The Washington Post

The Washington Post Google announced plans to eliminate online links created with its “link shortener,” creating “goo.gl” formatted links that were saved on Google’s computers. Google stopped letting users create short links in 2018, but Common Crawl Foundation reported that the latest announcement could impact 10 million links. The decision to eliminate Google’s shorter links […]

The Washington Post Monthly residential electric bills have risen across several states summer, largely due to increased datacenter energy demand. Johns Hopkins University’s Abe Silverman said an increase in datacenter load growth is being seen in every U.S. region, “putting enormous upward pressure on prices, both for transmission and for generation.” Hugging Face and Carnegie […]

The Washington Post A PowerPoint presentation dated July 1 outlines plans to use the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” to analyze some 200,000 federal regulations to eliminate an estimated half no longer required by law. The tool has been used to complete “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban […]

The Washington Post Lawmakers in Russia last week passed a measure that will fine people who “deliberately searched for knowingly extremist materials” and gained access to them through means such as virtual private networks. Russia defines “extremist materials” as content officially added by a court to a government-maintained registry, a growing list of about 5,500 […]

The Washington Post AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have deployed bots for real-time retrieval and recapping of content, even as more people use chatbots as an alternative to Google searches. New York startup TollBit found that retrieval bot traffic to 266 websites, with national and local news organizations accounting for half, surged 49% from […]

The Washington Post A letter to the U.S. Congress signed by 260 state lawmakers from both parties calls for the removal of a provision from President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that would impose a decade-long moratorium on state-level AI regulations. The state lawmakers said in their letter, “Over the next decade, AI will raise some […]

The Washington Post The bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate on May 14, now with the backing of Apple. Under KOSA, social media companies must take “reasonable” care to avoid product design features that put minors at risk of self-harm, substance abuse, or sexual exploitation; require the strongest privacy […]

The Washington Post Google agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims brought by the Texas attorney general that it broke state law by deceptively tracking user data. Meta paid Texas a similar amount to settle a lawsuit related to its use of facial recognition in July last year. Google’s agreement does not force it […]

The Washington Post A federal judge in California said Wednesday that Apple violated her legal order to offer users in the U.S. more options for making digital purchases from iPhone apps, referring the case to prosecutors for potential criminal investigation. The company was ordered in 2021 to stop requiring app developers to offer any digital […]

The Washington Post The bipartisan Take It Down Act is expected to be signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump after passing the U.S. Senate in February and the U.S. House on April 28. The legislation makes the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfake images of real people, a federal crime. […]