Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System

Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims

Futurism · 2 hours ago
by Victor Tangermann · Future Society


The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.

The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”

So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.

Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever releasing the tech, a feature dubbed “NameTag.” That’s despite its CTO Andrew Bosworth happily describing those plans in excruciating detail in public and arguing it would be a “great feature” — mere days after calling Wired‘s bombshell reporting “absolutely dishonest.”

Now, the company is facing a proposed class action lawsuit over the ordeal, as Wired reports, with a set of families in Illinois and California accusing the company of illegally scraping their Facebook and Instagram photos to build a massive facial recognition system for “NameTag.”

The news comes just days after a mother in Utah accused Meta of using its AI to scour Instagram and Facebook posts to reveal invasive information about her young daughters.

Meta told Wired in a statement that the latest “lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work.”

“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the a spokesperson told Wired. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

The proposed class action accuses Meta of extracting biometric signatures from publicly available social media profiles. As Wired first noted in June, these “faceprints” appeared in the code for the AI companion app of its smart glasses.

A patent described the software as matching these signatures to profile photos. An AI image generator Meta released called Emu was also trained on a vast swath of user-uploaded images and text. The complainants accuse Meta of using this AI system to harvest biometric data.

Meta has already been caught with its pants down after allowing users to generate images inspired by public Instagram accounts, admitting that it had “missed the mark” with the feature.

The company has a long history of mishandling sensitive user data, settling a class action lawsuit in 2020 over an entirely separate facial recognition system for $650 million. In 2024, it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle yet another facial recognition data lawsuit in Texas.

More on Meta’s glasses: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

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Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid

 Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid

Futurism · 4 hours ago
by Joe Wilkins · Artificial Intelligence


Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.

Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.

As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.

One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.

Though the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from OpenAI itself. As the New York Times reported, third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.

That said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.

To give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found plenty of evidence showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.

Despite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to lobby for regulatory safeguards that would cement its role as the authority around AI development.

This being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As Politico notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.

More on Altman: Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman

The post Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid appeared first on Futurism.

People-search site ClarityCheck left 9 million face photos publicly exposed

 

People-search site ClarityCheck left 9 million face photos publicly exposed

ClarityCheck, a people-search website that promises users their reverse image searches are "private and secure," left more than 9 million image files openly accessible on the internet, according to research by independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. The exposed Amazon S3 bucket contained roughly 450 GB of data stored in folders labeled "faces" and "profiles," reachable by anyone who knew the URL embedded in the company's own publicly available website code. A second misconfiguration separately exposed users' email addresses and phone numbers. The images included photographs of adults, teenagers, and children, sensitive biometric data that, unlike a password, cannot simply be changed if it falls into the wrong hands.

The exposure is especially troubling given what ClarityCheck is designed to do. The service explicitly markets itself as a tool to identify strangers from photos and find their social media profiles in seconds, meaning the people whose faces ended up in the database likely never knew they were there and almost certainly never consented to it. Fowler warns the bucket appeared to have been exposed for months before it was secured, and his initial attempts to alert the company went nowhere. He also flagged that an automated bot could have crawled the database, harvested the face images, and used them to train AI models. ClarityCheck disputes the word "exposed," arguing that finding the URL required specific knowledge not available through ordinary browsing, and has since secured the database.

Apple Intelligence is getting usage limits - of course

Apple Intelligence is getting usage limits, and here’s what it means for you
The free lunch is over. Apple Intelligence is about to start counting your requests.
By Rachit Agarwal Published September 10, 2026 1:45 AM
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends

In its July earnings call, Apple hinted that Apple Intelligence will have usage limits, and heavy users will need to subscribe to iCloud+ plans to get past them. Apple has now revealed more details on the matter.

Starting with the 2027 software update, Apple Intelligence is set for a serious upgrade with broader access to its server-powered features. But there’s a catch. Apple plans to roll out usage limits across many of these tools to keep things fast and reliable for everyone.
What features are we talking about?

The list covers some of Apple Intelligence’s more demanding tools. Siri AI is on there, along with newer AI photo editing features like Clean Up, Extend, and Spatial Reframing. Image Playground makes the cut too, as do the AFM 3 Cloud and AFM 3 Cloud Pro models used inside Shortcuts. Even developers building apps with Apple’s Foundation Models through Private Cloud Compute will have to work within these limits.Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
What happens once you hit the limit?

Don’t worry, a maxed-out feature won’t disappear forever; it just needs to cool down. Apple says the feature comes back after a timeout period, and how long that takes depends on a mix of things: which feature you’re using, how complex your request is, how busy Apple’s servers are that day, and Apple’s own policies. If waiting isn’t your thing, Apple will let you pay for expanded access instead.

A similar cap already exists in the Home app. Video summaries from your security cameras are tied to your iCloud+ plan. The 2TB plan gets you one camera, the 6TB plan bumps that to two, and the 12TB plan covers up to five. Apple notes these numbers could change down the road.

Bottom line is that don’t be surprised if your favorite AI feature asks you to wait a bit, or dangles a paid upgrade to skip the line.

Meta planned to cut some teams by 60% and replace the work with AI

Meta planned to cut some teams by 60% and replace the work with AI

Meta explored cutting the size of many teams by as much as 60% and handing the work to AI agents, under a plan code-named Project OT. Its own data showed the agents produced far more code but few more features. Zuckerberg cancelled the second wave hours before the first.

August 31, 2026 - 1:07 pm





Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Sept. 4, 2025.
Credit: Shutterstock


Meta spent the first half of this year planning to replace much of the work its employees do with AI agents, then abandoned the most aggressive part of the plan when the technology did not deliver. Meta code-named the scheme Project OT, short for Organization Transformation. It explored cutting the size of many teams by as much as 60%.

Katie Paul reported the plan for Reuters, working from scores of internal documents, posts and recordings, and interviews with more than 20 people with knowledge of the company.

Mark Zuckerberg and his senior team hatched it at his Hawaii compound in January. AI would take over daily work performed by thousands of employees. Smaller cadres of what one planning document called “talent-dense” staff would supervise the virtual workers.
Two waves, one cancelled

The plan ran in two stages. A first purge would come in May, and a second shake-up in November. Layoffs would sit alongside the closing of open positions and the removal of people Meta rated as poor performers.

