Americans do not like masked secret police. There is really no other way to put it. The reasons why are manifold: accountability, trust in law enforcement, and just plain overall vibes. More concretely, not being able to tell who’s a cop and who’s not is dangerous. An assassin masquerading as law enforcement killed Minnesota legislator […]
Steven Garcia, as told to Gaby Del Valle: I was in the middle of a frozen lake when I got the notification from The Minnesota Star Tribune that there had been a shooting. I was on assignment at a pond hockey event, and someone who was supposed to play later that evening said he probably […]
Federal agents in Minneapolis repeatedly punched a man, forced him to the ground, and then shot him multiple times. The man was later pronounced dead. This is just the latest incident of deadly violence involving ICE, which has grown increasingly frequent, especially on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s been less than three weeks since an […]
Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google’s plan to “onboard kids” into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem “leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime,” as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, […]
TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don’t seem to know what’s going on. The company announced Tuesday that its US service is now part of the separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture […]
TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance – TikTok’s Chinese parent company – and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform’s US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives. The Silver […]
Where’s the Trump Phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it turns out we might have two Trump Phones to worry about. The Trump Phone may be no more […]
Just over a year after it briefly disappeared from app stores, TikTok in the US is now part of a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. With approval from both the US and China closing on the schedule laid out in December, ByteDance’s ownership of the new joint venture is now only 19.9 percent […]
A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long-running antitrust fight partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes “joint product development, joint […]
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is pressing OpenAI about its move to bring ads to ChatGPT, and is asking several other companies whether they have similar plans. In letters to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, and xAI, Markey writes that embedding ads into AI chatbots “raises significant concerns for consumer protection, privacy, […]