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T1 Phone PR firm is ‘not assisting Trump Mobile any further’

19 June 2026 at 14:00
Promotional image of the redesigned Trump Mobile T1 Phone on a beige background

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We don't have the phones we preordered yet, but this week we received unexpected news from Trump Mobile's media relations manager.

If you've been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you'll know that Trump Mobile doesn't exactly keep open lines of communication with the media. That doesn't look to be changing, with the company no longer working with its long-term media relations firm.

Poplar Group has represented Trump Mobile since at least last June, when the company's founding partner Chris Walker gave a statement to USA Today, insisting at the time that "T1 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls

Wealth tax criticized by billionaires and Gavin Newsom would levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth over $1bn

A popular proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.

The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor union backing the measure.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

The midterms are going to be a data security nightmare

18 June 2026 at 15:21
Graphic photo illustration of a voting sign that reads “Vote here”.

One messy database is threatening to disenfranchise thousands or even millions of registered voters, while leaving even more at risk of intimidation or data breaches, in the name of solving a problem that barely exists.

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, election and privacy experts are sounding alarms about the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program, which President Donald Trump's administration has expanded to ostensibly catch noncitizens voting. Experts say that amounts to a dangerous, error-prone effort to centralize voter data. "The federal government doesn't have the author …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Blair’s Encyclical Labor Imbecilis

18 June 2026 at 15:00

Everyone knows that Tony Blair and the Pope issued encyclicals in the last week or two. The Pope's was entitled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’; by analogy, Blair's should have been called ‘Labor Imbecilis’, says James Alexander.

The post Blair’s Encyclical Labor Imbecilis appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

What the satellite servicing economy can borrow from carbon credits

18 June 2026 at 14:00
Artist rendition of ESA’s Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (DRACO), a spacecraft loaded with sensors that will break up in orbit in order to gather data on uncontrolled reentry.

In January 2026 alone, the Federal Communications Commission authorized 15,000 Starlink Gen2 satellites. Starcloud has filed for 88,000 orbital data center satellites. SpaceX has filed for 1 million. There is […]

The post What the satellite servicing economy can borrow from carbon credits appeared first on SpaceNews.

Vibe-decoding the White House-Anthropic fight over Fable

17 June 2026 at 17:27
CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17th, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France. | Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that's going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send 'em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

Back when I was covering Donald Trump's first presidency, it was incredibly common to read three different versions of the same story. His administration had split into several factions, all of which had different interests, and all of which hated each other. There was the Reince Pr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Swiss decision to not contribute to Copernicus tests program’s value model

16 June 2026 at 19:16
View of the Fagradalsfjall volcano on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, acquired by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite less than 10 hours after its eruption began on Feb. 8, 2024, with the lava flow and smoke plume clearly visible near the city of Grindavík. Credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery.

MILAN — Switzerland’s decision not to participate in the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program during the 2028–2034 funding cycle has revived a broader debate over the value of contributing […]

The post Swiss decision to not contribute to Copernicus tests program’s value model appeared first on SpaceNews.

A UN agency that works for US space

16 June 2026 at 14:00

If United States policymakers deride the wider United Nations, they still spend on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) because it amplifies the commercial reach of U.S. standards. This includes U.S. […]

The post A UN agency that works for US space appeared first on SpaceNews.

All the news about Anthropic’s new AI fight with the White House

15 June 2026 at 20:04
Anthropic logo on an orange background.

Anthropic was already navigating one dispute with the government in its standoff with the Pentagon, and then came an order on June 12th to block off foreign access to its most recently released AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. When they launched on June 9th, Anthropic said “Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available,” and that Claude Mythos 5 had the same underlying model, “but with the safeguards lifted in some areas.”

According to reports, the order came after conversations between Amazon and the White House about researchers saying they found ways to get Fable 5 to serve information that could be used in cyberattacks.

Anthropic responded by shutting access to both models for all customers, saying, “We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people.”

Read along below for all of the latest updates

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