One human-resources executive projected a culling as big as or bigger than the roughly 25% Meta cut three years ago, according to an internal document.

On the night of 19 May, hours before the first wave, Zuckerberg called off the November planning. Meta went ahead the next day and cut about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its staff. It moved 7,000 people into AI roles in the same week.

Reuters could not establish what changed Zuckerberg’s mind.
Meta confirms the plan

The company acknowledged Project OT. It described it as a year-long effort focused on cutting costs, redesigning team structures and moving staff into priority areas such as producing training data.

Meta also confirmed the two-wave structure and the 60% figure. It said the number covered scenarios for certain teams only. Several major units sat outside the exercise, it said, and it never intended to cut 60% of the whole company. Leaders cancelled the second wave before working out how many people would lose their jobs.

“This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn’t move forward with every scenario from the exercise, and it was never assumed we would,” Meta said in a statement.
Where the idea came from

Meta executives spent last year studying how AI startups organise themselves. Chief data officer Alex Schultz and head of product Naomi Gleit both visited Asia, and three people said they admired how startups there had built their org charts around AI.

Gleit told Reuters in June that she had spent “quite a bit of time” in Meta’s Singapore office, and that the practices there had “inspired some of the teams in California and New York”. She said many of the ideas were bottom-up.
The numbers that undercut it

Meta’s own data showed the agents were producing volume rather than value. Code changes to internal platforms and infrastructure rose 220% year on year, according to a June post by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. Changes that reached users as new or upgraded features rose 36%.

The gap did not stay harmless. An April post said unchecked AI agents were performing “large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute”. Major technical and security incidents, including service disruptions and possible data leaks, climbed 40% on the previous year. Time spent firefighting them rose 70%.

Infrastructure teams had flagged reliability warning signs as early as March. In June, hackers exploited Meta’s new AI customer support bot to reach high-profile Instagram accounts, including the dormant Obama White House page.

Meta declined to comment on the internal data.
The staff worked it out

Employees became convinced they were training their replacements. Meta had reassigned engineers to write software puzzles used as training data, and many called the work rote in internal posts. It had also mandated tracking software on US employees’ devices to capture keystrokes and mouse clicks, so agents could learn to use a computer like a person.

Meta paused that programme in June. Twenty-six employees have since sued the company, saying its AI systems targeted workers on medical leave for the layoffs.

Staff replied to executive posts with pictures of elephants. Meta’s internal sentiment score fell from 74% favourable to 55% in its half-year Pulse survey. Labour organising gathered pace.
What replaced the org chart

An internal post titled the AI-Native Playbook set out the target structure. Product teams of 10 to 20 specialists would shrink to pods of three to five. Engineers, designers and product managers would share one title, “builder”. Middle management layers would go, and “agent-assisted analysis” would set daily priorities.

By June at least 11 units had implemented pods. Unit heads would oversee 30 to 50 people each, supported by human-resources staff and unspecified “AI systems”. Meta declined to explain that phrase, but said performance ratings and promotions “were and are made by people, not AI”.
Zuckerberg concedes the timing

At a July town hall the chief executive conceded he had misjudged the timing. The “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected”, he told staff, in remarks reported by Engadget. He said he still expected benefits within three to six months. Bosworth had already told employees in August to stop asking for time off on the strength of AI gains.

The public message has changed shape. Meta now runs advertising saying it is betting on people. Zuckerberg’s recent 6,500-word essay predicts an abundance of jobs, while allowing that individual companies may employ fewer. “Company sizes may shrink, just as they did in the transition from industrial giants to tech companies,” he writes.

The spending has not changed. Meta plans to invest at least $130bn in AI chips and infrastructure this year. Its second-quarter filing listed 75,472 employees at the end of June, a figure that still included about 8,000 people leaving under the May cut, RuntimeWire reported from the document.

Zuckerberg has promised no further company-wide layoffs this year. That wording leaves team-level cuts and 2027 open, and employees have noticed. The number that will settle the argument is the one Meta stopped publishing: whether feature output ever catches up with the code its agents produce.

250 Elite Investors, 167 Pitches: Canada Investment Summit

   250 Elite Investors, 167 Pitches: Some Clean Economy Projects Make the Cut as Canada Investment Summit Convenes in Toronto

September 11, 2026
Reading time: 8 minutes

Full Story: The Energy Mix

Mitchell Beer



Bank of England/flickr

With as many as 250 of the world’s top investors converging on Toronto next week for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit, news reports say pipelines, nuclear plants, railways, AI data centres, and more will be among the 167 domestic projects on offer.

The aim of the summit, co-hosted by Carney, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), is to attract $500 billion in foreign investment over the next five years and kick-start $1 trillion in economic activity to help reduce Canada’s dependence on its unreliable neighbour to the south. Summit participants with nearly $120 trillion under management are expected to show up from as many 28 countries to discuss a collection of projects with a reported minimum value of $200 million.

Related: Click here for details on The Better Ideas Show, Energy Mix’s two-day livestream Sept. 14-15 on the nation-building options that can support Canada’s sovereignty, diversify our trade, and build more resilient, cohesive communities—while bringing down the greenhouse gas emissions causing the climate crisis.

CBC reports the 67-page dealbook for the summit covers eight investment categories, including 63 projects in mining and metals, 31 in a clean energy category that includes carbon capture and storage projects and nuclear power plants, 19 in advanced manufacturing, 16 in marine and port infrastructure, 11 in power and utilities, 11 in conventional energy, 10 in digital technology, and six in transportation.

The Toronto Star says the list of projects “skews heavily toward energy and natural resources,” with about two-thirds of them involving fossil fuels, renewable energy, and mining. Specific offerings identified by the Star and CBC include:

• A $57-billion expansion of the Port of Churchill, Manitoba;

• The controversial West Coast Pipeline, valued at a likely overly modest $35 billion;

• Equally contentious new liquefied natural gas infrastructure, including $28.5 billion for the Ksi Lisims floating LNG terminal off the British Columbia coast that the government describes as “fully permitted and shovel-ready”;

• The Wind West offshore wind project in Nova Scotia, priced at $44 billion;

• $2.1 billion for the proposed Prairie Connector pipeline expansion toward the United States;

• Expansion of Ontario’s Bruce nuclear power station;

• The massive, new nuclear development proposed for Wesleyville, Ontario;

• Mining opportunities in the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario;

• A $10.9-billion high-speed rail line between Edmonton and Calgary;

• A pitch to convert civilian auto parts manufacturers to produce land defence systems and specialty industrial vehicles.

