This Week in Tech (Audio)

Between copyright-free AI art, government blacklists, and data brokers run amok, this episode spotlights the fierce new battles for privacy, agency, and control in our digital lives. Plus, hear Cory Doctorow break down why the AI gold rush may be headed for a colossal crash.

Pentagon Officially Tells Anthropic It Is a Supply Chain Risk

Trump moves to blacklist Anthropic AI from all government work

If AI is a weapon, why don't we regulate it like one?

Sam Altman's greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him

ChatGPT user base surges 350% in 18 months as it nears 1 billion weekly active users

AI-generated art can't be copyrighted after the Supreme Court declines to review the rule

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Grammarly is using our identities without permission

Alphabet Grants Sundar Pichai Stock Awards Worth Up to $686 Million

Google vs Epic Games ends with Android app stores, lower fees

Google Ends Its 30% App Store Fee, Welcomes Third-Party App Stores - Slashdot

Xbox CEO confirms next-gen 'Project Helix' console will play PC games

Motorola Partners With GrapheneOS - Slashdot

Data Broker Breaches Fueled Nearly $21 Billion in Identity-Theft Losses

CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples' Movements

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester

COPPA 2.0 passes the Senate again, unanimously this time

South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto By Posting Password Online

Iranian drone strikes at Amazon sites raise alarms over protecting data centers

Charter Gets FCC Permission To Buy Cox, Become Largest ISP In the US

How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents

Anne Wojcicki's Plan to Revive 23andMe: Rich Donors, Improved Tests—and Maybe Even MAHA

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

Seagate Just Unleashed 44TB Hard Drives

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Joey de Villa and Cory Doctorow

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Anthropic's clash with the Pentagon pits tech ethics against government demands, raising explosive questions about AI's role in surveillance and weaponry. If you care about who controls the future of artificial intelligence, this episode is a must-listen.

Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines in Pentagon fight

The whole thing was a scam

OpenAI allows NSA to use GPT for surveilling Americans

Anthropic's Claude hits No. 1 on Apple's top free apps list after Pentagon rejection

Layoffs at Block

Crypto exchange Gemini plans to lay off up to 200 staff, exit Europe, and Australia

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for Paramount Takeover

An update on our model deprecation commitments for Claude Opus 3 \ Anthropic

Keep Android Open

Colorado moves age checks from websites to operating systems | Biometric Update

Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

New Apple product launch starts Monday, Tim Cook confirms

Everything announced at Samsung Unpacked: The Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy Buds 4 and more

Here's how the new Samsung Galaxy S26 compares with last year's S25

Hacked Prayer App Sends 'Surrender' Messages to Iranians Amid Israeli and US Strikes

The Big One: The cyberattack scenarios that keep officials up at night

CISA replaces acting director after a bumbling year on the job

New AirSnitch attack bypasses Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises

Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn't Support Broad Search of Protesters' Devices and Digital Data

Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET—scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found

Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio, study shows | TechCrunch

Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say 'Please' and 'Thank You'

Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service - Slashdot

Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died

Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, Song of Kali, dead at 77

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Molly White, Owen Thomas, and Harry McCracken

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What do jailbreaking fighter jets, lost Amazon vans, and swapping your phone's smart features for a handful of mud have in common? TWiT dives into the wild, occasionally absurd future of tech, where yesterday's sci-fi is tomorrow's supply-chain headache.

Mark Zuckerberg and his Ray-Ban entourage have their day in court

Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda - Slashdot

Australia's Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned

Google I/O 2026 set for May 19-20

Pixel 10A hands-on: More like a slightly better Pixel 9A than a slightly worse Pixel 10

Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro, says it's better at complex problem-solving

Tucson Daily Brief

Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs

A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloud

Amazon delivery van accidentally gets stuck in the sea in Britain

Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans

Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis' Human Babysitters

The Supreme Court's Tariff Ruling Won't Bring Car Prices Back to Earth

A flood of cheap used EVs is coming

Signal guide for everyday folks

PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months

Federal ban on TP-Link routers shelved, but Texas fights on

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Mississippi health system shuts down clinics statewide after ransomware attack

Fake Job Recruiters Hid Malware In Developer Coding Challenges

F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like an IPhone: Dutch Defense Minister - Slashdot

In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator | Tom's Hardware

Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)

CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Nicholas De Leon

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Is social media addictive by design or just irresistible entertainment? The panel tackles the lawsuit that's dragging tech giants onto the witness stand and how surveillance tech is quietly expanding while lawmakers and users scramble to catch up.

Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial

Instagram Chief Says Social Media Is Not 'Clinically Addictive' in Landmark Trial

Section 230 turns 30 as it faces its biggest tests yet

Meta apparently thinks we're too distracted to care about facial recognition and Ray-Bans

Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app.

Discord backtracks on controversial age verification rollout...kind of

Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor that this man remotely accessed thousands of them

HP's laptop subscriptions are a great deal — for HP

FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI

T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation

Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says

Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release

Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025

$1.8 million MST3K Kickstarter brings in (almost) everyone from the old show

OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. China's ChatGPT Fans Aren't OK

Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78

Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Higginbotham, and Thomas Germain

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Will Elon Musk really launch a million data centers into orbit, and why is McDonald's so worried about you using "McNuggets" as your password? This week's tech roundtable takes on wild new frontiers and everyday security headaches with insight and a bit of irreverence.

More schools are banning phones so students can focus. Ohio's results show it's not that simple

After Australia, Which Countries Could Be Next to Ban Social Media for Children

EU says TikTok must disable 'addictive' features like infinite scroll, fix its recommendation engine

Anthropic and OpenAI release dueling AI models on the same day in an escalating rivalry

Sam Altman says Anthropic's Super Bowl spot is 'dishonest' about ChatGPT ads, but he agrees it's funny

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code

Alphabet reports Q4 2025 revenue of $113.8 billion

Amazon's blowout $200 billion AI spending plan stuns Wall Street

A New Gilded Age: Big Tech goes on a $600 billion AI spending splurge

Hidden Cameras in Chinese Hotels Are Livestreaming Guests To Thousands of Telegram Subscribers

AI-generated ads hit the Super Bowl

SpaceX acquires xAI, plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it

Russia suspected of intercepting EU satellites

Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors

New York Wants to Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your 3D Printer

Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs

A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words

The Wayback Machine debuts a new plug-in designed to fix the internet's broken links problem

Project Hail Mary is getting its own LEGO set

Dave Farber

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Larry Magid, Mike Elgan, and Louis Maresca

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