🚨NEW🚨 Amazon has been developing drone surveillance tech for American cops, from gun detection to repurposing Twitch's streaming code. It's also pushing all manner of surveillance tools, including Flock car tracking and AI that constantly monitors all prison calls. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

"The rate of election appeals by companies in the time from Wilcox's firing to the end of August was more than double the rate filed during the same time frame last year when the NLRB was fully functional, the Reuters tally showed." www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

NEW: Federal workers had their out-of-office replies changed to an unhinged and probably illegal partisan screed; when they changed them to neutral language, the replies were changed yet again. @leahfeiger.bsky.social and @telliotter.bsky.social have the details:

Am curious what might be considered "high quality" AI slop: "Mr. Sahai, the OpenAI product leader, said a significant amount of content, across the quality spectrum, would be produced with Sora, but that the highest quality work would rise to the top." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/t...

New: Two Amazon delivery drones crashed into a construction crane midflight in Arizona yesterday, prompting the company to suspend the service. The FAA and NTSB are probing the incident: www.cnbc.com/2025/10/02/a...

the torch has officially passed from millenials to zoomers. enjoy your turn in the sun as the whipping boy and freak show of american media, anthropologized as if being visited by aliens www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/s...

"Many of the laws don’t cover generic chatbots like ChatGPT, which are not explicitly marketed for therapy but are used by an untold number of people for it." apnews.com/article/ai-t...

New: I sat down with Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff, who returned to the Amazon-owned unit in April. He explained his decision to restore Ring's original mission to "make neighborhoods safer." Of the scrutiny over tech and policing, he said he "backs the blue" www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/r...

Really important story from @jonathanvanian.bsky.social on the burgeoning online market for AI "nudify" services that allow users to easily create nonconsensual, explicit deepfakes and the shockingly limited legal recourse for victims of this abuse www.cnbc.com/2025/09/27/n...

Docs reveal how deeply embedded Palantir’s tools were in ICE's investigative unit. For example, they used a Palantir app to plan a gang takedown & when a target was not at the expected location they used the same app to find the person at their family's address. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Not doing a renovation because I don’t want the terrorists to win

"Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers, the agency said..." story by Annie Palmer @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/09/25/a...

“.. days after President Donald Trump issued a public demand for his Justice Department to act ‘now’ to bring prosecutions against Comey and other political foes ..” abcnews.go.com/US/former-fb...

“The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.”

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Who the hell would use shit like ChatGPT when Dear Daria on the 2002 Sony Clié PEG-NX80V exists

New: Amazon suspended a Palestinian software engineer on Monday who protested its work with Israel through Slack posts and a letter to executives. It's the latest example of tech companies cracking down on dissent of their work with the Israeli government: www.cnbc.com/2025/09/11/a...

Five years after its splashy $1.3 billion acquisition of Zoox, Amazon is officially entering the robotaxi race by launching public rides in Las Vegas, its first commercial market. It'll take on Google's Waymo, the U.S. robotaxi leader. More here w/ @sal19.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/2025/09/10/a...

According to reports, “Amazon is simultaneously working on two models: one for its own drivers to assist with deliveries, and a sleeker version with color display for customers to order.” Anyway, today in luxury surveillance.

Strong reporting here from ProPublica, which found that three Trump Cabinet members -- at Labor, Transportation and EPA -- call multiple homes their primary residence on mortgages. That's the same move that led Trump to fire Lisa Cook from her job at the Fed. bit.ly/466yMyI

New: Reverse acquihire deals are gaining momentum in Big Tech as they look to keep pace in the AI race. But what happens to execs and staffers who get left behind? @ashleycapoot.cnbc.com, @sal19.bsky.social and I found these deals often turn them into "zombie" startups. www.cnbc.com/2025/08/19/h...

rewarding my microwave by letting it heat up a fork as a treat

Totally normal stuff: Two sections of the Constitution, about due process and foreign gifts, just vanished off the Congressional website, a site that has not changed in many many years www.404media.co/constitution...

NEW: Google dubbed an error from its healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, a typo. Experts say it demonstrates the risks of AI in medicine. www.theverge.com/health/71804...

New: Google execs are "urgently" pushing employees to use more AI tools in their day-to-day as the company tries to get more productivity out of everyone amid growing AI $$ spending. cnb.cx/44RB5X8

Hey is it bad if google AI search results stop people from leaving google dot com 99% of the time? All our news and information creators can survive just fine with one percent of their previous search traffic right? I’m sure it’s fine. www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...

