A court in France on Friday shot downa bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s from September — a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron that raises fundamental questions about efforts to protect kids on the internet.
The Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, said the restrictions in the bill disproportionately infringe on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.
Europe’s would-be first social media ban, which sought to prohibit access to anyone in France under the age of 15 from next month, had been a flagship policy of Macron’s second and final term.
The French president has also pushed restrictions to the top of the EU agenda, with an expected announcement of bloc-wide measures by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September.
In a statement late Friday, the French presidential office said the government would not be giving up on the bill. It has set a new target date for spring 2027, which coincides with when Macron will leave office.
The statement said Macron “has instructed the Prime Minister to work, as quickly as possible, on a legally sound draft that takes into account” the court’s decision. The ruling hinted at what would make the age restriction align with fundamental rights: giving parents more flexibility.
Peter Craddock, a senior Brussels-based attorney advising social media firms, said the French court decision could have far-reaching implications.
“What they’re basically saying here is: ‘Listen, government, if you want to get this to succeed, you can’t just work on the basis of a general ban. There have to be limitations,” said Craddock, a partner at Keller & Heckman. “There have to be ways for people to say, ‘well, actually, in my case, my son, my daughter is of a certain degree of maturity and is able to use this properly.'”
The government bill had passed through the French legislative procedure after a lengthy back-and-forth earlier this summer. It was set to bring forward Europe’s first social media age restrictions, with Greece and Denmark planning to follow suit.
But Article 1 of the French bill essentially rendered it a blanket ban, without sufficiently distinguishing between the risks of each social media platform or the varying levels of vulnerability among minors themselves, said the court. The ban would also apply to online platforms that have not been proven to have risks to the health and safety of minors.
Craddock warned the court’s judgment may not bode well for other national bans or restrictions coming from the European Commission, since the decision is framed around fundamental rights, which are harmonized across the bloc.
“The reasoning is actually equally relevant internationally, throughout the EU, because this fundamental freedom is not specific to France,” he said.
In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV.
In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” He then walked off in triumph.
By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms.
As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms.
Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.
“Flock from the first has been quite deliberate in sequestering decision making processes — where these things are placed, what they gather and for whom — and the data gathered through them from the general public,” Adrian Daub told me. A comparative literature professor at Stanford University, his forthcoming book, “What Tech Calls Governing,” examines the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley.
“The intersection with state actors is particularly worrisome,” Daub said. “Governments can outsource the dodgier aspects of data collection and use, while the private sector gets to disavow the obvious political implications of this kind of massive surveillance.”
According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. In Johnson County, Texas, police officers fixated on a woman suspected of having an abortion, and used the database to track her movements in an effort to prove it — even though state law is supposed to exempt the patient from criminal prosecution. Police have been outed for using the cameras to stalk people for personal reasons, such as having a conflict — or even a sexual obsession — with them.
Flock has claimed the company will reform its policies to address these issues, but history suggests it would be unwise to trust them. One former Flock employee, Jonathan Paz, has accused the company of lying about its intentions to gain government contracts, which are then abused by law enforcement to harm the public. Paz told 404 Media that company management had assured him they weren’t feeding information to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a falsehood he passed on to city governments in his sales pitch. After finding out about a secret pilot program to help track down and detain immigrants, Paz left the company.
Flock’s behavior represents a microcosm of a larger trend in tech that should alarm freedom-loving Americans, regardless of political affiliation. Silicon Valley enriched itself with promises that the cyber revolution would mean more freedom and democracy by enabling the flow of information and communication. But in recent years, there has been a dramatic about-face as the C-suite class has become increasingly authoritarian. Algorithms and AI are used to choke off people’s access to information and make intra-human communication more difficult. Journalism is faltering as an industry, even as social media and search engines are being programmed to dissuade users from reading or watching real news sources. Surveillance is starting to feel ubiquitous, between online bots tracking our every move to cameras everywhere, including the faces of other people wearing AI glasses. Billionaires like New York Knicks owner James L. Dolan reportedly use spying tech to harass people who criticize them.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Trump groups, observed at a recent meeting of financial analysts about the future of AI.
“There is a link between technology (whether it ‘works’ or not) and repressive state apparatuses,” Daub explained. For example, while Flock cameras expand the ability of the government to crack down on people, they also allow officials “to claim it’s not their fault when some poor sucker gets snared” unjustly by blaming poor technology. “It’s not an accident that their politics have tacked more openly to the right in recent years,” he said of the tech CEO class.
The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile.
This can all feel overwhelming at times, which is very much by design. Silicon Valley’s hype machine portrays an AI-controlled future as inevitable, even equating the technology to a god that will overpower us humans, rendering democracy a quaint artifact of the past. AI was swiftly embedded in innumberable computer programs, often not even allowing a user to opt out. The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile.
The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back. The public has some leverage points. Despite their elaborate efforts at secrecy and unaccountability, Flock works through government contracts. Citizens can petition leaders to avoid or drop contracts, a tactic that has been working across the country. There are still transparency laws that apply to Flock databases, which is how 404 Media and other media outlets have discovered abuses of the technology. Activists have been building maps alerting people where the cameras are.
The maps intersect with what has been the most controversial part of the Flock uprising: the vandalism. Although it appears the vandals aren’t organized in any meaningful way, they are being egged on by social media users who cheer from afar as people shoot, steal or otherwise disable the cameras. It’s understandable that the vandalism is the most compelling front of the rebellion, and not just because petty, victimless crime is a cheap thrill. Vandalizing the cameras is a sharp rebuttal to Silicon Valley talk about how technology will liberate us from the limitations of the physical world.