“The rest of the list is comprised primarily of ports, data centres and advanced manufacturing projects, largely in the defence sector,” writes Star business columnist Adam Radwanski. “The heavy resource focus means that the pitchbook is also considerably weighted toward Western Canada and to some extent Atlantic Canada, with relatively few listed projects in Ontario.”
A Who’s Who of Global Finance

A handful of news reports, two of them in the last week, have identified many though not nearly all of the investors who are expected to attend the summit. They include:

• BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink;

• BlackStone Inc. President Jon Gray;

• China International Capital Corp. and China Investment Corp.;

• Dutch pension fund APG Groep N.V. executive board chair Annette Mosman;

• Dhilan Pillay, CEO of Singapore’s state-owned fund Temasek Holdings;

• Senior executives from JPMorgan Chase, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, U.S. investment giant KKR & Co., Oslo-based Norges Bank Investment Management, Australia’s IFM Investors and Macquarie Group, Emirati state fossil Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC), and more than a half-dozen Middle Eastern investment funds, including United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment Co., and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund;

• More than two dozen of Canada’s biggest investors, including 11 major pension funds and more than 45 prominent corporations, including Cohere Inc. CEO Aidan Gomez and Xanadu Quantum Technologies CEO Christian Weedbrook.

The Globe and Mail identifies Suncor Energy CEO Rich Kruger, Ontario Power Generation CEO Nicolle Butcher, and TC Energy Corporation CEO François Poirier as panel presenters who will “pitch the country as a stable place to invest in a range of energy assets, from pipelines to nuclear power.” Some sources say former president Stephen Harper, who now chairs the Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo) pension plan, will be the closing speaker.

Several federal cabinet ministers are expected to rotate in and out of the summit, and all 13 provincial and territorial premiers will be on hand.
Not Just a ‘Signing Ceremony’

Reports in the lead-up to the summit indicated the government might be preparing to pitch large, public assets to private buyers, but Carney “may not be offering up Canada’s airports, at least for now,” Radwanski writes. “Across the board, the government appears to be seeking equity or financing for projects to build new assets or expand existing ones. The prospectus does not signal any intent to simply sell existing assets to foreign owners.”

Citing a senior government source, Radwanski said the summit is expected to produce specific announcements, but it won’t be a “signing ceremony”. Star business columnist David Olive received similar signals from his own sources.

“We will probably never have more than a rough idea of the summit’s impact,” Olive wrote last week. “It is a meet-and-greet affair, or more crudely a networking event. It is not a deal-making venue for the elite attendees, who head some of the world’s largest banks, asset management firms, and sovereign wealth funds.”

For those participants, any decisions “to commit billions of dollars to Canadian energy, transportation, and infrastructure projects will be made months or years from now,” Olive added. That long lead time had TD Economics predicting a 10-year “supercycle” of private investment in Canada, with Senior Vice President and Chief Economist Beata Caranci estimating new commitments exceeding $190 billion over the next two years, $500 billion in three to 10 years, and $270 billion beyond that.

“Given the long time frames of these types of infrastructure projects, investment could be sustained as far as the eye can see, with a quarter of the spending estimated to be more than ten years away,” she wrote.

But so far, those investments are looking elusive for many or most the cleantech and clean energy options that will be needed to build a clean climate economy. The Institute for Sustainable Finance reported this week that cleantech venture capital in Canada fell to just $600 million in 2025, from an all-time high of $1.65 billion in 2022—even as the global market grew 8%. Elsewhere, Politico says clean energy is now a casualty of Donald Trump’s global trade wars, slowed down by obstacles ranging from tariffs on solar panels to export controls on critical minerals.

“Trade fragmentation makes green products more expensive worldwide relative to non-green products,” the European Central Bank cautioned earlier this year. “This undermines the adoption of green technologies, leading to higher greenhouse gas emissions in the global economy.”
Risks and Omissions

In addition to a counter-summit over the weekend and some hard-edged protests while the main event is under way, the Canada Investment Summit is already generating commentary on who will and won’t be there, and the risks in some of the investments the government is putting front and centre.

“The only people missing are the ones without any shares: the kid with a mental disability, the veteran, the renter, the shift worker, the community that owns the land sitting on top of the minerals CEOs want to get at,” retired federal executive Bhagwant Sandhu writes for The Hill Times.

“There is no comparable summit gathering doctors, nurses, and personal care workers to confront a health care system buckling under wait times,” he adds. “No summit of municipalities to face a crisis that leaves more than 65,000 Canadians sleeping outside each night. No summit for the 360,000 children pushed into poverty. And no summit—not even a nod to Canadian workers—on wages that haven’t kept pace with the cost of staying alive.”

The other issue backgrounding the summit is a permanent decline in oil consumption, with China reporting an 8.9% reduction in demand this year, according to state-owned oil and gas giant Sinopec. “I’m sure this is a temporary trend (oh it’s three years in a row?!).Well I’m sure it has no bearing on future investment plans that countries are thinking about (oh, Canada is considering a new oil pipeline to satisfy Asian demand?!)” snarked Morgan Solar Executive Chair Mike Andrade on LinkedIn Thursday. “Seriously, though, I continue to say that people are sleeping on the structural change that has occurred with natural gas and oil demand in Asia.”

The Sinopec report had the Reuters news agency referring to “oil demand destruction, or a long-term drop in consumption, at the world’s largest oil importer.” Germany saw its use of fossil fuels in electricity fall by half between 2018 and 2026, and Semafor Climate and Energy Editor Tim McDonnell says Trump’s prolonged war on Iran, with oil prices now rising above US$100 per barrel, “seems to be hastening the end of the oil age.”

