Jason Koebler, 404 Media: The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]⌥ Permalink

Dr. Drang: A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years […]⌥ Permalink

If you cannot get enough squircle talk, Michael Tsai has a whole roundup of different takes, some of which you may not have seen already. Here is another thing: robbing icons of a variable for creative excellence and flexibility is just another form of context flattening. You know how Instagram and YouTube are host to […]⌥ Permalink

Kashmir Hill, of the New York Times (gift link), learned about an A.I.-generated biography of her for sale on Amazon for $27. It is just one of many wholly-generated books available there: Amazon does not mind if people hawk A.I.-generated books on its platform, unless they are truly and deeply terrible. “Charlie Kirk: An Inspiring […]⌥ Permalink

Bryce Elder, on the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog: Here’s paragraph one of the Morgan Stanley’s SpaceX initiation note: With an ‘X of 1’ position in space infrastructure, we believe SpaceX can convert energy into intelligence at scale with optionality to monetize through a range of consumer and enterprise solutions for the next era of AI… […]⌥ Permalink

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: In a newly published Apple Advertising Services policy, effective as of July 14, 2026, the iPhone maker shares its rules for advertising on Apple Maps. Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting services, among others. If Apple is […]⌥ Permalink

Paul Kafasis, writing on the Rogue Amoeba blog: With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to […]⌥ Permalink

Yash Garg: A friend pointed me to this option in Meta Accounts Center called “Activity from other businesses”, which shows “activity sent from other businesses or organizations to show you relevant content.” Their main help page doesn’t even work in my region. If you dig around in your Meta account privacy settings, you can turn […]⌥ Permalink

Karl Bode: One lie that companies have been telling local municipalities is that if they greenlight a massive local AI data center, it will immediately bring a flood of savvy innovators to your podunk-ass town. The promotional materials for Kevin O’Leary’s still hypothetical “data centre park” imagine a futuristic campus full of bright young minds […]⌥ Permalink

Nathaniel Rich, author of the novel “Cloudthief”, in a non-fiction retelling for New York Times Magazine of a 2007 heist of a London data centre by Terry Ellis and others: The fixer — Ellis called him Ray and won’t reveal his name — met him in North London near Hampstead Heath for coffee and cakes. […]

Meta, in a press release called “Meta’s A.I. Glasses: Your Questions Answered”: Can’t people just cover up or disable the LED? The camera is disabled when people try to do this. Beginning with our second generation of glasses, the camera is automatically disabled if we detect that the capture LED has been blocked. No photos […]⌥ Permalink

Joseph Cox, 404 Media, last month: ShinyHunters published the [Madison Square Garden] data on Tuesday. The full file download is nearly 45GB. A spokesperson of the group sent 404 Media a smaller sample of the data. One file includes what appear to be emails sent by customers to MSG and sometimes MSG’s response. One email […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Torchinsky, the Autopian: You know what I miss that cars often had up until the ’90s or so, and are almost extinct today? Badges. Not the usual make/model badges, though, we still have plenty of those, I mean the highly-specific feature badges that cars used to proudly display. Actually, not even just features — also […]⌥ Permalink

Kif Leswing and MacKenzie Sigalos, CNBC: Apple on Friday sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California, alleging trade secret theft, saying that the artificial intelligence lab took the iPhone maker’s intellectual property in order to develop its own consumer hardware. The docket is on CourtListener, along with Apple’s complaint (PDF). What is immediately notable […]⌥ Permalink

Brian Krebs: The X/Twitter account IRIS C2 (@C2IRIS) has gained more than 4,000 followers since its creation in January 2025, posting frequently about security vulnerabilities, AI and software exploits. IRIS C2 says it is a company in McLean, Va. that sells offensive cybersecurity capabilities. […] A search on the Arlington, Va. address listed in the […]⌥ Permalink

Meta: Once complete, our Sturgeon County data center will represent an investment of more than CAD $13 billion. We anticipate approximately 3,000 construction workers will be onsite at the peak of construction, and the data center will support more than 300 operational jobs. […] As with all of our data centers, this data center’s electricity […]⌥ Permalink

Tim Cushing, Techdirt: Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist: Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in […]⌥ Permalink

“Aamir F.”, on behalf of the Google Earth Team: We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on […]⌥ Permalink

I am a tiny bit sorry for all the links I am posting regarding age gating. As I have written before, it is something I am still trying to work out for myself. After all, it seems straightforward why age verification is an easy way to reduce the risks to children of today’s platforms, the […]⌥ Permalink

Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen, Reuters: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged shortcomings in the company’s sweeping restructuring at an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the systems known as AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters. […] In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory […]⌥ Permalink

Marcel Thee, Nikkei Asia: Following Australia’s move in late 2025, Indonesia became the first non-Western country to announce restrictions on social media access for users under 16. Rules unveiled on March 6 require platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Roblox to introduce age verification checks and remove underage accounts. The restrictions were supposed to […]⌥ Permalink

Sam Schott: As of 2026-07-28, this project is archived. It’s been a fun challenge to develop a syncing client, but unfortunately, I find too little time to invest in Maestral these days. I’ve also moved away from using Dropbox myself. Maestral will still remain usable in the medium term, but will no longer be actively […]⌥ Permalink

Bruce Schneier: AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them—and should be treated by the law as such. If a company hired human writers to write its summaries, that company would be liable for inaccuracies in those summaries. If a company’s human agent signed contracts in the company’s name, that company […]⌥ Permalink

The Tiny Awards are returning for a fourth year. The past three winners have been remarkably diverse — rotating sandwiches, a one minute park experience, and a memorial to the fifty thousand names of those killed in Gaza. If you know of a cool, weird, eye-opening, or simply interesting web-based thing launched between July 2025 […]⌥ Permalink

Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s Build conference this year: Perhaps the most important design criteria for us is: ‘how do we earn the permission from the communities in which we are building these data centres?’ That’s where these principles ground us and focus us. How do we ensure that the D.C.s do not increase the electricity […]⌥ Permalink

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel: Despite the technical difficulties, there are photographs of Canada in the 1860s — including one taken of the historic moment the proclamation of Confederation was read out at Market Square, Kingston, Ontario. I had no idea there was a photo taken when this proclamation was read. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink

When Apple announced Siri A.I. would not be available on E.U. iPhones or iPads at launch, it said: Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the […]⌥ Permalink

Sony’s Sid Shuman: As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028.  Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. […]⌥ Permalink

Mathew Ingram: So what, I can hear you thinking. I don’t know or care what anyons are, or how gallium arsenide works. Me neither! The interesting part of this story for me is that Microsoft — a company that has a market value of $2.7 trillion and almost single-handedly created the personal computing industry — […]⌥ Permalink

Tyler Murphy and Ben, co-founders of EasyOptOuts: We’ve discovered vulnerabilities in Hide My Email that allow attackers to discover the meant-to-be-hidden address behind a Hide My Email address. We reported the issue to Apple over a year ago, and as of June 30, 2026, it still hasn’t been fixed. About a month ago, we realized […]⌥ Permalink