Buying extra storage space for your Google Drive is now called AI for some reason.

Interesting, considering Meta comms made such a stink about how it was never deployed and claimed Wired went overboard with their first story. 🤔🤔🤔

The U.S. government sent someone to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum but not to the RSA Conference on cybersecurity in San Francisco. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/w...

yep. this is a crazy stat, for example:

Scott Pelley's one of those one-man-institution guys who I didn't think to appreciate til he's gone, but man I appreciate him. Routinely doing TV journalism that's smart, hard hitting, and very broadly accessible might be the hardest thing in journalism and he's so good at that.

There's just a certain fin de siecle absurdity of someone whose only achievement in life is having opinions on the internet ending the career of someone who managed to get into Kyiv in 2022 in the middle of the initial Russian invasion to interview Zelensky.

So pro-Iranian hackers got access to the top enlisted member of Space Force's Instagram and spent Sunday evening posting Ali Larijani fan cams, Hanoi Hannah audio and Game of Thrones memes. taskandpurpose.com/culture/spac...

It's very funny when Gmail AI can't recognize an obvious phishing email but can auto summarize it for you

I get that there is a theoretical privacy value to Bitcoin ATMs. But in practice, in a world where it's easy to get a Coinbase account, their main purpose seemed to be to charge heavy fees for confused scam victims who didn't understand crypto.

New: NYC Health and Hospitals says a data breach earlier this year affects 1.8 million people. Hackers stole personal info, medical data, government-issued IDs, Social Security numbers — and *biometrics*, including fingerprints and palm scans. Already one of the largest healthcare breaches of 2026.

Bitcoin Depot, the US' largest crypto ATM operator, is shutting down citing anti-fraud measures it had to roll out ...and now you know why these things existed in the first place www.globenewswire.com/news-release...

Privacy and security people: Do you keep a burner phone number handy at all times for everyday use? Feels like an inevitable opsec step but I don't see people talking about it except for travel and serious use cases. I'm talking about for grocery rewards, gym membership, to RSVP to a bday party.

Incredible kicker here.

The existence of this article means that the poor writer had to spend a good chunk of last night/early this morning frantically looking for a news angle to write up. I hope he's napping now.

🚨

happy birthday to moms

Some personal-professional news: I have spawned/sired yet another person, and as a result am not writing news stories until deeper into the summer. Please refrain from making any news until August.

I'm so fascinated by these things. Practically all cybercrime these days is done by people far away, usually on another continent. You don't really need to worry about a hacker in your coffee shop and haven't for a long time. But occasionally dudes will drive a textspam-van in your area.

EXCLUSIVE: My latest story for @theatlantic.com : www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Question for my fellow tech/AI/etc reporters here: How often do you get "tips" from people clearly suffering from AI psychosis? Strangers reaching out to tell you they've uncovered something secret and special and technical through an AI. I've had several via Grok. Yesterday my first Gemini.

I get a lot of AI slop book marketing emails, but this is the first time I have ever been . . . mistaken for Jane Austen.

[NYT breaking news email has a typo in the subject one time] Oh was that during the Meg Gala?

Some really strong reporting here. As many communities across the country are rejecting new data centers, WV is seeing a boom, often in secret thanks to a special state law that makes it easy for companies building them to dodge FOIA requests.

This week, the Supreme Court finally killed off the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I've spent the past decade studying the VRA and the attacks on it, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective, and where I think we're headed. This will be a long thread; buckle up.

Potential case of Chinese government transnational repression behind RightsCon cancellation.

This is the biggest digital rights conference in the world, with people from every corner planning for months, and scheduled to start in less than a week.

I think she's the first cyber subcommittee leader to say she wants to dismantle DHS. bsky.app/profile/ddim...

Last night’s incident was closer on the spectrum to the Clinton era “assassination attempt” when a guy opened fire on the White House with an AK-47 from the public sidewalk than it was to Butler, where the president was actually in danger. It was just a Hail Mary at the first line of security.

Do think it’s notable here that the pool report—the journalists not attending the event, but actually covering it—was the correct one

Big news: Sean Plankey has withdrawn from consideration to be Trump's CISA director after his nomination languished for more than a year amid bipartisan holds in the Senate. CISA hasn't had a permanent director since Trump retook office. www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

I admittedly follow news from WV in particular, but I really don't think there's another state in the country where industry so routinely kills and poisons the locals.

This is the kind of specific election disinfo/misinfo that Facebook and others actively sought out to remove in 2020. Now it's just a mailer that the WV GOP does.

NEW: The Onion says it has struck a deal to take over Infowars. That deal still must be approved by a judge. This news was first reported by @pablo.show. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Not relevant to this specifically but since we're doing Justified discourse, I always desperately appreciated it was a show set in Appalachia that had cops and criminals, bad people and good and in between, rich middle and working class often in tension, etc. Very little of that on TV!

Extremely good reporting and color in here.

SCOOP at @nbcnews.com: Back in January, Apple privately threatened to remove the Grok app from the App Store.

New: San Jose and SJPD sued over use of nearly 500 Flock Safety cameras. Class action alleges their prevalence and the accessibility of residents' location data violates the Fourth Amendment.

Still thinking about the NY Post scoop on a scientifically impossible CIA spy tool. While it's possible the reporter lied/misunderstood/talked to two bogus sources, I think it's more likely is that it's an actual US gov disinformation campaign, knowing the NYP is conservative and for/by rubes.

My toddler keeps getting gifted hand me down Thomas the Tank Engine books and I truly do not understand their deal. He keeps pointing to these trains with expressive round human faces and saying what's that and I have to keep telling him it's yet another funny train-man who is among regular people

Tonight's a good reminder that when you see abuse allegations in a major news outlet with a real standards department, the allegations have been thoroughly vetted, investigated, corroborated. There's strong reason to believe them. It's not wanton rumors or a coin toss whether or not they're true.

I have a weird little story about Paolo Zampolli, the guy who introduced Trump to Melania: He owned a building 1 block away from the old BuzzFeed NYC office and would rent some of its apartments on AirBnB. I stayed there a lot (proof attached, he gave me great reviews). This was part of the decor:

A subtle/weedsy thing I find very interesting about Anthropic's exclusive mega hacking machine announced Tues: They say they briefed CISA and NIST on it. A non-exclusive list. I asked them + NSA if those agencies had tried it. Each deliberated for a v long time and then refused to confirm or deny.

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning. And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep. Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones. No warrant required. Our @citizenlab.ca investigation + how to protect yourself 🧵/1 citizenlab.ca/research/ana...

I can say without hesitation that this is the HARDEST article I have ever written, but I am incredibly proud of it. If you have questions about Orion’s heat shield, given the issues with Artemis I, I hope I can provide some answers: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

This might be overstating it a bit

This is some of the most important reporting to come out of the war on Iran so far. And it's nice to see CBS doing it, i.e good reminder that bad leadership doesn't mean that every journalist there instantly stops doing their job.

For weeks I’ve been working on a very strange story that sent me to Victoria, Canada and a little town in Georgia, to try and get to the bottom of a left-wing conspiracy theory about Donald Trump and a man who claims he was abused by the president and Jeffrey Epstein. www.ms.now/news/sascha-...

It's annoying that the NY Post credulously published such ridiculous claim, but props to Scientific American for actually doing the legwork to explain why it's certainly bullshit.