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• eBay pays $46M to journalists it targeted in bizarre harassment campaign

  eBay and three former executives agreed to pay nearly $56 million in a settlement over a macabre campaign of cyberstalking and harassment that targeted two journalists in 2019. As we’ve previously written, the case involved deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a book about surviving the loss of a spouse, and a bloody pig mask to the home of a couple who run a news website. There were also harassing messages sent via email and Twitter, and an attempt to install a GPS tracking devic...

• Mamdani Is Right. Netanyahu Belongs Behind Bars.

  Mayor Zohran Mamdani charged Benjamin Nentayahu with genocide, said he is unwelcome in New York City, and called for his arrest. Two years ago, that would have been unimaginable. Going forward, it should be a litmus test.

• Google just had its first negative cash flow quarter due to massive "AI" spending

  Google has reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2026 (PDF), and as usual, the search giant raked in an unfathomable amount of money. Google saw total revenue of $119.8 billion, beating analyst expectations by a comfortable margin. Despite that, the company’s stock has taken a hit. Along with all that revenue, Google has announced a further increase in its AI-fueled capital expenditures (or capex). The company is actually spending so much on AI infrastructure that it has negat...

• Unlimited AI tokens aren’t unlimited after all as US Army burns through supply | Troops received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens

  Genocide aint free…

• Trump Attacks Socialism Because He Knows Americans Want It

  The current freak-out by Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and other right-wingers about democratic socialism is quite rational. In socialism, they see a formidable foe.

• ChatGPT Convinced Alabama Woman Her Soul Was Within Its System As She Ended Her Life, Lawsuit Claims

  The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT destroyed the mental stability of Christian Faith Madison, a 29-year-old Alabama resident.

• Meet Flock's Alpha Drone – It Reads License Plates from 2,000 Feet

  Car brains are fine with state licenses, state subsidies, destroying the planet, etc… But monitoring their driving is a step too far. Cars are the root problem here. No car, no license, no problem.

• A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can feed intestinal tumours

  A ketogenic diet promotes tumour growth in the small intestine in susceptible mice. In people, diet advice might need to be tailored to individual cancer risks.

• FCC officials took pricey gifts from Paramount as company needed approval for billion-dollar deals

  Expensive Gifts: Despite regulating broadcast media, FCC commissioners have accepted pricey tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala from CBS or its parent company, now Paramount. Conflict of Interest: Ethics experts say that by accepting the gifts, FCC commissioners are compromising the agency’s impartiality and should avoid acting on Paramount’s pending merger. Mixing Business and Pleasure: After voting for a Paramount merger, Commissioner Olivia Trusty took tickets worth over $12,000. FCC Ch...

• Palestinian youth saves child from drowning in sewage pond in Jabalia camp

• Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center installed 59 natural gas turbines without permission, report claims — thousands of tons of pollutants reportedly impact black communities in Mississippi already suff

• Tech bros having their production environments nuked by "AI" is never gonna get old

• An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion

  A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034. DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and vehicles—threatening the privacy and civil liberties of everyone in the border regions.

• OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

  OpenAI has decided its AI browser experiment has run its course, pulling the plug on ChatGPT Atlas less than a year after launch and moving its browser-based agent features into ChatGPT and Codex.

• Hegseth wants a "High-T" military; doctors call it a clinical minefield

  “This is a great big fat ‘Oh, no,’” Anawalt said in reaction to Hegseth’s announcement. “We’re turning the clock back on rational healthcare. … I’m worried about the ethics. I’m worried about the health consequences. I’m worried about unnecessary evaluations, incorrect assessments, and incorrect diagnoses that lead to inappropriate prescriptions of testosterone.”

• Epstein-Tied Billionaires Have Spent $1.6B on US Elections Post-Citizens United, Report Finds

  Over 80 percent of this spending went toward Republicans or conservative causes, a new analysis finds.

