The Ninth Circuit let 2,400 addiction lawsuits proceed without touching Section 230
The Ninth Circuit let 2,400 addiction lawsuits proceed without touching Section 230

The Ninth Circuit handed the social media companies a defeat on Monday. It did not hand them a ruling. The San Francisco appeals court rejected their bid to overturn a lower court and shut down some 2,400 federal lawsuits over claims they built their p…

Meta is giving $1bn to data centre towns. Its proof is a tax from 1968
Meta is giving $1bn to data centre towns. Its proof is a tax from 1968

Mark Zuckerberg announced a $1 billion Future Is For Everyone Fund on Monday. It will invest directly in the American communities where Meta builds data centres. The commitment sits inside a 6,500-word letter, The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a …

The FCC wants to ban DJI drones it already approved. LiDAR and thermal cameras are now “military-grade.”
The FCC wants to ban DJI drones it already approved. LiDAR and thermal cameras are now “military-grade.”

The FCC is considering banning DJI drones that it already approved for sale in the United States. The proposal would expand the agency’s existing drone restrictions to target specific capabilities: LiDAR sensing, thermal imaging, aerosol-dispersing sys…

Myspace wants to sell you a feed without an algorithm. Brussels is about to make that mandatory anyway.
Myspace wants to sell you a feed without an algorithm. Brussels is about to make that mandatory anyway.

The Vanderhook brothers, whose company Viant Technology owns Myspace, have confirmed they intend to relaunch the platform. They made the announcement in a documentary titled Myspace, which premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto and also features co-founder C…

Hong Kong educators want a social media ban for under-16s. The government says it has no plans to legislate.
Hong Kong educators want a social media ban for under-16s. The government says it has no plans to legislate.

Hong Kong educators and a lawmaker are urging the city to ban children under 16 from social media, calling addiction “the biggest problem facing education.” At a panel discussion this week, Lilian Chan Lui Ling-yee, honorary president of the Yan Oi Ass…

China’s new AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s running out of Chinese-language training data.
China’s new AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s running out of Chinese-language training data.

China’s AI race has a new constraint, and it is not chips. The country is running out of high-quality Chinese-language training data. While US export controls on advanced semiconductors have dominated the debate over China’s AI capabilities, Chinese ex…

South Africa wants to ban companies from moving stablecoins abroad. Individuals keep their allowance.
South Africa wants to ban companies from moving stablecoins abroad. Individuals keep their allowance.

South Africa has proposed banning corporate cross-border stablecoin transactions, in draft rules released jointly by the Reserve Bank and National Treasury. It is one of the most aggressive attempts by any emerging economy to force borderless digital t…

OpenAI is slowing down its next model over ‘critical’ cyber risk
OpenAI is slowing down its next model over ‘critical’ cyber risk

OpenAI tested Astra, one of its upcoming models, over the past few days. In a post on Friday, it said the results were strong enough that it “cannot rule out” critical cyber capabilities. So it is pausing some internal work on the model and scaling up …

The US wants Chinese optics out of its AI data centres. Amazon and Microsoft pay first.
The US wants Chinese optics out of its AI data centres. Amazon and Microsoft pay first.

China’s two biggest optical module makers took a beating on Wednesday. Zhongji Innolight fell as much as 16%, according to the South China Morning Post. Bloomberg put the intraday drop at 14%. Eoptolink Technology slid with it. The trigger was a Reuter…

TikTok kept a safety fix from 15 million US users “by design,” a sealed document shows. One was a teenager who died.
TikTok kept a safety fix from 15 million US users “by design,” a sealed document shows. One was a teenager who died.

In 2021, TikTok changed its algorithm to stop users being flooded with harmful content. But it did not give the safer version to everyone. It held 10% of US users on the old version, about 15 million people at the time. It wanted to test whether the sa…