Technology

Reetle’s smartink I is an iPhone case with an e-ink display that lets users flip their device and read books without screen glare.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6952495

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/11910

Public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers—and the push by corporations and officials to move forward with their construction anyway—were vividly illustrated in a viral video this week of a woman who was arrested after speaking out against a proposed data center in her community in Wisconsin.

Christine Le Jeune, a member of Great Lakes Neighbors United in Port Washington, spoke at a Common Council meeting in the town on Tuesday evening. The meeting was not focused on the recently approved $15 million "Lighthouse" data center set to be built a mile from downtown Port Washington—part of a project developed by Vantage Data Centers for OpenAI and Oracle—but the first 30 minutes were taken up by members of the public who spoke out against the project.

As CNBC reported last month, more than 1,000 people signed a petition calling on Port Washington officials to obtain voter approval before entering into the deal, but the Common Council and a review board went ahead with creating a Tax Incremental District for the project without public input. The data center still requires other approvals to officially move forward.

"We will not continue to be silenced and ignored while our beautiful and pristine city is taken away from us and handed over to a corporation intent on extracting as many resources as they can regardless of the impact on the people who live here," said Le Jeune. "Most leaders would have tabled the issue after receiving public input and providing sufficient notice. But you did nothing, and you laughed about it."

Le Jeune spoke for her allotted three minutes and went slightly over the time limit. She then chanted, "Recall, recall, recall!" at members of the Common Council as other community members applauded.

Police Chief Kevin Hingiss then approached Le Jeune while she was sitting in her seat, listening to the next speaker, and asked her to leave.

She refused, and another officer approached her before a chaotic scene broke out.

Last night, the Port Washington Police Department used excessive force to arrest a woman for speaking up against the Vantage data center.

We are thankful that this local advocate is safe, and we condemn the Port Washington PD’s actions in the strongest possible terms. SHAME! pic.twitter.com/35dhEKvojL
— Our Wisconsin Revolution (@OurWisconsinRev) December 3, 2025

City officials had told attendees not to speak out of order during the meeting, and Le Jeune acknowledged that she and others had spoken out of turn at times.

But she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she had been surprised by the police officers' demand that she leave, and by the eventual violence of the incident, with officers physically removing her from her seat and dragging her and two other people across the floor.

The two other residents had approached Le Jeune to protest the officers' actions.

"I never expected something like that to happen in a meeting. It was very strange," she told the Journal Sentinel. "Suddenly this police chief showed up in front of me, and all I was thinking was: 'Wait, what is going on? Why is he interrupting her speech? ... It felt like [police] were kind of primed tonight to pounce."

State Sen. Chris Larson (D-7) said that "police should not be allowed to violently detain a person who is nonviolently exercising their free speech. This used to be something all Americans agreed on."

William Walter, executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, filmed the arrest and told ABC News affiliate WISN, "I've never seen a response like that in my life."

"What I did see was a lot of members of the Port Washington community who are really frustrated that they're being ignored and they're being dismissed by their elected officials," he said.

AI data centers, he added, "will impact you. They'll impact your friends, your family, your neighbors, your parents, your children. These are the kinds of things that are going to be dictating the future of Wisconsin, not just for the next couple of years but for the next decade, the next 50 years."

After Le Jeune's arrest, another resident, Dawn Stacey, denounced the Common Council members for allowing the aggressive arrest.

"We have so many people who have these concerns about this data center," said Stacey. “Are we being heard by the Common Council? No we’re not. Instead of being heard we have people being dragged out of the room.”

“For democracy to thrive, we need to have respect between public servants and the people who they serve," she added.

Vantage has distributed flyers in Port Washington, which has a population of 17,000, promising residents 330 full-time jobs after construction. But as CNBC reported, "Data centers don’t tend to create a lot of long-lasting jobs."

Another project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin hired 3,000 construction workers and foresees 500 employees, while McKinsey said a data center it is planning would need 1,500 people for construction but only around 50 for "steady-state operations."

Residents in Port Washington have also raised concerns about the data center's impact on the environment, including through its water use, the potential for exploding utility prices for residents, and the overall purpose of advancing AI.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, the development of data centers has caused a rapid surge in consumers' electricity bills, with costs rising more than 250% in just five years. Vantage has claimed its center will run on 70% renewable energy, but more than half of the electricity used to power data center campuses so far has come from fossil fuels, raising concerns that the expansion of the facilities will worsen the climate emergency.

A recent Morning Consult poll found that a rapidly growing number of Americans support a ban on AI data centers in their surrounding areas—41% said they would support a ban in the survey taken in late November, compared to 37% in October.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

It’s not every day a video codec wins an Emmy. But yesterday, the Television Academy honored the AV1 specification with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, recognizing its impact on how the world delivers video content.

Tldr: he wants a non-upgradeable laptop that is maxed out from day one. I'd want a bit more upgrade path than he does, but he has some interesting thoughts.

It appears Meta's Horizon Worlds may literally and figuratively not have legs after all.

This is a frontend for the asknostr hashtag on nostr, a more decentralized fediverse alternative.

More questions are needed, if you can help. You can sign up instantly with no email address or anything, but it's hard for the user base to grow, because the questions are usually too focused on a small (honestly cultish) number of topics. I find that odd when anyone can ask anything.

The website has content filters to remove spam and stuff from its own display, but the nostr protocol is open source, and you can self host your own backups of removed posts and display them on your own website without losing any data. I also haven't heard of anyone getting a "ban" where all their past posts are filtered at once / they have to stop posting.

As someone who constantly gets banned from places like asklemmy for being a radical communist or whatever, it's especially important to me that there are no bans here, because it means I don't have to worry about admins repeatedly wiping out time I invest in helping people with answers to their questions.

Note: asknostr.site is still early in development and kinda buggy. Remember you can also post to it through the asknostr hashtag from other nostr apps if you want.

Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.

Year in Review.

Including two popes, the Prince of Darkness, and MrBeast.

Wikipedia will mark its 25th anniversary on January 15, 2026. No one could have predicted 25 years ago that Wikipedia would grow into the backbone of knowledge on the internet it is today—powering search engines, voice assistants, and generative AI tools.

Today, nearly 250,000 volunteers generously give their time and energy to update Wikipedia, add citations, build consensus, and more. They keep knowledge human. In 2025, people spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours reading English Wikipedia articles, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. The top 20 most-read English Wikipedia articles of 2025 outlined below focus on politics, popular culture, and loss.

Microsoft has dropped its diversity and inclusion report

Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.

A Wild West for Crayola prices.

Today, the Commission has issued a fine of €120 million to X for breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The breaches include the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark', the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.

We’re cooked.

Can you hear me now?

Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251205050710/https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/