Brian Boland spent more than a decade figuring out how to build a system that would make Meta money. On Thursday, he told a California jury it incentivized drawing more and more users, including teens, onto Facebook and Instagram – despite the risks. Boland’s testimony came a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the […]
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing TP-Link over claims that the router-maker is misleading customers about its ties to China. In a lawsuit filed this week, Paxton claims TP-Link is “masking its Chinese connections,” while serving as “an open window for Chinese-sponsored threat actors and Chinese intelligence agencies.” TP-Link was founded in China, but […]
West Virginia has filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of allowing the distribution and storage of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in iCloud. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey claims that by abandoning a CSAM detection system in favor of end-to-end encryption, iCloud has become a “secure […]
New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) dropped her proposal to allow robotaxi companies to launch commercially in cities other than New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators, Bloomberg reports today. The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as […]
Generally speaking, arcane and mostly unenforced FCC rules are not the province of late night talk shows. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr seems intent on changing that, though; not long after causing a ruckus that briefly took Jimmy Kimmel off the air, his vague threats appear to have been enough to convince CBS to tell Stephen […]
Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about the love-hate (but mostly hate) relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington. I hope everyone got to celebrate George Washington’s birthday in their preferred manner: skiing, staycationing, subscribing to The Verge if you haven’t already, etc. Prediction: this is going to be a mess Political […]
On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a “narco sub,” a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered a downtown Los Angeles courthouse in largely the same way as all the attorneys, reporters, and advocates who’d come to watch his landmark trial testimony, but with one notable difference: he was flanked by an entourage that appeared to be wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. To get to the courtroom, […]
A set of bellwether cases alleging that social media platforms harmed teens’ safety and mental health is going to trial this year, putting executives like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the stand to answer questions about what they’ve done or not done to protect kids. Unlike many earlier legal challenges against social media companies, these […]
Waymo defended its use of remote assistants for its robotaxis after the testimony of one of its top executives during a Senate hearing went viral. In a letter to Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) on Tuesday, Waymo’s head of global operations Ryan McNamara provided a detailed description of the company’s remote assistance operations, including the number […]