Tech

Baltimore chief prosecutor asks FCC to stop negative news coverage about her

Enlarge / Baltimore chief prosecutor Marilyn Mosby being interviewed by NBC News in August 2016, in the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested shortly before his death from a spinal cord injury. (credit: Getty Images | Larry French ) Baltimore’s chief prosecutor has asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop a local Fox News affiliate’s […]

Tech

Amazon and others ordered to slash diesel pollution from warehouse trucks

Enlarge / An Amazon Prime delivery truck drives through the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach on April 22, 2020, in Long Beach, California. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (credit: Robyn Beck / AFP) The trucks that move goods sold by Amazon and other e-commerce retailers have become a growing source of diesel […]

Tech

Amazon “seized and destroyed” 2 million counterfeit products in 2020

Enlarge / Amazon trailers backed into bays at a distribution center in Miami, Florida in August 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Lawrence Glass) Amazon “seized and destroyed” over 2 million counterfeit products that sellers sent to Amazon warehouses in 2020 and “blocked more than 10 billion suspected bad listings before they were published in our […]

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Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty) Few bitcoin projects illustrate the cryptocurrency’s enormous climate impact better than the Greenidge power plant in upstate New York. The once-abandoned power plant was bought by private equity firm Atlas Holdings and retasked. A significant portion of Greenidge’s electricity no longer powers nearby homes or businesses; rather, the plant’s […]

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Why Amy Klobuchar just wrote 600 pages on antitrust

Enlarge / Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images) To promote her new book, Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota gave a series of interviews this week, one of which was with me. She told me outright that our session […]

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It began as an AI-fueled dungeon game. Then it got much darker

Enlarge (credit: AI Dungeon) In December 2019, Utah startup Latitude launched a pioneering online game called AI Dungeon that demonstrated a new form of human-machine collaboration. The company used text-generation technology from artificial intelligence company OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. When a player typed out the action or […]

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Ajit Pai promised cheaper Internet—real prices rose 19 percent instead

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | MirageC) The average US home-Internet bill increased 19 percent during the first three years of the Trump administration, disproving former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s claim that deregulation lowered prices, according to a new report by advocacy group Free Press. For tens of millions of families that aren’t wealthy, […]

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Facebook and Big Pharma exploited disease “awareness” for personalized marketing

Enlarge (credit: Getty | YinYang) Pharmaceutical companies spend around $6.5 billion a year on advertising, and even though Facebook prohibits the use of “sensitive health information” in ad targeting, about $1 billion of that ad spending ends up in the companies’ pockets. Big Pharma, it turns out, has found some creative ways to work within […]

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Biggest ISPs paid for 8.5 million fake FCC comments opposing net neutrality

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017, in Washington, DC, the day of the FCC’s vote to repeal net neutrality rules. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong ) The largest Internet providers in the US funded a campaign that generated “8.5 million fake comments” to the Federal Communications Commission as part of […]

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China’s carbon pollution now surpasses all developed countries combined

Enlarge (credit: Getty | AFP) Carbon pollution from China’s bustling, coal-intensive economy last year outstripped the carbon pollution of the US, the EU, and other developed nations combined, making up a whopping 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. As China’s economy has grown in the last 30 years, so too have its emissions. […]