The reality is that bodies and physical space are still of paramount importance, which is why tracking and controlling people’s movement is a priority for tech-obsessed authoritarians. But while they’d like to pretend they are gods on an invisible mountain, bending us to their wills, the reality is that they need old-fashioned metal — copper and gold, even! — to get it done. Destroying a camera sends a strong and unmistakable message: They are finite, physical entities, just like us.
Like it or not, the vandalism sends an emboldening signal to the public that tech oligarchs are not omnipotent. If you toss a brick at their expensive cameras, they squawk. It’s crass and illegal, and yes, the cameras are insured and immediately get replaced. But the boost to human self-esteem and the reminder that our squishy bodies still matter more than all the data in the cloud? It’s hard to argue against it.
There are still plenty of pitfalls. MAGA leaders like Tucker Carlson are clocking the anti-Flock movement and trying to hijack it. Using conspiracy theories, he and others can redirect attention away from real enemies — tech oligarchs and compliant politicians — and toward blaming phantasms like the “deep state,” falsely insinuating that the tech spies are left-wingers doing some poorly defined socialism. This has the twin benefits of ginning up outrage at innocent people, while also shielding the very right-wing forces that are actually the source of the problem.
Still, it’s promising sign that people are rebelling against Flock cameras. Along with protests against data centers, it’s a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.
This week and next, the Brussels Playbook Week Ender podcast is away for the summer holiday.
So, we thought we’d re-up this popular installment on Europe’s quest to become independent from U.S. tech.
In this episode first released in June, Sarah Wheaton is joined by “The Tech Coup” author and former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and POLITICO’s Laurens Cerulus, as they look at what happens when the systems running Europe’s schools, ministries, banks, businesses and security are controlled elsewhere. They also discuss whether Brussels can build real alternatives or simply learn to manage its dependence better.
The Brussels Playbook Podcast will be back to its regular schedule on Aug. 24.
Questions? Comments? Send us a message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
A bipartisan House delegation met with top Vatican officials on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence during a visit that briefly included Pope Leo XIV, according to two people with knowledge of the trip granted anonymity to disclose details of the private meetings.
The delegation’s visit, which has not been previously reported, included nine lawmakers and was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the person said. Committee member Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and California Rep. Ro Khanna, the panel’s top Democrat, led the trip.
A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.
In an interview confirming the visit, Khanna said the topics of discussion included religious freedom, AI’s economic and geopolitical risks, as well as broader ethical and existential implications. It centered on two key principles: human dignity and equality.
“Human dignity means that human beings need to be responsible for any key decisions involving health, involving finances, involving individual freedom, involving public services,” he said.
The Silicon Valley Democrat said that in this context, equality means preventing automation from causing mass unemployment, and ensuring AI cannot be used to exclude people from social services. Khanna said it also means guarding against a concentration of power in which “a few billionaires can make decisions about data and algorithms.”
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting. But Pope Leo has taken a special interest in the technology and used a May encyclical to call on countries to “safeguard humanity” as AI develops, warning that the technology could deepen inequality, fray the social fabric and erode moral responsibility if it doesn’t have ethical guardrails. Congress, meanwhile, has introduced dozens of AI bills and held several hearings, but has failed to agree on a comprehensive federal framework for governing the technology.
The pope previously cast the global race to develop cutting-edge AI technology in stark terms. As the U.S., China and other powers compete for an edge, he warned against a “dehumanizing ambition to develop ever more powerful technologies or to secure control over them,” describing a contest between “opposing imperialisms” seeking either to preserve or seize technological supremacy.
Khanna told POLITICO he plans to introduce legislation that would tax the use of autonomous AI agents to incentivize companies to hire human workers.
The group also discussed AI’s implications for human mortality and the limits of human knowledge — boundaries some developers have long imagined technology might overcome by uploading human consciousness and accumulated wisdom to the cloud.
Following the meetings, Khanna sent letters to top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon, asking how they intend to align their technology with the tenets of human dignity and equality.
An OpenAI spokesperson pointed POLITICO to prior policy documents outlining the AI company’s commitment to safety and to ensuring benefits from the technology are distributed equitably. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawmakers traveled to Berlin to discuss China’s rising global influence, before picking up on the topic during their Vatican visit and in meetings with Italian government officials a few days later.
Alongside Khanna and Newhouse, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) took part in the discussions, according to one of the people familiar with the trip.
Spokespeople for the members did not respond to requests for comment.
NATO plans to fortify its eastern edge using drones, sensors and artificial intelligence in a massive network designed to spot and help repel a potential Russian attack.
Western officials say the alliance is exploring AI-assisted drone operations as part of the broad effort to bolster its defenses. The aim, however, isn’t full autonomy; instead, machines could help to pilot the drones while human operators make the call on what they strike.
The approach echoes what Ukraine is already doing. The embattled country is increasingly incorporating AI into its drone operations, but both soldiers and defense tech firms have repeatedly emphasized that humans must remain at the center of the fight, even as the war becomes more robotic.
For NATO, AI-assisted drones would be part of the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative — a digital battlespace network the alliance is building to track threats along its borders with Russia and Belarus, which stretch from northern Finland to the Black Sea.
The new concept includes thousands of drones, sensors and satellites linked with AI to detect potential breaches of allied territory and repel attacks as the first line of defense. Conventional military forces, such as tanks, fighter jets and artillery, will remain the backbone.
U.S. Army Maj. Ben Schiff, a software operations officer, told Bild — which, like Business Insider and POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network — that both Ukraine and Russia still rely on humans to control drones.