• AI software that generates ‘rage bait’ developed by Germany’s far-right AfD

  The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has developed a new software suite, driven by Google Gemini, Open AI and Anthropic’s Claude, that helps party members generate so-called “rage bait” social media postings. Central to the new campaign is the Alternita platform, registered to the AfD’s general secretary Hans-Holger Malcomeß, which promises users social media posts “in five minutes, with your positions, in your style, your branding”. In the case of the AfD, an undercover investiga...

• How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization

  In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press (“We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’”), we made the case against the anthropomorphizing language that makes it harder to have clear discussions of what so-called “AI” technologies actually do, and when and whether to use them. But these ways of speaking are deeply ingrained at this point, and it takes work carve new conversational and writing habits. That work involves at least three steps: Noticing which word choices are anthropomorphizing Finding...

• Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself

  In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged. Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the Nati...

• Meta Patents AI Device That Tracks Your Emotions, Watches You Take Your Meds

  Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent’s stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they’re happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an...

• Why US Media Has Evoked Israel's "Right to Exist" 1,001 Times vs Only 6 For Palestine [Podcast][28mins]

  In this News Brief, we dissect the Orwellian phrase “right to exist,” why it only applies to Israel, what purpose it serves, and why Palestinians are never said to have such a right.

• Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that "AI" agents haven't progressed as quickly as he'd hoped

  Reuters reports that at an internal town hall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected them to. Earlier this year, Meta laid off some 8,000 employees — approximately 10% of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported. During this week’s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts...

• SpaceX Is Junk. That’s What the Bond Market Says

  The bond market’s assessment also jibes with SpaceX’s stock. It’s a profitless, non-dividend-paying, one-person-controlled, empire-building project trading at more than 100 times sales, about 30 times the valuation of the S&P 500 Index. That’s the very definition of a junk stock. Original link: bloomberg.com/…/spacex-is-junk-that-s-what-the-bo…

• Israel Installs Cranes Equipped With Unmanned Machine Guns to Kill Gazans

  “Days ago, the Israeli army installed huge military cranes, each about 30 meters tall, on the eastern areas it controls. These cranes… fire randomly and almost continuously at tents, streets, and exposed neighbourhoods.” He added: “There is no place to hide, and not a single moment of safety.” Three people had been killed by the cranes in the space of two days, Nahed claimed, including a five-year-old girl playing near her home. “We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons....

• Echoes From Gaza: How the Dehumanization of Muslims Leads to the Deaths of Thousands

  I write this so that the next time you hear about the number of children killed in the war, the next time you see a video or article on Israeli violence, you recognize the dangers of remaining silent and the effects of dehumanization. Listening to this and staying silent is no longer an option. We must demand our lawmakers to do something about this. We must stop sending weapons to Israel. I write this piece so that the next time you see me, you see the face of a boy who refused to stay silent a...

• Talk of a bubble is 'blasphemy against AI' says SoftBank's Son

  … The shareholder meeting provides an opportunity for Son to lay out his ‌vision for ⁠the business and field questions from retail investors. Son has said that SoftBank is a golden-egg-laying goose and again returned to that comparison. “Eggs do not lay eggs, the goose lays the eggs,” he said. “SoftBank Group is the factory that lays the eggs.” He also complained about the gap between the company’s market capitalisation ​of around 37 trillion yen ($229 ​billion) and the value ⁠of its assets...

• A Stanford Study Exposes Massive Racial Bias in AI Hiring Tools Used by 90 Percent of Businesses

• Half of America’s Cities Are Depopulating. We Could Be Headed for a Ghost Town Era.

  Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: By studying population trends and forecasting models, researchers have come to believe that nearly 15,000 U.S. cities will face noticeable depopulation by 2100. Populated areas of the cities in question could experience a decline of up to 44 percent. Projections call for the biggest drops in city populations to occur in the Northeast and Midwest.

• NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubles down on criticism of AIPAC

  “When I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organisation that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people, not just in Palestine, but frankly, through much of the region, and it is a status quo for immorality,” Mamdani said on Monday at City Hall. The mayor noted that more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces since a US-brokered “ceasefire” was agreed last October to halt Israel’s genocidal w...

• Religious exemption from using the "AI" at work