ProPublica has obtained the blueprint for the Trump administration’s unprecedented plan to turn over IRS records to Homeland Security in order to speed up the agency’s mass deportation efforts.

A Canadian labor board has ruled Amazon interfered in a union drive at one of its BC warehouses, including by hiring an excessive amount of workers to dilute the vote www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

New: Amazon warehouse workers from countries like Haiti and Venezuela are losing their jobs after the Trump administration ended humanitarian parole programs. These folks came to the U.S. legally but are now out of work, undocumented and at a higher risk of deportation. www.cnbc.com/2025/07/10/a...

ICEblock, which allows users to alert others to the geographical location of ICE officers, is the top social networking app in the App Store right now after Karoline Leavitt condemned it from the podium yesterday.

about 150 people are protesting outside a Palantir office in Palo Alto and have stopped local traffic. "Up, up for liberation, down, down with deportation," they chanted

Trump Mobile has dropped claims that its $500 T1 Phone, announced last week, would be "made in the USA" via @arjunkharpal.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/06/26/t...

Meta is absent from SF Pride this year, as tech industry retreats from public support of LGBTQ+ - quite a contrast from 2015 when Mark Zuckerberg personally called the nonprofit to ensure Facebook had a spot at the SF Pride parade. www.cnbc.com/2025/06/24/m...

New w/ @ashleycapoot.cnbc.com: Amazon is reorganizing its health-care business into six new “pillars” to simplify its structure. It comes after Amazon recently lost a handful of top health execs, including two departures that haven’t been previously reported. www.cnbc.com/2025/06/13/a...

Amazon reorganizes health-care business in latest bid to crack multitrillion-dollar market www.cnbc.com/2025/06/13/a... by @ashleycapoot.cnbc.com & @anniepalmer.bsky.social

Some Amazon employees have uncovered snippits of internal code that look like instructions for an AI model to evaluate and pull keywords from disability and leave documentation:

Overall, just 30% of American voters surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of Musk, the world's richest person, Trump backer & CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI (which owns X) etc. - Less than a third and that’s gotta feel bad when he’s on X all day receiving praise from fans & bots.

Really good WSJ article on ICE escalations over recent weeks including Miller's visit to ICE national HQ where he demanded Home Depot raids. www.wsj.com/us-news/prot...

scooplet - Amazon has formed a new team in its devices unit that's tasked with developing "breakthrough" consumer products, called ZeroOne. The unit is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft and was a key architect of the Xbox. www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/a...

Amazon has struck a deal with the New York Times to license the paper's content to train its AI models. It comes as the NYT sued OpenAI and MSFT for copyright infringement, accusing them of using Times' articles to train their language models without permission. www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/a...

Spotify committing violence by putting this front and center in my feed

Big news for the exact age demographic of this website

Tech companies are ramping up security as employee protests become more common. Security firms told us that tech companies have enlisted more of their security services as they engage in more sensitive work with governments. www.cnbc.com/2025/05/26/t...

"One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/b...

guys be like "i know a place" and then take you to the cloudflare AI labyrinth

I was very happy to contribute reporting that helped get this deep dive on xAI's environmental impact in Memphis going over at @nbcnews.com. Great on the ground reporting by Bracey Harris, Jon Gerberg and Stephanie Gosk. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news... #environment #airpollution

Immigration lawyers say tech visas are under increased scrutiny. Requests for additional documentation on visa applicants are increasing; some are being asked to submit biometrics; one attorney tells WIRED the petition process has become hostile. Latest in @wired.com www.wired.com/story/trump-...

Pretty incredible that Jeff Bezos' Amazon announced a "$5 billion-plus" partnership w/ a Saudi AI co launched by Mohammed Bin Salman and sent CEO Andy Jassy to meet with him less than 7 years after MBS murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for Bezos' Washington Post. techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/a...

Temu has abruptly stopped shipping products direct from China after the de minimis trade exemption expired around midnight on Friday. U.S. shoppers can only buy items from "local" sellers who have inventory stored in the country, the company confirmed. www.cnbc.com/2025/05/02/t...

Corporate sponsors for the usually apolitical event held on the White House South Lawn include tech giants Meta, YouTube and Amazon.