Technology

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An activist platform designed to track US immigration enforcement activity, StopICE.net, has come under fire after reports surfaced of a major data breach that allegedly compromised the personal information of over 100,000 users and handed it to federal authorities.

In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.

This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54622575

emails released by the US Justice Department as part of its Epstein Files disclosures reveal that Jeffrey Epstein emailed Gavin Andresen two days prior to Andresen visiting the CIA headquarters to discuss Bitcoin in June 2011.

Andresen was the successor to Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Nakamoto personally chose Andresen to be the lead maintainer of Bitcoin development and gave him Commit key access.

The newly disclosed sequence of events is remarkably coincidental.

Nakamoto retired on April 26, 2011, one day before Andresen announced that he was going to speak about Bitcoin at the CIA headquarters in June.

Although Nakamoto never blamed Andresen’s decision for prompting his retirement, there’s widespread speculation that he was unhappy about Andresen attracting government attention to Bitcoin development.

Despite Nakamoto’s resignation, Andresen followed-through on his controversial April promise, speaking at the CIA headquarters on June 14, 2011 to discuss Bitcoin.

The week before, on June 6, tech reporter and socialite Jason Calacanis responded to an email from Epstein, promising to send along Andresen’s contact information.

“I would like to get in touch with the Bitcoin guys,” Epstein emailed Calacanis eight days before Andresen’s CIA meeting.

Between 2022 and 2023,” Professor Schwarz reported, U.S. federal contracts for military AI “nearly tripled, with a potential increase in the value of these contracts by 1,200 percent.”

According to J.P. Morgan, VC investment in military and aerospace companies amounted to $48 billion in 2024, and “Through the first half of 2025, venture investments into U.S.-based defense tech startups totaledroughly $38 billion and could very well exceed the 2021 peak ($55 billion) should the pace of investing remain constant through the end of the year.”

Profiting From Israel’s Genocide Many of the largest VCs that are funding cutting edge AI weapons development for the Pentagon — such as Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Hercules Capital, Shield Capital, and Sequoia Capital — are also investing in Israeli high-tech firms, thus profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These investments are being made in spite of pleas by Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, that all governments and corporations “completely abstain from, or end, their relationship with this [Israeli] economy of the occupation, especially as it has transformed into an economy of genocide.”

TL;DR: As Mozilla moves to make Firefox an AI browser, people are looking at other options. Some people are rediscovering Waterfox, a browser that has been around for a decade from independent developer BrowserWorks. In this post, I interview the founder of Waterfox - Alex Kontos, and we discuss Waterfox’s history and look towards its future. We also talk about how Waterfox thinks about AI in the browser.

Mozilla finally landed today the long-anticipated AI Kill Switch controls for Firefox, which let users strip the open-source web browser of any AI-powered features, and you can test it right now in Firefox Nightly.

In December 2025, when Mozilla appointed its new CEO, the company developing the popular Firefox web browser revealed that it was working on an AI kill switch that would let users completely disable all the AI features that had been included in the past few releases, estranging more and more loyal users.

Now, the AI kill switch is finally a reality as it landed today with the latest Firefox Nightly update. The implementation is called “AI Controls” and can be found in Firefox’s settings as a standalone section. From there, users can toggle a setting called “Block AI Enhancements” to remove any AI features.

A cross-party parliamentary commission aims to end dependence on US tech giants and increasingly rely on European open-source solutions.

Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you’ll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox.

They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.

SpaceX has acquired xAI, the company announced on Monday, merging two of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies into the most valuable private company in the world.

Software engineers at Microsoft are now expected to use both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot and give feedback comparing the two, I’m told. Microsoft sells GitHub Copilot as its AI coding tool of choice to its customers, but if these broad internal pilot programs are successful, then it’s possible the company could even eventually sell Claude Code directly to its cloud customers.

Guys? Are we going to have to rename Microsoft products from Copilot to Claude soon?

Microsoft Claude 365?

Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms.

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advanced American farmers and equipment owners’ lawful right to repair their farm and other nonroad diesel equipment. EPA’s guidance to manufacturers clarifies that the Clean Air Act (CAA) supports, rather than restricts, Americans’ ability to make repairs on their own, and makes clear manufacturers can no longer use the CAA to justify limiting access to repair tools or software. For America’s farmers, timely and affordable repairs are essential to planting, harvesting, and keeping operations running.