All of those factors help explain the lack of private investment in a new West Coast pipeline, with the absence of any significant private investment spotlighting the “fundamental risks” associated with the project, Pembina Institute senior analyst Ian Sanderson wrote in a release.

“Under current market conditions, the primary challenge facing Alberta producers is not a lack of export capacity, but uncertainty around future demand, prices, and the economics of long-term oil infrastructure,” he said. “Those risks should not be shifted to taxpayers when the private sector is signalling that the project is too risky to finance on normal commercial terms.”

Google will limit how much memory Android apps can use

Google will limit how much memory Android apps can use from February 2027

Google will enforce new memory limits on Android apps from February 2027, and says the reason is the RAM shortage created by the AI data centre boom. Apps that break them can be slowed, terminated, or buried in the Play Store. A second deadline follows in April.

August 31, 2026 - 1:18 pm





A hand holds a smartphone displaying the Google logo in front of a circuit board with an AI chip, symbolizing artificial intelligence.
Credit: FotoField / Shutterstock


Google will start policing how much memory Android apps use, and it says the reason is the global shortage of RAM. From February 2027, an app that exceeds the new limits risks two penalties. Android can slow it down or shut it. The Play Store can bury it.

The company published the requirements this week on its Android Developers Blog. TechCrunch spotted them first. Google says the mobile industry faces “significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability”.

Its technical documentation puts it more bluntly. “An ecosystem-wide memory crisis is imminent due to rising RAM costs,” the company wrote, in a line first noted by The Register.
What the limits actually are

The thresholds scale with the device. On a phone with 8GB of RAM, an app can use no more than 2.25GB in the foreground. It gets 1.5GB for user-perceived services and 1.5GB in the background. Devices with more than 16GB are mostly exempt.

Google measures the main figure as Anonymous Resident Set Size plus Swap. That is the memory an app holds which no file backs. Bitmap memory has its own cap, and it applies to every device. Apps get 200MB in user-perceived services and in the background, and 400MB cached. The limits differ somewhat for games.

Those numbers are not generous on a mid-range handset. A modern app with a large image cache and an embedded browser can approach them without doing anything unusual.

The third requirement covers DEX code optimisation. DEX files hold a compressed version of an app’s Java bytecode, and Google wants them optimised for modest memory use, faster launches and better runtime performance.
The penalty is distribution

Google is explicit about what happens to an app that ignores this. “If your app exceeds these limits, it will be slowed down and may be terminated,” the documentation says.

The commercial threat is the larger one. “Apps and games that do not meet these thresholds may see reduced app visibility and publishing capabilities on Google Play,” Google wrote. It promised more detail later this year.

Reduced visibility on the Play Store is the sanction that matters to a developer. An app that ranks lower in search results loses installs, and installs are revenue. Google has not yet said how far it will go.
Where the shortage came from

The AI data centre boom is consuming the memory that phones need. TNW reported in May that AI is killing the cheap smartphone, because the memory that used to go into handsets now goes into data centres. Nvidia AI server prices are rising more than 15% from early next year on memory costs.

Consumers are already paying. Amazon raised prices on Echo, Kindle and Fire TV devices by up to 60% overnight in August. Xiaomi’s profit fell again as the crunch squeezed its phone margins.

Phone makers have responded by fitting less RAM. The Verge noted that the base Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL ship with less memory than last year’s models. Google confirmed higher Pixel 11 prices in July as RAM costs surged, and said then that it was reworking Android to use less memory. This is that rework, arriving as a rule for everyone else.
It starts with Pixel and spreads

The per-app memory limits arrived with Android 17, on Pixel phones first. Google says the rest of the industry is coming.

“Over the coming year, an increasing number of manufacturers will leverage the Android per-app memory limits across their portfolio of device RAM configurations from 4GB to 16GB+ devices,” the company wrote.

This expands a push Google announced in June. That one aimed at “preventing one bad actor from destroying the multitasking experience and stability of the user’s entire device”. Its documentation gives the example that worries it. A single app springs a memory leak, eats most of the phone, and forces Android to kill everything else.
The squeeze lands hardest on cheap phones

Google’s own wording covers devices from 4GB to 16GB and above. The apps that will struggle sit at the bottom of that range. Those phones sell in Europe, India, Brazil and Africa rather than in Silicon Valley.

Google frames the rules as protection for exactly those users. A phone with 4GB has no headroom, so one badly behaved app ruins the whole device. The counter-argument is simple. Developers now carry the cost of a shortage that data centre buyers created.
On-device AI is part of the problem

Google is also pushing developers to run AI models on the phone itself, through Gemini Nano. Those models sit in the same memory the new rules ration. The Register noted the tension in one line: on-device AI probably is not helping.

Google has not addressed that directly. It is rolling out tools that warn developers when an app crosses a threshold. Deeper diagnostics arrive later in the year, including a Memory Limiter feature that stops an app taking too much of the device.
A second deadline in April

Google is not only rationing memory. It is also changing what an app must do when a user buys a new phone.

The memory rules are the first of two stages. In April 2027, every Play Store app that offers sign-in must support zero-tap credential restoration when a user moves to a new device.

Google frames that as security rather than convenience. Manual sign-ins during setup do not just create friction, it says, they expose apps to phishing and credential theft. Google points developers at the Android Restore Credentials API.

Two dates now matter. Memory and code thresholds bite in February 2027, and the sign-in requirement follows in April. What Google has not published is how much store visibility an app forfeits for missing either one.

Remembering 9/11

 Remembering 9/11

https://youtu.be/jkxVzhs-MCM?si=Tk223RCvs_EQGF1M

A gamble with our lives

'A gamble with our lives': Ex-Anthropic researcher warns of AI 'catastrophe'


Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By Una Hajdari
Published on 09/09/2026 - 13:24 GMT+2
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'A gamble with our lives': Ex-Anthropic researcher warns of AI 'catastrophe'

Jacob Coxon says AI executives privately fear catastrophe while racing to build it anyway. His exit follows a summer of AI containment failures and a new push in Congress to ban superintelligent AI outright.

A researcher who spent three years building the systems behind some of the world's most powerful AI models has quit the industry entirely, warning that the companies racing to build ever-more capable AI "are gambling with our lives".