While some systems have AI or machine-learning capabilities that allow brief moments of autonomy in flight, piloting is primarily performed by operators on the ground. Schiff said that “the most boring parts of flying”— drones loitering above the battlefield looking for targets — should be automated. But when it comes to deciding what the drone should strike, that’s where a human comes into play.
“So the humans are deciding what the drone does, but they don’t necessarily need to take the action of flying it because we don’t have a million pilots. We can’t fly a million drones at the same time,” said Schiff at the U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Schiff is a product manager for the EFDI Data Backbone, a developing framework designed to help NATO forces detect, classify, share and act on information at speed and scale. The backbone bridges incompatible computer and command systems across multiple allied nations, allowing real-time data to flow from forward-deployed sensors all the way back to headquarters.
The goal is to help NATO move beyond today’s linear system — called a “kill chain” — where information moves from the front line back to a decision-maker and then back again to the battlefront to a “kill web,” where data from sensors can be rapidly passed to weapons systems and operators.
“The value of a drone, sensor or other capability is not determined solely by its individual performance,” said Maj. Matt Blubaugh, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. “Its effectiveness depends on how well it integrates into the broader operational ecosystem.”
Learning from Ukraine
Ukraine is already pioneering the integration of AI into military operations.
Soldiers observe a drone in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine on June 14, 2025. | Florent Vergnes/AFP via Getty Images
On the battlefield, Ukraine has made significant progress in using AI to support functions like decision-making, drone navigation, terminal guidance and precision, said Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of the Ukrainian state-backed innovation platform Brave1.
This spring, Hrytseniuk told Business Insider in Kyiv that more than 200 local companies were developing AI-based components for drones, missiles, radars and other systems. However, they insist machines won’t control drones from start to finish.
Wild Hornets, the manufacturer of the popular Sting interceptor drone, also told Business Insider in May that AI will be gradually integrated at almost every stage of flight operations — target detection, identification and, later, terminal guidance.
A spokesperson for the company said humans will still make the final decision on what to strike. Since Russia is constantly changing its tactics, interceptor operators must keep tabs on these changes and make necessary adjustments, they said.
As autonomous systems become more common on the battlefield in Ukraine, commanders also told Business Insider that humans need to remain in the loop.
Grek, the call sign of a company commander overseeing robots with Ukraine’s 21st Unmanned Systems “Kraken” Regiment, said the goal is to “allow people to focus on the tasks where human judgment has the greatest value.”
U.S. Army officers stressed that NATO is using the operational environment in Ukraine to inform military planning for a potential future confrontation.
“We’re not copying Ukraine,” said Capt. Ronan Sefton. “We’re learning from Ukraine.”
The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.
President Donald Trump is paving a legal pathway for U.S. companies to launch cyberattacks on foreign cybercriminal gangs — a significant and potentially controversial measure that would put approved tech and cybersecurity firms on the front lines of digital combat.
The memo represents one of the biggest shifts in U.S. cyber policy undertaken in recent years. It would empower tech and security companies — whose data and control over internet infrastructure often offer unique insight into foreign hacking operations — to mount state-sanctioned digital strikes.
While many such companies already work closely with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, a web of legal and political constraints has long prevented them from taking direct action inside foreign networks.
Companies that want to participate would be required to sign contracts with both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and to undergo what the memo describes as “rigorous vetting” while working with the government. The overall effort would be overseen by a National Coordination Center, established in an earlier Trump administration executive order, with co-executive directors from DOJ and DHS.
However, the memo states that no operations by the companies would be approved until the executive directors at DOJ and DHS establish “consensus procedures” with the White House Homeland Security Council guaranteeing “complete oversight and control of Participating Companies’ performance.”
Those procedures, it notes, should be drafted within 60 days. They are likely to be extensive.
They will outline steps for participating companies to obtain approval for proposed offensive hacking operations, so the government can confirm that the targets are criminal gangs and ensure that operations are consistent with U.S. law and don’t undermine ongoing U.S. intelligence efforts. Companies could propose surveillance operations to help identify criminals or “effects” operations to degrade the systems they use to stage their attacks.
Participating companies would have to pass minimum standards for technical expertise and personnel vetting, and would be required to notify the federal government if they believe approved operations may result in the loss of life or rise to the level of use of force under international law.
Some see the memo as a critical step to help the U.S. government counter foreign cybercriminal gangs that operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
“For years we’ve called the American technology industry a strategic asset but left it on the cyber sidelines,” Joe Lin, the CEO and co-founder of Twenty, a start-up that builds offensive cyber tools for the U.S. government, said in a statement. “This administration is changing the paradigm.”
The memo notes that companies will only be authorized to target criminals that are “not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”
Even with the help of the U.S. intelligence community, making that distinction could be difficult.
Adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran have persistently targeted U.S. critical infrastructure, including water systems, ports, and telecommunications infrastructure, while multinational crime syndicates have defrauded billions of dollars annually from Americans via complex online schemes.
But many cyber gangs in Eastern Europe are thought to operate with the tacit consent of the Russian government, while state hackers in Iran and China sometimes moonlight as cybercriminals to earn extra money or deflect blame for their governments’ attacks.
More broadly, it is not always easy for digital investigators to determine who is responsible for a given cyberattack, or who different computer networks belong to — another risk the memo contemplates.
Companies that accidentally carry out operations targeting a U.S. citizen or network will be required to immediately pause the operation and notify the U.S. government, the memo states. It does not appear to preclude activities that are deliberately “directed” at a U.S. person, so long as they receive “any necessary authorization, judicial or otherwise, prior to approval of the operation.” Under U.S. law, a “U.S. person” can refer to an American business or organization.
