Latest Technology Posts

Few people are likely to miss the click-to-cancel rule.  Consumers won’t, since they never had a chance to enjoy it, and businesses won’t because they hated it.  The rule, which would have required all sorts of online businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was blocked by a federal appeals court just days before it was set to go into effect, a ruling that is unlikely to be appealed.  Trump opposes consumer protections and is reshaping the FTC to carry forward his pro-business agenda.

The clash between TikTok and the U.S. government centers on national security and data privacy concerns tied to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. TikTok, with around 170 million American users, faces a federal mandate under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), signed April 24, 2024, requiring it to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban effective January 19, 2025. The Supreme Court upheld PAFACA in TikTok v. Garland on January 17, 2025, finding it constitutional and not in violation of First Amendment rights.

Palantir Technologies’ data tracking software and Artificial Intelligence tools are playing a huge role in the ICE sweeps plaguing communities throughout the US, sparking a national day of protests and concerns over a revolving door between the company and key government agencies.

The Trump organization has dropped any pretense of avoiding conflicts of interest.  Instead, it is blatantly cashing in on Trump’s presidency in every conceivable way.  At the top of the list is tech, with both Trump and his wife selling digital currencies and a new Trump mobile phone on the way.  An additional bonus is that Trump has a great deal of power over the agencies that oversee these industries, and Congress is doing nothing to stop him from taking advantage of it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the discipline of designing computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human cognition—pattern recognition, language generation, planning—by learning statistical relationships from large data sets. Modern AI works by training vast machine-learning models on petabytes of text, images, audio, and code and then applying those models to new inputs to produce predictions or content; it now powers everything from chatbots and fraud detection to medical imaging and autonomous drones.

In his first few days in office, Donald Trump announced a $500 billion joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank to invest in growing the US’s AI infrastructure and rescinded former President Joe Biden’s executive order requiring safety submissions from AI developers.  His big, beautiful bill showers much more money in the industry, and aims to eliminate state oversight or regulation of AI companies as well.

The Israeli military uses Artificial Intelligence to find and target Hamas fighters, but with a civilian death toll estimated at 52,000, critics allege the system is not reliable and may even be providing cover for widespread bombing and ethnic cleansing.  And that US companies are complicit.

Tech billionaire support for Donald Trump is paying off in some of the expected ways, such as  extraordinary access and deregulation.  But Trump has wreaked havoc on the stock market, disappointed his crypto backers, and failed to save Mark Zuckerberg from a grilling at the Federal Trade Commission.

Amid the current political unrest, citizens have voiced their concerns  through social media. Voicing one’s differences of opinions without government interference is an American right, but that right has since been under attack.