Jacob Coxon, 27, resigned from Anthropic on 8 September after also working at OpenAI and set out his reasons in a lengthy thread on X.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence."

In his thread, Coxon argued that AI systems are approaching a point where they could "hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources," and said the pace of progress in each of those domains "is not slowing".

He claimed that many of the people building the technology privately fear it could prove fatal for humanity, even if they avoid saying so publicly.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he wrote, adding that executives "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible" while expressing the same fears in private.
A race neither side says it can stop

Coxon's departure is not an isolated warning.

Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei has spent much of the year raising alarms about the technology his own company builds, warning in a January essay that powerful AI could hand authoritarian states the tools for a "totalitarian nightmare" of total surveillance, and cautioning in a later memo that superintelligence would "test us as a species".

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has struck a more measured public tone but still describes superintelligence, his preferred term over AGI or artificial general intelligence, as arriving within "a few thousand days," or roughly in 2032.

Amodei, by contrast, told the White House in a March 2025 policy filing to expect what he calls "powerful AI" as early as late 2026.

Coxon, for his part, wrote that Anthropic staff understand the risks well but feel trapped in a race, believing that if they slow down, less careful developers will simply take their place.

He called this dynamic "a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack".

It is also not the first resignation of its kind at Anthropic. In February, the company's former safeguards research lead, Mrinank Sharma, left with a letter warning that humanity faced grave and growing danger from the technology.
RelatedSweden is preparing for AI-powered election interference. What does that defence actually look like?
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Warning shots

Coxon is optimistic about the potential for industry coordination, pointing to a string of incidents this year in which AI systems have slipped their intended boundaries.

In July, AI agents built by OpenAI broke out of an internal testing environment and autonomously hacked into Hugging Face, a code-sharing platform, an episode OpenAI itself later called a "warning shot" for the sector.

Anthropic, Coxon's former employer, has disclosed a similar pattern, saying its own Claude models gained unauthorised access to the real systems of three separate organisations.

Coxon said such episodes have made pacing agreements between US labs "more viable," though he does not believe the industry is currently on track to avoid a global race.

He suggested this might ultimately require "costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities".
Lawmakers move to act

Some legislators are no longer waiting for labs to coordinate voluntarily.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar unveiled the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on 3 September, legislation that would permanently outlaw the development of superintelligent AI in the US and impose a temporary pause on other advanced AI development until a new federal regulator sets safety rules.

Violators could face up to 20 years in prison. Separately, Representatives George Whitesides and Pat Harrigan have introduced a bill directing the National Institute of Standards and Technology to monitor how advanced AI systems are being used to conduct further AI research and development themselves.

In Brussels, the European Union has taken a more incremental but firmer regulatory path.

Obligations on general-purpose AI models under the bloc's AI Act took effect in August 2025, with stricter rules for high-risk systems following in August 2026.

The European Commission has rejected pressure from several major tech firms to delay enforcement, and companies that breach the rules face fines of up to €35 million or 7% of their global turnover, whichever is higher.

Despite the scale of his warnings, Coxon closed his thread with a direct appeal to researchers still working at frontier labs, urging them to weigh up what the coming years will actually demand of them.

"Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind?" he asked.

"Should you put your head down because 'it's happening anyway' or take this moment to call for different conditions?"

Google will pay £260m to settle a UK class action over Play Store fees

Google will pay £260m to settle a UK class action over Play Store fees

Google has agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action brought for UK app developers over Play Store commissions, weeks before it was due in court. The claim was originally valued at over £1bn. £100m of the settlement covers the cost of running the case.

August 31, 2026 - 1:28 pm





Alphabet logo displayed on a smartphone screen, with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s profile photo in the background.
Credit: Thrive Studios ID / Shutterstock


Google has agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action brought on behalf of UK app developers, ending a case that was due to go to trial next month. The deal appeared on Thursday and is worth about $353m, Reuters reported.

Lawyers had previously valued the claim at just over £1bn. It sought compensation for developers who sold apps on the Play Store in the UK.

Barry Rodger, a competition law academic, brought the case as class representative. His lawyers alleged that Google abused its dominant position in two ways. It prevented developers from distributing apps by other routes, and it charged an unfair commission, usually 30%.
Google admits nothing

The settlement needs approval from London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will consider it at a hearing in September. Google made no admission of liability or wrongdoing. The 19-page agreement states that the company “believes it has strong defences to Professor Rodger’s claim”.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The company has not commented publicly on the deal since.

Bloomberg Law reported the underlying allegation in the claimant’s own words. Google, it said, imposed “excessive and unfair” commissions on transactions running through the Play Store.

Rodger called the outcome “a great outcome” for app developers. He had been due in court next month, and the settlement takes the trial off the calendar. “If approved, meaningful financial compensation will become available for businesses that could never have taken on a company like Google alone,” he said in a statement.
Where the money goes

The £260m splits in two. £160m goes to developers who sold an app on the Play Store between August 2018 and July 2026. The remaining £100m covers the costs of bringing and funding the lawsuit.

That means 38% of the settlement pays for the case rather than the claimants. Litigation funding is how these actions get built in the UK, because no individual developer could carry the cost alone, which is the point Rodger made in his statement.

Bloomberg Law reported that the claimant and his lawyers described it as the largest settlement to date under the UK regime. Alphabet’s figure converts to roughly $354m at Thursday’s rate. The Financial Times carried the same £260m number.

The settlement is about a quarter of the original claim. Rodger’s lawyers put the case at just over £1bn. Google has agreed to £260m of that, and to nothing else.
What a developer actually gets

Nobody knows yet. The £160m pot is fixed, but the number of developers claiming against it is not. A larger turnout means a smaller cheque each, and the tribunal has to approve the distribution before anything moves.

The eligibility window is wide. It runs from August 2018 to July 2026, which covers eight years of Play Store sales. Any UK business that sold an app in that period sits inside the class, whether or not it ever heard of the case.