Many lawmakers and security experts have broadly supported calls for the private sector to play a larger role in responding to cybercrime, though not all approve of granting them the ability to launch active hacking efforts.
In recent years, some House members have debated the idea of issuing “letters of marque” to private companies to carry out cyberattacks on behalf of the U.S. government, similar to the U.S. Navy authorizing private ships to disrupt British shipping during the War of 1812.
As part of a more assertive cyber posture, Trump has turned to U.S. Cyber Command to mount digital attacks in tandem with U.S. military operations, including in Iranand Venezuela. He signed an executive order this March to clamp down on countries that fail to take action against scam centers operating within their borders.
That same month, the White House called on the private sector to broadly help it “disrupt” foreign adversaries in its new national cyber strategy, though it stopped short of telling private companies to take riskier and more consequential steps, such as directly launching attacks against foreign criminals.
Some of the most prolific online fraud operations are believed to emanate from scam compounds in Southeast Asia. But hackers from North Korea — who for years have stolen hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency from victims around the world — would likely be exempt from targeting by U.S. companies since they work at the direction of the North Korean government.
North Korea's Red Star Linux OS ships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. — Read the rest
Ever find yourself hunched over your laptop, eyes glazed, slack jawed, and stunned by the quantity of information modern life is throwing at you? You might take a break to stare at your phone. Or you could try switching from one browser tab to the next while checking your email and inching closer to the day’s deadline.
Some people call this TikTok brain. Others call it brain rot. Either way, it feels like a distinctly 21st-century affliction, caused by scrolling through too many short-form videos and social media feeds that trains your brain to seek out little hits of dopamine and ruins your ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. People with the condition may not be able to read books or even watch feature-length films. They can’t do anything except watch little videos, leaving them prone, catatonic, faces blank and bright in the glow of their smartphone screens.
I don’t even use TikTok, but I feel this way all the time. Give me one hour to complete a task that requires even a medium amount of mental fortitude, and I’ll find 55 minutes’ worth of other things to do. It’s not that I’m avoiding the task. But once I get started, my mind wanders relentlessly, no matter how hard I try to keep it on track.
You can blame technology for doing this to you — and I do — but the real issue is with how we treat our brains. Generally speaking, the human brain works like an analog computer, processing one thing at a time, and when you switch tasks (which is what we’re actually doing when we say we are multitasking), it comes at a cost: It drains your cognitive resources, which makes it even harder to pay attention in the future. The more you do this, the more ingrained the behavior becomes.
The human attention span is not one thing. There are different types of attention, including sustained attention (your ability to stay engaged with a task over a period of time) and selective attention (your capacity to take in certain information while tuning out irrelevant details). Alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to switch tasks rapidly) and dividing attention (process multiple things at once) are especially demanding on your cognitive resources. And all of this is managed by the brain’s command center, your prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function. When you’re experiencing cognitive fatigue, there’s a physical reason why: There’s actually less blood flowing to this portion of the brain.
“We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor
The good news is that the damage is not permanent. The human brain’s capacity to focus is just as intact as it was in the 19th century when everyone spent their evenings reading novels and knitting fisherman sweaters. Lots of things have changed since then, of course. As smartphones have driven us to consume endless amounts of information, psychologists have been working on strategies to put the pieces of our attention spans back together. I called a few of these attention experts hoping that they might tell me the secret to regaining my ability to focus. They all agreed that two things are necessary to solve the problem: Be intentional with your attention and let your brain rest.
“What we need most is the capacity to know where attention is, moment by moment, and greater agency over our attention so we can direct it intentionally,” Amishi Jha, a neuroscience professor at the University of Miami and author of Peak Mind, told me. “We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Put another way, in order to reclaim your attention span, you first need to be mindful. That means spending less brain power dissociating on social media feeds and more on whatever you’re actually interested in. You also need to give your brain a chance to rest and recover. Staring at your phone will not help you recharge and reclaim your attention span. Staring at a tree, however, will.
Let your brain rest
One way to think about your own attention span is to consider what is voluntary and what is not. When something like a bright light or a loud noise grabs your attention, it engages your involuntary attention, which is effectively limitless. When you’re deciding to pay attention to something, however, you’re using your voluntary, or directed attention. This is a limited resource. As you’re making an effort to focus on something, like a book, your supply of directed attention runs down, but it can be replenished in specific ways.
This simpler way to understand how our attention works dates back to the 19th-century psychologists, like Williams James, but it’s making a comeback thanks to attention restoration theory (ART). This school of thought, first developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, suggests that spending time in nature restores your directed attention. The theory claims that the natural world does this by captivating our indirect, or involuntary, attention and allowing our cognitive resources to recover.
Imagine you’ve gone for a hike and happen upon a waterfall that’s so fascinating you can’t look away from it. Marc Berman, one of Stephen Kaplan’s former students and now a professor at the University of Chicago, refers to such a spectacle as a “soft fascination,” something that can grab your attention without consuming it, thus giving your mind space to wander. You might get the same effect from staring at a campfire or looking up at tree branches swaying in the breeze. Hard fascinations, by contrast, capture so much of your attention that you can’t look away and you can’t quickly recover. Times Square is a canonical example, but being on social media counts, too.
In one study Berman conducted, he and his team (which included Kaplan) gave research subjects difficult attention and memory tasks, sent them on a walk in nature or an urban environment, and then repeated the tests. The participants who went on nature walks improved their performance in these tests by about 20 percent, Berman said, and the improvements held regardless of whether participants said they liked the walk or not.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention.”
Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor
Berman said they aren’t entirely sure why nature seems to have this effect on us, but he theorizes that it relates to fractals, or repeating, self-similar patterns whose individual parts resemble their larger whole — tree branches or fern leaves, for instance. Fractals are common in nature, and Berman thinks their orderly arrangement helps our brains to process the information. “It’s easy to get the gist and you don’t need to encode all the details,” he said. “Whereas in the built environment, it’s not very fractal and you might have to encode everything, which might be more taxing.”
Of course, it’s not always possible to zip over a forest in the middle of the work day. If you can’t take a walk in the park, Berman said that even looking at a picture of nature scenes can help. (Try not to do that on Instagram, though, because you might end up just doomscrolling.)
Be intentional with your attention
Reclaiming your attention is one thing, but holding onto it in the first place is its own distinct challenge. When you find yourself feeling distractable, it might be that you need a break. If that’s the case, you can’t will your way into concentrating.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention,” said Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “It’s not enough to just want to pay attention.”
Instead, you have to put yourself in an environment that makes paying attention not only possible but achievable. That means making a concerted effort to avoid multitasking, which will drain your cognitive resources. Try the alternative: monotasking.
Monotasking likely requires clearing away clutter, whether that’s literal clutter on your desk, or digital clutter on your screen in the form of extra apps or browser tabs. Turning off all notifications is essential. You should also hide your phone — put it in a drawer or in another room. (A widely cited study published in 2017 found that even having a phone in sight can reduce your cognitive capacity and affect your ability to concentrate.) When you need to take a break, don’t go find your phone: Take a walk outside, or stare at a tree, or look out the window and listen to a song you like.
Monotasking also means being intentional about how you do that one thing, avoiding distractions along the way. At work, this might mean carving up projects into digestible chunks. You might even try the Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes, focus hard on the task until it goes off, take a five-minute break, and repeat. At home, it could mean making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks so that the toughest ones get done first, while you still have some gas in the tank.
If you aren’t ready to turn off all notifications at this point, at the very least turn off all the ones that aren’t coming from humans. You do not need to be alerted of an Amazon flash sale while you’re trying to plan your family’s meals for the week.
Give yourself some constraints
There’s no such thing as being 100 percent locked in to any given task. When there are no external distractions, your brain actually turns inward and finds something else to pay attention to, which can lead to daydreaming and mind wandering. Daydreaming — creating a structured narrative of imaginary scenarios — is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It can be productive in helping you plan and think creatively. But if you’re just mentally wandering from random topic to topic, you’re getting into the danger zone.
Some people find that adding constraints can improve their attention. One approach you’ll see in self-help books is the use of a so-called commitment device that restricts future behavior in service of a larger goal. If you’ve read (or seen) The Odyssey, you might remember the scene in which Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast and ignore his orders so that he won’t steer the boat into the rocks when he hears the Sirens’ call. Odysseus was using a commitment device to avoid killing his whole crew. You might use a commitment device, like a dedicated writing space or the Pomodoro technique, to avoid distractions, both external and internal.
So how do you focus just the right amount? Removing those external distractions is a great start. Much like paying attention, ignoring these distractions consumes your cognitive resources, impacting your performance, and causing you to make mistakes. It also takes more effort to stay on task as time goes on. From there, do your best to avoid overtaxing your brain to the point that the internal distractions take over and your mind is wandering. That’s how you know it’s time to take a break.
“For several minutes, give yourself no new input,” Jha said. “Do not reach for the phone while waiting in line. Take a short walk without listening to anything. Look out a window. Let the mind wander without trying to solve a problem.”
Take a walk in the park. Sit quietly and look at a bird. Paying attention has never sounded so relaxing.
A news organization and free speech nonprofit sued President Donald Trump over his social media platform’s program that offers paid early access to his posts after the scheme went live at the beginning of August.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the left-leaning nonprofit newsroom The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, alleges the practice “is extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.”
The plaintiffs also say the controversial $100,000-a-month program violates their First Amendment rights to access presidential statements “on equal terms with other members of the press and public.”
In announcing plans to introduce the program, Truth Social — whose parent company Trump founded in 2021 after being kicked off social media platforms and owns a plurality stake in — described the initiative as valuable for “organizations that place a premium on immediate, verified access to information.” But critics allege it amounts to insider trading on advanced access to the president’s market-moving words.
The service gives traders and other entities high-speed access to the president’s Truth Social account in addition to the nine other most-popular accounts on the platform, including Vice President JD Vance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A spokesperson for Truth Social, which isn’t named as a defendant in the complaint but is referenced throughout it, said in a statement that “information from President Trump is disseminated by countless platforms and news outlets, many of which offer subscription APIs.”
“One of those channels is Truth Social, which was founded as an uncancellable haven for free speech after the President was unjustly deplatformed,” the statement continued. “Now, left-wing activists are trying to wrongfully weaponize the courts to censor him again and harm our shareholders.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The Intercept’s chief legal officer, David Bralow, in a statement said “nothing could be more antithetical to the free, independent press than the president charging for early access to his public announcement.”
Natalie Harp, an executive assistant to Trump who media reports suggest is responsible for authoring many of the president’s social media posts, is named as a defendant in the suit alongside deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office.
The subjects of the president’s Truth Social posts can range from squabbles with federal judges to hiring and firings within his administration and threats against foreign adversaries. They also provide a glimpse at the issues of the day that occupy Trump’s attention.
Such announcements have had the ability to sway markets, like when oil prices plunged after Trump posted that he was calling off an attack on Iran in April. He has also occasionally touted specific companies on the platform, causing their stock prices to rise.
