the other entities that have reported issues to varying degrees in NYC, Ohio, Pennsylvania — you name it.
That should just about cover the various federal agencies looking into this global problem, right? Even if it took them...12 hours to mention it, although maybe their systems were down too?
According to 404 Media, the list of directly impacted agencies included the Treasury and the Department of Energy.
Gadgets are getting weird — and so are iPhone homescreens
On The Vergecast: Trump, Apple betas, and a round of ‘is this anything?’
According to a new Bloomberg report, the FBI’s initial attempts to break into the phone belonging to Thomas Matthew Crooks were unsuccessful.
But that changed once Cellebrite provided the agency with an unreleased, still-in-development update to its software. From there, it took just 40 minutes to access Crooks’ phone, which is described as “a newer Samsung model.”
The country’s competition watchdog suspects Google may provide “incomplete and misleading” about how the company uses personal data when users link their accounts to other apps and services. In a statement to Bloomberg, Google says it will “examine the case and work with the authorities.”