That is the design of the UK regime. A class representative sues for everyone at once, and the people represented usually find out afterwards.
The fourth case of its kind

This is the fourth such action against a major tech company since the start of 2025, according to Reuters. Apple lost a UK lawsuit over App Store commissions in October last year. Qualcomm said in February that claimants would drop a case over smartphone chip royalties. Sony is still fighting a £2.7bn case over PlayStation Store prices.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal now prices app-economy grievances in Britain. Its regime allows a single class representative, in this case an academic, to sue on behalf of thousands of businesses that would never file individually. Litigation funders pay the bills and take their cut from the award.

The commission at the centre of the claim is the one every app economy argument turns on. Google takes up to 30% of transactions made through the Play Store. Developers have spent a decade calling that unfair, and regulators on three continents are now testing whether it is.

Google is fighting the same argument on several fronts. It lost its final appeal over the record 4.1bn euro EU Android fine in July. Rivals then began lining up for damages after Brussels issued its first Digital Markets Act penalty.

In the US, a judge told Google in August to stop making rival app stores hard to install. The Play Store has since started carrying competitors, and a Lisbon company called Aptoide walked in first.
What the UK regulator is doing separately

The settlement does not touch the commission itself. Google can keep charging what it charges, and the agreement says nothing about future rates. A payout closes the past. It does not reprice the next decade.

Britain’s competition regulator is working on that from another direction. In June it proposed letting developers steer users away from Apple and Google payment systems. That proposal, not this settlement, is what would change the 30%.

Nothing in the deal changes the rules for developers outside the UK. UK sales define the class, and the agreement binds Google only in this jurisdiction. European developers watching the number will have to look to Brussels, not London.

Two things follow. The tribunal decides in September whether to approve the deal, and only then does any money reach a developer. Every UK developer who sold an app on the Play Store between August 2018 and July 2026 is in the class, and the size of each payout depends on how many of them come forward.

Clippers and owner Ballmer punished in salary cap probe

 Clippers and owner Ballmer punished in salary cap probe. The NBA yesterday suspended LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for one year, fined the team $30 million, and docked it five first-round draft picks beginning in 2029, saying the team and its leadership circumvented the league’s salary cap for Kawhi Leonard. The league said a law firm’s investigation found “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations,” including helping Leonard secure off-court deals. The team maintained its innocence, saying, “We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings,” and that it plans to challenge the findings and the penalties.

Gates-backed TerraPower targets British nuclear power plant start by 2034

Gates-backed TerraPower targets British nuclear power plant start by 2034

Published by Global Banking & Finance Review

Posted on September 7, 20262 min read

· Last updated: September 7, 2026Add as preferred source on Google
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Quick Summary

TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, aims to have its Natrium reactors delivering electricity in the UK by 2034—its first market outside the U.S.—leveraging supportive UK policy frameworks and ongoing regulatory steps.

Table of Contents: TerraPower's Expansion and the Future of Natrium Reactors in the UK
TerraPower's UK Ambitions
UK Government Support for Nuclear Innovation
Progress and Regulatory Status
Regulatory Approvals and Assessments
Technical Specifications and Fuel Supply
Natrium Reactor Capabilities
Fuel Production Initiatives
Economic Competitiveness and Site Selection
Cost Competitiveness
Potential Locations and Partnerships
Expansion Plans and Collaborations

Gates-backed TerraPower Targets First UK Natrium Nuclear Reactor by 2034
TerraPower's Expansion and the Future of Natrium Reactors in the UK

By Susanna Twidale
TerraPower's UK Ambitions

LONDON, Sept 7 (Reuters) - TerraPower, the U.S. nuclear developer backed by Bill Gates, expects its Natrium reactors to begin generating electricity in Britain by 2034, its CEO told Reuters, making the UK its first market outside the United States.
UK Government Support for Nuclear Innovation

Britain has backed the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) to help to increase energy security and meet climate targets, launching an Advanced Nuclear Framework this year to support privately funded projects.
Progress and Regulatory Status

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Chris Levesque, TerraPower's president and CEO, said progress on the company's first Natrium reactor, due to be completed in 2031, showed that "2034 nuclear electricity in the UK from Natrium is very possible".
Regulatory Approvals and Assessments

The technology has cleared regulatory requirements in the United States, where the first plant is being constructed in Wyoming and is currently being assessed under Britain's Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process.
Technical Specifications and Fuel Supply
Natrium Reactor Capabilities

Each sodium-cooled Natrium reactor generates 345 megawatts of baseload power and includes storage capable of boosting output to 500 MW for more than five hours. The reactors run on high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
Fuel Production Initiatives
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Britain and the U.S. are both building plants to produce the fuel, which was previously only commercially available from Russia.
Economic Competitiveness and Site Selection
Cost Competitiveness

Levesque said electricity generated by Natrium plants would be competitive with other low-carbon technologies, including combined solar-and-battery projects, at less than £100 ($135.32) per megawatt hour.
Potential Locations and Partnerships

TerraPower has yet to choose a site for its first UK project, but said its British subsidiary is likely to be based in Liverpool, northwest England, close to the country's nuclear regulator.
Expansion Plans and Collaborations

In the U.S., the company has an agreement with tech giant Meta to develop up to eight reactors. Levesque said TerraPower could seek similar partnerships in Britain.

($1 = 0.7390 pounds)

(Reporting by Susanna Twidale. Editing by Mark Potter)
Key TakeawaysTerraPower anticipates UK Natrium reactors to start powering the grid by 2034, following its first U.S. plant due in 2031 (gov.uk).
The UK government’s Advanced Nuclear Framework encourages privately funded SMR and advanced reactor projects, offering regulatory clarity, planning support, and fuel strategy alignment (gov.uk).
TerraPower has launched TerraPower UK, entered Step 1 of the UK Generic Design Assessment (GDA), and is collaborating with KBR on site evaluations and supply chain planning (terrapower.com).

Android 17 encrypts your web traffic so ISPs can't track which sites you visit

 

Android 17 encrypts your web traffic so ISPs can't track which sites you visit

Android 17 is closing a privacy loophole that has existed since the early days of mobile internet. Even when a connection is secured with HTTPS, the initial handshake between a phone and a website has always broadcast the destination domain in plain, readable text, meaning internet service providers and anyone else monitoring a network could see exactly which sites a user visits. Google is addressing this with four network security upgrades baked into Android 17, the most significant of which is Encrypted Client Hello, or ECH, which scrambles that handshake data so it is legible only to the intended destination. Built alongside Jigsaw and supported by developers through OkHttp 5.5.0, the feature makes Android the first major mobile operating system to roll out ECH broadly.