The plaintiffs also express concerns that the program would give outlets willing to pay for the service an unfair advantage over other newsrooms and hinder efforts to catalog the president’s posts by scraping Truth Social.
The company said in an August earnings report that despite a $238 million loss in the second quarter of 2026, 10 customers had already registered for the service.
The program has caught the eyes of Democratic lawmakers on the Hill. Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced a bill Tuesday seeking to ban social media companies from selling early access to government employees’ accounts and specifically invoked the Truth Social program.
A programmer named Fogus came across a GitHub argument about chess engine development and wrote about why hobby coding communities are hostile toward large language models. Hobbyists say is working code isn't the goal. They like to build operating systems, programming languages, and console emulators, or try to fit a working program into as few characters as possible. — Read the rest
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski on Wednesday threatened to reconsider Warsaw’s $50 million-a-year spending on Elon Musk’s Starlink network, joining a growing government backlash over new roaming restrictions set to hit Polish customers later this month.
“Hey, @elonmusk, big man, stop discriminating Polish users of Starlink or we might re-think paying you $50 million p.a. for your services,” wrote Sikorski on X.
The foreign minister’s anger follows Starlink’s decision to exclude Poland from a shared European roaming zone that covers more than 30 countries, including Germany, Czechia, Slovakia and Lithuania. Customers within the zone can take their terminals across borders without triggering international-use restrictions. But Polish users will now face extra requirements when traveling.
“Note: Poland is not included in the Europe region above. Accounts registered in Poland are treated as Poland-only for home-country use,” reads Starlink’s current guidance.
Polish Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski also went after Musk, accusing Starlink’s parent company SpaceX of treating Poles as second-class customers and demanding it spell out the regulatory basis for the change.
“Poland is not a second-tier market. Polish customers are not second-tier customers,” Gawkowski wrote on X. If SpaceX blames “local regulatory requirements,” Warsaw expects it to point to the specific rules rather than offer “general explanations,” he added.
The new rules have applied to new customers signing up for Starlink since July 14, 2026 and will extend to existing Polish users on Aug. 17.
This isn’t the first time Sikorski and Musk have fought over Starlink. Last year, Musk told the Polish minister to “be quiet, small man,” after Sikorski warned that Warsaw could seek alternative providers for the satellite service it’s financing for Ukraine.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.
A Berlin-based non-profit has filed a criminal complaint against Meta’s smart glasses, arguing the devices breach Germany’s strict privacy rules and should be banned.
Privacy concerns over the device have snowballed in recent months amid reports of people being filmed without their consent, or recording intimate footage without knowing it could be reviewed by Meta contractors.
The non-profit HateAid is arguing that the sale of Meta smart glasses in Germany is a criminal offense because the devices allow wearers to covertly film other people.
The complaint, which alleges the sale breaches Germany’s Telecommunications, Digital Services and Data Protection Act, was filed against Meta, Ray-Ban and Oakley — eyewear brands that have partnered with Meta to design the glasses — and several retailers.
Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard said the smart glasses were approved by Germany’s regulator BNetzA in 2022, and “were built with privacy safeguards from the ground up that go beyond what any smartphone offers.” Those include an LED light that turns on when the glasses are recording, as well as technology to stop anyone from tampering with the light.
HateAid said that smart glasses should only be sold if they are clearly identifiable, and that there should be limits on recording in certain spaces as there is for dashcams or bodycams.
Europe’s privacy regulators have commissioned a report on smart glasses that is due to be finalized this summer.
I'm not fond of bricking my hardware. But I'm very fond of Valve's SteamOS. If you haven't had the opportunity to mess with a Steam Deck or Steam Machine, SteamOS is a deliciously easy-to-use, low-maintenance Linux distribution tuned to work on their hardware with next-to-no maintenance. — Read the rest
Hank Green in January 2026. | Tommy Martino/Associated Press
Everyone is wrong about Hank Green.
In case you missed the controversy: The veteran YouTube star, writer, and science comms entrepreneur was recently “canceled” after he acknowledged using AI for research.
“I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid,” he wrote in a statement on Reddit. “It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.” Although Green wrote that the words in his videos are his own, his reliance on AI as a research aid still gave the finished work an ineffable “AI feel.” And his relationship with AI, he wrote, had become “not healthy for me or good for the world.”
Some of Green’s followers, known by the cheerfully dorky moniker “Nerdfighters,” turned on him for daring to use AI in any capacity. Just as quickly, that backlash produced its own backlash, aghast not at Green’s use of AI but at his prostration before an anti-AI mob — “self-canceling,” as some put it, over a legitimate use of the technology.
I think both of these camps are misguided and have flattened a complex issue into a set of binary extremes. And it surprised me that, despite robust societal debate on AI’s impacts on our ability to think, write, and produce original ideas, the debacle hasn’t prompted more thoughtful conversation about the limits of AI in creative work.
I felt this because I recognized myself in Green’s statement: the feeling that even using AI for research can start to take over your creative process, that it can become hard to know where your own brain ends and where AI begins, and that the technology can simply push you to work too fast. I don’t use AI to generate writing and would not do so — but its use need not rise to that level to raise profound questions about how much of our work to automate, and what happens to our ability to think for ourselves when we do.
In a follow-up video published late last week, Green laid out a new AI policy for his work. He wrote:
1. No portion of any script will be written, edited, or outlined by an LLM.
2. The thesis of a video will always originate with a human.
3. No image or music in a video will be generated by AI. If something is accidentally included, best efforts will be made to remove it.
