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Thanks to an unexpected surge in popularity on TikTok, Radiohead now has its fourth-ever song on the Billboard Hot 100: the morosely gorgeous track “Let Down” from the 1997 album “OK Computer.” “Let Down” never broke through to mainstream attention like Radiohead’s “Creep” or “Karma Police,” but it’s by no means a deep cut, like the Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” that went viral due to a qui...

A top Social Security Administration official turned whistleblower says members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of most Americans at risk of compromise. Library e-book and audiobook app Libby is adding AI, much to the disapp...

Months before a jury awarded a $242.5 million verdict against Tesla over its culpability in a 2019 fatal crash, the automaker had a chance to settle for $60 million. Instead, Tesla rejected that offer, according to new legal filings that were first reported by Reuters. Also, Google is tightening security measures around Android app distribution, the company announced on Monday. Starting next year,...

Today, Mastodon users unhappy with the service can opt to move their account to a different Mastodon server, while Bluesky is developing technology that allows users to migrate their account to a new PDS (Bluesky’s term for “personal data server”) on its network. However, Mastodon runs on the ActivityPub Protocol and Bluesky on the AT Protocol, which has limited the ability to migrate accounts acr...

Intel officially announced an agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday afternoon, following Trump’s statement that the government would be taking a 10% stake in the struggling chipmaker. While Intel says the government is making an “$8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock,” the administration does not appear to be committing new funds. Instead, it’s simply making good...

When Meta selected a site in Louisiana for its largest data center to date, it signed a deal with Entergy to power the site with three massive natural gas power plants. Earlier this week a state regulator approved Entergy’s plans. The power plants are expected to come online in 2028 and 2029, and at full strength, they’ll generate 2.25 gigawatts of electricity. Ultimately, the AI data center could...

The debate over whether AI models could one day be conscious — and merit legal safeguards — is dividing tech leaders. In Silicon Valley, this nascent field has become known as “AI welfare,” and if you think it’s a little out there, you’re not alone. Also, more than two years after leaving the company, some former Twitter employees may finally receive their severance pay. Elon Musk’s X is tentative...

Earlier this year, two hackers broke into a computer and soon realized the significance of what this machine was. As it turned out, they had landed on the computer of a hacker who allegedly works for the North Korean government.  The two hackers decided to keep digging and found evidence that they say linked the hacker to cyberespionage operations carried out by North Korea, exploits and hacking t...

Late-night host Jimmy Fallon shouted,“I P 6 8! I P 6 8!,” trying and failing to fake excitement about the new Pixel smartphones. Fallon, who likely had never heard the technical term before, didn’t seem to realize that IP68 — a rating that indicates phones can survive being submerged in water — isn’t all that interesting as a selling point, nor is this water resistance feature new to Google’s Pixe...

When James Cox, the former leader of Uber’s ride-share product, UberPool, left that company in 2019, the Silicon Valley giant had abandoned its autonomous vehicle development and sold off the division entirely. While UberPool had struggled to take hold, Cox felt a massive opportunity had been missed: taking the core of UberPool’s tech and applying it to robotaxis. , one of the most annoying issues...

A federal appeals court handed SpaceX a win on Tuesday, in a ruling that prevents the National Labor Relations Board from prosecuting unfair labor practices against the company. The ruling by the Fifth District Court of Appeals, which suggests the structure of the NLRB is likely unconstitutional, could have far-reaching effects. Also, Meta is rolling out an AI-powered voice translation feature to...

In a move reminiscent of Facebook’s early days, TikTok is launching a new feature that allows college students to find and connect with others on their campus. The feature, called Campus Verification, lets users add their college campus to their TikTok profile and browse a list of students at their school. Also, On Friday, The Information reported that Meta was preparing to tear down its existing...

Elon Musk’s X is struggling on Android devices in terms of new installs, even while App Store downloads grow, according to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. In July 2025, X downloads on Google Play saw a significant decline, as new installs dropped by 44% year-over-year worldwide, even as iOS downloads grew by 15%. In other news, Spotify is introducing a new feature that allows s...

xAI’s website for its Grok chatbot is exposing the system prompts for several of its AI personas, including a “crazy conspiracist” that seems designed to handhold a user into beliefs that “a secret global cabal” controls the world. Also, the new interface adopts a block-first approach, letting you insert tables, columns, separators, lists and headers. You can also add rich text blocks to highlight...

Earlier this week, Variety and other Hollywood publications reported that Matt and Ross Duffer, the brothers who created “Stranger Things” (and wrote and directed many episodes), were in talks to sign an exclusive deal with Paramount (now under the ownership of David Ellison’s Skydance). Then on Friday evening, Puck’s Matthew Belloni posted that the Duffers had in fact “made their choice” and were...

Two years after launching, social network Bluesky is revising its Community Guidelines and other policies, and asking for feedback from its users on some of the changes. The startup, a competitor to X, Threads, and open networks like Mastodon, says its new policies are meant to offer improved clarity and more detail around its user safety procedures and the appeals process. Also, the attorney gene...

Igor Babuschkin is leaving xAI less than three years after he co-founded the startup with Elon Musk, following a series of scandals at company. Also, riding in the back of a Waymo that’s autonomously navigating the busy streets of San Francisco and doing so with relative ease thanks to 29 external cameras, six radar, and five lidar sensors all feeding into an AI model is nice. For just 15 bucks, y...

Exclusive: A dating gossip app for men exposed thousands of users' personal data, including scans of driver's licenses. CEO Xavier Lampkin won't say if he plans to notify affected users about the app's security lapse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nvidia's research lab developed the technology that took the company from a video game GPU startup to a $4 trillion-dollar company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anthropic’s escalation – a response to OpenAI’s attempt to undercut the competition – is a strategic play meant to broaden the company’s foothold in federal AI usage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The automaker is investing $2 billion into the Louisville Assembly Plant with a $30,000 EV pickup slated for 2027. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Sunday. In other news, Nvidia, AMD may sell high-end AI chips to China if they pay US a cut. The global AI chip race narrative used to be about U.S. national security, but apparentl...

The Trump administration has finally issued new guidance that states can use to dole out $5 billion in funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, after spending months withholding the money. Also, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Monday it has seized the servers and $1 million in bitcoin from the prolific Russian ransomware gang behind the BlackSuit and Royal malware. Learn m...

Rocket Lab is taking the concept of an 'end-to-end' space company to new heights with a forthcoming acquisition. In other news, Openvibe, an app for tracking the open social web in one place, now supports RSS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you, like practically anyone else with a cell phone in the U.S. and beyond, have received a scam text message about an unpaid toll or undelivered mail item, there’s a good chance you have been targeted by a prolific scamming operation. But a series of opsec mistakes ultimately led security researchers and investigative journalists to the real-world identity of the maker of the scamming software...