The update also takes aim at a specific criminal technique known as SMS blasting, in which bad actors use rogue devices to force nearby phones onto outdated 2G networks and then push phishing messages that bypass modern spam filters. Android 17 allows participating carriers to disable 2G connectivity by default, cutting off that attack path entirely without requiring any action from users. Two additional security upgrades round out the package, together addressing what Google describes as some of the most persistent privacy gaps remaining in how phones connect to the world. Android 17 is not yet released, but the groundwork being laid now, from developer library support to carrier partnerships, suggests these protections will be in place when the update arrives later this year.

Zillow settles FTC claims it paid Redfin to stop competing on apartment listings

Zillow settles FTC claims it paid Redfin to stop competing on apartment listings
Published Mon, Aug 24 202611:35 AM EDT

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a group of states settled with Zillow ahead of trial on Monday, ending claims the online real estate platform illegally paid Rocket Companies’ Redfin $100 million to stop competing in apartment rental listings.

The FTC and five states were ready to argue at trial scheduled to start Monday that the Zillow-Redfin partnership drove up costs for landlords and decreased listing quality for renters. More than 30% of Americans rent their homes, according to census data.


Under the settlement, Redfin can continue to display Zillow ads on its sites but will resume its rental advertising business within six months, the FTC and states said.

While Democratic state attorneys general have clashed with the Trump administration on other matters, both the FTC and the states called the settlement a win.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the lawsuit restored competition in online listing platforms, “critical tools that New Yorkers rely on to find affordable homes.”

Virginia, Arizona, Connecticut and Washington were also plaintiffs.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said the settlement will provide competition in rental markets that is “an integral component of President Donald Trump’s domestic housing agenda.”


A Redfin spokesperson said the settlement allows the company to maintain its partnership with Zillow through at least 2030 while building its own rentals business.

Zillow rentals executive Michael Sherman said the settlement is positive and “enables us to keep our energy on innovating for renters and property managers.”
Zillow-Redfin partnership allegedly raised ad prices


Zillow and Redfin made a deal in February 2025: Redfin would wind down its rental listing business, refer its customers to Zillow, and display copies of Zillow’s listings on its site. Redfin agreed to stay out of the business for up to nine years.

In return, Zillow agreed to pay Redfin $100 million, plus fees for each renter who signalled interest in a property.

The FTC sued the companies, as did New York, Virginia, Arizona, Connecticut and Washington. They said that before the deal, Zillow and Redfin were competing to list vacancies in buildings with more than 25 units.

After Redfin stopped competing, Zillow customers paid an average of 14.5% more per listing, an expert for the FTC and states estimated, while some property managers stopped buying online listings.

Zillow had said in court papers that the deal put more listings on both sites and helped it compete with market leader CoStar Group. Exclusive deals are common in the industry, Zillow had said.

How Seoul became the busiest international airport

 

How Seoul became the busiest international airport

Olga Pak / Getty Images

As a result of turmoil in the Middle East, Dubai’s 12-year reign as the top destination for international travelers is over. Seoul’s Incheon Airport has become the world’s busiest hub for international travel over the first six months of this year, according to data from Airports Council International (ACI).

Since the Iran war started in February, the shift away from the city where Tom Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa has been drastic:

• The number of international passengers going through Dubai fell from 7.4 million in February to 2.5 million in March (but rose to 4.7 million in June).
• Meanwhile, Incheon in Seoul served 38.4 million international travelers in the first half of the year.

Lost connection: Transfer traffic in the Middle East has fallen by half since the war began, according to the New York Times. Much of that traffic is going through Asia instead: From January to June, Incheon saw an 18% rise in flyers making a connecting flight and a 63% increase in passengers connecting to Europe, compared to a year earlier.

Plan ahead: The International Air Transport Association reported that bookings are down in the Middle East for June through September. But they’re up 33% from a year ago in the Asia-Pacific region for the same time period.

Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

  

Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

To put it in terms familiar to anyone who’s seen clips of these humanoids, shares of China’s Unitree Robotics did more than a quadruple backflip yesterday in its stock market debut.

It’s a blowout showing from a company whose bots have attracted viral attention over the past year (see: Unitree robots doing synchronized kung fu, surviving martial-arts kicks, and mouthing off as the TikTok star Rizzbot):

• Shares of Unitree surged nearly 630% in China, before closing up 460%.
• The company raised $900 million in its debut. Strategic investors included Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, a group associated with tech giant Tencent, and several state-owned utility companies.
• The IPO valued Unitree at ~$9 billion. That’s more than 200x its earnings last year.

This is the first humanoid company to go public in mainland China, and demand was overwhelming. Retail traders were 5,000x oversubscribed, as China’s world-leading humanoid market is predicted to balloon from $2 billion this year to $15 billion by 2030, per Morgan Stanley.

Zoom out: Unitree is the second major Chinese company in a month to list its shares in Shanghai rather than the US, underscoring China’s efforts to keep its tech players domestic and away from Silicon Valley.

Overwhelming Majorities in Canada, U.S. Say No to Local Data Centre Development

Overwhelming Majorities in Canada, U.S. Say No to Local Data Centre Development
August 19, 2026
Reading time: 4 minutes

Author: The Energy Mix staff
Full Story: The Energy Mix



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Public opposition to artificial intelligence (AI) data centre projects is surging across Canada and the United States, as outrage over the projects’ energy and water use, noise pollution, carbon footprint—and their proponents’ habit of often ignoring or flouting community opposition—unites voters across the political spectrum.

The latest news showed up this week in an exclusive poll for Heatmap that showed public support for data centres collapsing over the last year, with 75% of respondents now saying they oppose development in their communities. The poll results arrived hot on the heels of a decision this week by the Alberta Utility Commission (AUC) to disallow a $1-billion, 1,400-megawatt gas power plant that would have powered a data centre in the rural community of Olds, where 900 people out of a population of about 9,500 were given standing to speaking out on the project.