4. LLM outputs are not trusted as a source.
These are all good ideas for any creator trying to avoid AI creep in their craft. But still, they raise a bigger, harder-to-answer question: The very structure of generative AI makes it hard to use without offloading human thought and judgment, which can lead to a widely discussed phenomenon known as “cognitive surrender.” And it pushes us toward uses — like synthesizing research, brainstorming, generating ideas and angles — that short-circuit the original thinking and discovery that we ought to be doing ourselves. What, then, can we even responsibly use AI for? How can we set guardrails that allow us to avail ourselves of its usefulness, without melting our brains in the process?
The most tempting uses of AI are precisely those best avoided
Remember late 2022, when ChatGPT first came out and everyone mocked its crappy research skills and propensity to hallucinate in every other sentence? I am so wistful for those days.
Many people who abstain from AI may not know it, but in the time since, and especially in recent months, large language models have gotten way smarter (especially the paid premium versions). It’s become unnervingly good at summarizing niche, complex research areas and debates, and producing ideas, often without being asked, for further research or writing on the same subject.
Whenever I have a research question these days (which is pretty much any time I’m working on a story), I’m more likely to fire up an LLM than a traditional search engine. If I ask, “Why are old-growth trees still being logged in North America?” it produces a synthesis of research, news, opinion, and whatever else its training absorbed on the subject: “We’re using an essentially nonrenewable ecological asset to smooth a temporary transition to a renewable timber resource,” it says. Probe it further, and it’ll suggest arguments for you: “Instead of conservationists having to prove that every old forest deserves protection, logging companies should have to demonstrate that cutting a centuries-old stand serves a need that cannot reasonably be met with second-growth or engineered wood.”
LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful.
These aren’t particularly smart or creative ideas — they’re perfectly replacement-level, which makes them plausible substitutes for the thoughts of most people. The AI can supply pat answers to every conceivable question and follow-up you might have while working on a project, relieving you of the need to mentally engage with the shape of a problem. Contrast that with Googling in the pre-AI overview days, which, while certainly not without its problems, at least used to send you to a list of sources that you then had to read and make sense of on your own.
Most of us who’ve engaged with LLMs know what this feels like. They make it easy for users to skate on the surface of a subject and feign understanding or insight, and in the process they can become involved in interpretive decisions that should be our own. In my experience, even more narrowly designed generative AI models don’t escape these problems. Google’s Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), for example, allows you to upload all of your sources for a project — books, reports, papers, audio and video recordings — and ask it questions based on what they contain, rather than searching the entire internet. It’s less prone to generating outright slop than general-purpose AIs. I use it for most stories I write — it’s an incredibly useful, time-saving tool. But it also enables me to engage with sources in a perfunctory, contextless manner: The AI can surface precisely the bit I need rather than forcing me to form the deeper connections that come from reading a text as a whole.
The best creative work (including not just art and writing, but also technological and medical breakthroughs) probably comes from having a wide range of background associations, and being able to combine them in unexpected ways. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré put this beautifully in his essay “Mathematical Creation,” where he wrote that it’s the tedious, sustained conscious effort that ultimately leads to flashes of insight.
I think this is what Green meant when he wrote that AI can prevent him from finding his “own ways into and around a topic.” LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful. This argument has already been made about AI-generated writing: Letting an LLM write for you defeats the point, because writing is thinking. But it can also be true, as Green’s example has shown, of using AI for the research that feeds the creative process.
If you use AI, consider creating a personal AI policy
Perhaps all these concerns are overblown — humans are hardly less prone to lazy and logically unsound thinking than AI. That’s absolutely true, but the point of doing our own thinking isn’t that we’re inherently good at it. To the contrary, it’s that we can only get better at reasoning by practicing it.
I don’t want to suggest that using AI for research is illegitimate. It’s too useful a tool to take off the table entirely, and we can’t put that genie back in the bottle. It can be extremely helpful with identifying the best sources that you wouldn’t find otherwise, but those very abilities can make it double-edged, foreclosing a slower, more open-ended exploration process. But AI’s greatest strength — its endless variety and flexibility — can be used to steer it away from the most tempting uses, especially those that ultimately harm us.
How to practice good AI hygiene
Don’t use AI to form your thesis or core arguments.
Use AI to find, not replace, sources, and avoid depending on AI-generated syntheses of sources. Read through source material yourself.
Keep creative borrowing of AI-generated language microscopic, not much different from how you’d use a thesaurus.
Watch out for compulsive chatbot use.
There are very obvious things that any LLM user should do to that end, like never assuming that a claim from an AI is accurate and always reading original sources. Beyond that, the necessary guardrails depend on your own use patterns, but above all, I think it’s helpful to avoid training ourselves to expect immediate answers to difficult questions.
One of my colleagues refrains from using it to brainstorm ideas entirely, instead using it to provide sources for narrow factual questions and to aid in the fact-checking process (emphasis on “aid”) after a story is written. To generalize from this, I think it’s a good idea to resist having AI do much synthetic work on a subject before you have drafted your project yourself. The less you do that, the less you will, to paraphrase Green’s recent video, see every problem as an “LLM-shaped problem,” and the less you’ll feel like you’re in the singularity where your brain is merging with AI.
One way that I like to use AI is as an enhanced thesaurus, to find the precise word or short phrase to express what I want to say in a sentence. When done right, I don’t find this harmful any more than using a traditional thesaurus; I find that it can enrich my working lexicon. But it must be used carefully and surgically, by setting a clear limit on the length of a phrase used from AI — like two or three words max — and avoiding sharing much of your writing with the tool at all, lest it start recommending extensive rewrites.
When interrogating the contents of specific sources or a body of work, or stress testing your own arguments, AI would be better for our intellectual development if it took a Socraticapproach — pushing you to discover an answer rather than simply giving you one. It might say, for example, “there might be some relevant caveats to your idea on pp. 42-43 of the source.” LLMs can be directed to behave this way in their custom instructions. It also helps to simply touch grass — find the sources you need, and rather than interviewing the AI about what they say, just close the chatbot and read them from start to finish.
Configuring AI in a way that’s healthier for our brains would also make it less addictive — when you find yourself getting sucked into a long back-and-forth with an AI, that’s often a sign that something has gone amiss. Green evidently struggled to set that boundary, referencing the unhealthy “level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs.” AI labs have very strong commercial incentives to want us to be addicted to their products, and unless they build different constraints into models themselves, it’s hard to expect the average person, who has far less autonomy over the terms of her work than Green does, to change these conditions on her own.
Although researchers at some AI labs are thinking about the societal risks of cognitive atrophy, it’s another matter to expect these companies, which compete on ease of use, to introduce friction into their models. We shouldn’t count on that happening soon — but we’re far from powerless against AI’s impacts. We can set our own personal AI use policies, and we can enforce social norms against AI-induced brain rot. Like, at bare minimum: Don’t send me your AI-generated writing. It’s rude!
The next step for AI is spatial intelligence, says Kevin Kelly. Today's models learned from text, but fail when engineers put them in a robot body because they have no sense of gravity, distance, or three-dimensional space.
"The primary bottleneck restraining the arrival of this world model is the lack of sufficient quantity of quality data," Kelly says. — Read the rest
The EU, Meta and TikTok on Monday agreed to create a dedicated channel with fact-checkers to flag disinformation linked to a surge of migrants arriving in Spanish territory, three people told POLITICO.
Thousands of migrants arrived in late July in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco and the EU’s only land border with Africa. The influx was triggered by false narratives spreading online that told migrants they would be welcomed, according to fact-checking site Maldita.es.
The Commission met with representatives from TikTok and Meta on Friday and Monday to coordinate a response to disinformation online. They agreed to set up an “enhanced information exchange and cooperation mechanism for reducing the impact of disinformation on the Ceuta crisis,” said the three people with direct knowledge of the talks, who were granted anonymity to speak freely.
That will serve as a point of contact for platforms, fact-checkers and the Commission to quickly flag content so that it can be reviewed and taken down if necessary. The effort comes amid concerns that disinformation is promoting further crossings into the territory on Aug. 15, according to Maldita.es. Maldita.es and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network attended Monday’s meeting.
The Commission operates a rapid response system under its code of conduct on disinformation, often triggered around elections. The new mechanism on Ceuta would bring a closer group of stakeholders together, two of the people said.
Another meeting has been set for later this week, one of those people and the third person confirmed.
Meta and TikTok said they were already actively monitoring the situation in line with their policies and had set up dedicated teams to monitor and respond to content in real time.
The crisis has divided EU countries and has reignited Europe’s long-running debate on illegal migration. Italy has since been one of the harshest critics of Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policies, and has implemented border controls for travelers arriving from Spain.
Former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, who was a force behind the EU’s online content rules, on Monday said the bloc should launch a disinformation inquiry into the Ceuta crisis in an interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday passionately defended the use of artificial intelligence, as the rapid advancement of the technology faces increased scrutiny — and calls for regulation — in the U.S. and globally.
In a 6,500 word post timed to the announcement of his company’s new open source version of its own model, Muse Spark, Zuckerberg detailed his vision for AI, arguing the technology is not to be feared and pushing back on concerns that superintelligence could strip people of jobs.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”
Zuckerberg’s vision is a direct contrast to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s, who has previously warned how AI could cause job disruption. Meta lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which have the most advanced AI models.
While Zuckerberg’s essay did not name Amodei or OpenAI directly, he called to broadly distribute superintelligent AI for economic opportunity. Doing so, Zuckerberg said, would provide a safety net to prevent just a handful of governments, businesses and other institutions holding too much power.
Still, Zuckerberg emphasized that the U.S. must address restrictions on AI companies in order to create the best models in the world.
“It is also important that the US and its allies lead the open source AI ecosystem that will make up a large percent of global AI use,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data.”
Zuckerberg’s essay comes amid growing concerns around AI safety. Last month, Anthropic revealed that several of its advanced models gained access to three organizations in three separate incidents dating back to April. That hack came shortly after OpenAI said that two of its most powerful models escaped a testing environment and breached multiple companies.
Lawmakers last month introduced a bill that would give the government power to restrict the use of models that could lead to catastrophic risks. While it is the latest bipartisan effort to address concerns around AI models, Congress has ultimately failed to advance broad legislation.
Zuckerberg urged the federal government to work with companies to test new models as he laid out his strategies for protecting against cybersecurity and bioterrorism.
“First, we should focus on limiting the physical production and distribution of harmful materials,” he wrote. “I expect it will be easier to regulate and control physical components than the spread of knowledge, so this is an important area of policy focus. Second, we should accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise. This includes streamlining how the FDA and other regulators test and approve new treatments.”
Zuckerberg also defended the spread of data centers, arguing that the centers represent investment into communities as he touted his company’s goal of being “water-positive, meaning that we’ll restore more water than we use in the watersheds where we operate by 2030.”
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A medevac flight that should have taken half an hour ended on the side of a mountain in New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Jeff Wise reports for Wired that a military GPS jamming exercise 100 miles away is part of the reason. — Read the rest
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