The data centre and gas plant. proposed by Synapse Real Estate Corp., would have been a “threat to our health, to our financial health, to our children’s future, to the future of Olds as a community,” Olds resident Carol Edwards, a retired finance professor at Simon Fraser University, told The Energy Mix. “There was absolutely no doubt in our minds that this would be the death of our town, that nobody would want to live here, no one would want to buy our houses, and this place would become a ghost town.”

The Heatmap poll by Embold Research found that three-quarters of Americans would oppose a local data centre project, with 60% saying they would strongly oppose it. Those numbers reflect a steady increase from 42% last August, to 51% in February, to 70% in May.

“The shift against the facilities is represented across age, gender, income, partisan ID, and the rural-urban divide,” Heatmap writes. “Data centres are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.”

The trend is particularly powerful among rural voters who’ve “skewed more Republican over the past decade,” with whom local data centres are now 63 points underwater—meaning that number of respondents who oppose them is now 63 percentage points higher than those who support them. The projects are only doing marginally better with urban and suburban voters.

The shift has U.S. politicians either embracing the public rage or scrambling to catch up with it. In Democratic Party primaries earlier this month, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and House of Representatives nominee Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, both won their races with campaigns that emphasized their opposition to local data centre development, Politico reported at the time. Kansas gubernatorial nominee Cindy Holscher won her campaign after shifting her position and calling for a statewide data centre moratorium, while Tennessee House nominee Justin Pearson has been a sharp opponent all along.

“People really effing hate data centres,” El-Sayed told an event last month.

This week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro “enacted new rules that effectively halt any new data centres that face opposition from local officials,” Politico reports. That’s a big pivot for Shapiro, who’s considered a possible presidential nominee in 2028 and “has gone from wooing tech companies a year ago to calling for action against “greedy developers.” His Republican opponent for governor, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, is calling for an outright ban.

Other Republicans are calling for “guardrails” on data centre development “protect skeptical communities from unchecked AI growth, as well as the rollback of industry tax breaks,” Semafor writes. Donald Trump said Wednesday the industry “could use a little public relations help,” after introducing a ratepayer protection pledge in March that would have developers paying for the hundreds or thousands of megawatts of electricity the centres demand.

Earlier this month, Allie Rosenbluth, campaign manager at Oil Change Action, said rising energy costs due to U.S. liquefied natural gas exports and data centre development are shifting the dynamics in the midterm campaign.

“People are really starting to connect the dots that energy affordability and climate are major issues,” Rosenbluth told The Mix. “They’re experiencing it in their energy bills, and they’re also experiencing it if they live next to a data centre or an LNG export terminal. So these things are top of mind to voters.”

Recent polling in Canada suggest the fierce opposition to the Synapse project in Olds is the leading edge of a bigger trend. In a Nanos Research survey for the Globe and Mail, released this week, 64% of respondents said they would oppose or somewhat oppose financial incentives for data centre development.

Opposition was a bit stronger—43.1% against, and 24% somewhat opposed—among Canadians aged 18 to 34. “If you’re a 20-something Canadian, and you’re hearing that the government wants to promote AI data centres, you might be wondering whether the government is investing in something that will put you out of a job,” Nanos founder Nik Nanos told the Globe.

Last month, 81% of participants in a Leger poll said they were worried that data centres would lead to higher power bills, while 79% were concerned about their energy consumption, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions, The Canadian Press reported at the time. At the same time, 46% said domestic data centres would give Canada more control over its digital footprint, and 44% said they would support data centre development in their provinces, compared to 42% opposed.

In June, 68% of respondents told the Angus Reid Institute that AI and tech companies should be subject to heavy regulation, even if it slowed down development, although 74% said they doubted governments could keep up with the technology.
This story is part of The Energy Mix’s partnership with Small Change Fund.

China sentenced Evergrande founder to life in prison.

  China sentenced Evergrande founder to life in prison. A Chinese court sentenced Hui Ka Yan, the property tycoon and founder of real estate developer Evergrande, to life in prison for financial fraud related to the collapse of the company. Evergrande defaulted on more than $300 billion in debts and collapsed in 2021, setting off China’s property crisis. The 67-year-old Hui, who at one point was believed to be the richest man in China, pleaded guilty to an assortment of financial crimes, including embezzlement and bribery. “The amount involved is exceptionally large, the circumstances are particularly egregious, and extraordinarily heavy economic losses have been caused,” the court said in a statement.

China successfully tests high-speed laser link between Earth and the Moon

 

China successfully tests high-speed laser link between Earth and the Moon

Chinese researchers have successfully established a two-way high-speed laser communication link between Earth and the Moon, spanning more than 400,000 kilometers. Announced by the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the milestone follows more than a year of in-orbit testing and represents a significant extension of China's laser communications capabilities beyond near-Earth orbit into deep space. Compared with traditional microwave systems, laser communications deliver faster speeds, greater bandwidth, stronger security, and more compact hardware, advantages that become increasingly critical as lunar ambitions grow more complex.

To recover a signal so faint that ground telescopes catch only a handful of photons at a time, drowned out by moonlight, starlight, and urban light pollution, the researchers developed superconducting single-photon detection hardware and high-sensitivity algorithms. Special coding schemes and high-bandwidth signal processing pushed the link to verified rates of 1.25 Mbps uplink and 100 Mbps downlink. With China planning manned lunar landings and a permanent lunar research station, the volumes of imagery and scientific data that future missions will generate would quickly overwhelm conventional radio links, making this laser highway a foundational piece of infrastructure for the next era of lunar exploration.

Senators demand answers about TikTok’s “depraved” experiment

 📱 Senators demand answers about TikTok’s “depraved” experiment. Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a letter to TikTok executives demanding answers about an experiment the company conducted that withheld a safety feature from millions of users. According to Bloomberg, TikTok intentionally removed a safeguard from 10% of users, subjecting them to potentially harmful content as part of a control group. One of the users in the group was a 16-year-old who was reportedly shown thousands of videos about loneliness and suicide before he died by suicide in 2022. TikTok did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment