The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger.

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On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, Reuters reported.

The change came after social media users noticed an apparent contradiction: The National Archives was using one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even as top US law enforcement claimed that such models illegally copy US frontier models. Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named Alibaba among six leading Chinese firms allegedly conducting “industrial-scale distillation” that the agency says is helping America’s biggest competitor cut costs and development time in the race for global AI leadership.

It’s unclear when exactly the National Archives, which runs the Federal Register website, began offering visitors the option to use a Qwen model to search public comments on proposed regulations. So far, the independent agency tasked with increasing public access to federal government documents has not commented on the removal and did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. The White House and the FBI have also not commented.

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For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI.

However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday from news plaintiffs led by The New York Times, internal documents are exposed that news groups alleged show exactly how Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news before unleashing new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

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US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has proposed a law that would require Internet service providers and other network operators to block foreign piracy websites. Issa's bill would help copyright holders obtain judicial blocking orders to be served to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks.

Issa, who is retiring from the House at the end of this year, is the latest in a string of Republican and Democratic lawmakers to propose a site-blocking regime that's been sought by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). He submitted the bill this week, after indicating in a June 30 hearing that he planned to introduce site-blocking legislation.

"While millions of listings for copyright-infringing content are removed every day under [the] notice-and-takedown process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right-holders have raised concerns with the speed," Issa said at the hearing. Issa asked, "Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45-minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?"

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Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single largest source of industrial climate pollution unchecked.

On Thursday, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association (APHA), the Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition requesting that the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit review if the EPA’s action conflicts with the Clean Air Act.

“Clean air is a basic human right,” APHA CEO Georges C. Benjamin said.

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On Tuesday, two survivors of child sex abuse accused the Justice Department of failing to notify dozens of victims found in Jeffrey Epstein’s massive collection of child sex images.

In a proposed class action, survivors explained that Epstein apparently started collecting child sex images in the 1990s, many of which the DOJ recovered after his arrest. In 2025, the FBI started reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” containing illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and issued a memo confirming that “a large volume of images” seized depicted likely minors.

Some of these victims may have had contact with Epstein, as the disgraced financier kept a "modelbook" of nude photos of young girls roped into his ring. However, the FBI also identified hundreds of CSAM images in cache, which include approximately 15–20 images of known CSAM dating back to the 1990s. And so far, the DOJ has largely ignored those victims, who likely never met Epstein and have no way of knowing if he possessed, transported, or traded their images, survivors alleged.

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California is on the verge of accepting $1.86 billion in federal broadband grant funds, despite the Trump administration telling states they cannot enforce net neutrality rules on any Internet service provider that gets a piece of the grant money.

When the Trump administration overhauled the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program last year, it ruled that states must agree not to enforce any rate regulation or net neutrality rule on ISPs that receive funding. This is particularly problematic for California, which previously won a yearslong court battle to defend its state net neutrality law.

Similar to federal net neutrality rules repealed during the first Trump administration, California's law prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and says ISPs may not require fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to Internet users. While the first Trump administration lost its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws, the second Trump administration is trying to achieve a similar result by making federal broadband money conditional on whether states agree not to enforce net neutrality.

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It’s not illegal to send an email telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials that their actions will haunt them, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, granting a preliminary injunction that blocks ICE from threatening to prosecute a critic for protected speech.

Back in January, David Streever sent a scathing three-paragraph email to then-acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons. Outraged by the killings of two Minnesota protestors against ICE, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Streever told Lyons that he was a “monstrous human being” who will eat himself “alive with shame” for defending officers who shot people who posed no threat and had no weapons. Comparing Lyons to an infamous high-ranking Nazi cop, Streever predicted that “even Trump” would one day turn on Lyons for defending the “obvious” slayings of Americans.

David Streever's email to ICE. Credit: via FIRE

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever wrote. “You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

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A bipartisan pair of US lawmakers tell WIRED they plan to introduce legislation today that would strip federal funding from states that fail to restrict the use of Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers. The devices, which help police track the location of vehicles tied to crimes, have become the subject of nationwide backlash in recent months over more nefarious uses by officers.

The No FLOCK Act—for Federal License-Plate Observation and Camera Keeping—directs the US secretary of transportation to withhold 10 percent of annual financial support due to states for highways, roads, and bridges if it fails to ban Flock and similar devices for all but five use cases. Congressmen Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat representing Chicago suburbs, and Michael Cloud, a Republican whose Texas district includes Corpus Christi, are cosponsoring the bill.

The legislation says that Flock cameras could be used only for “enforcing toll systems, identifying stolen vehicles, missing or endangered persons, vehicles registered to persons with a warrant for a felony offense, or investigating a vehicle involved in a felony offense.” Notably absent are uses like conducting traffic studies, investigating minor drug crimes, and enforcing parking and speeding rules.

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Some of the most widely used private torrent trackers for pirating movies suspect that a banned user may have posed as a filmmaker protecting copyrights in a failed attempt to seek revenge.

TorrentFreak has been tracking this story closely, reporting last September that an alleged independent filmmaker named Matthew Schneider sued six private trackers for infringing copyrights on some films that he supposedly made. Trackers targeted include PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, and HDBits. For months, the filmmaker sought to get Cloudflare to unmask operators of the trackers through a copyright fight, which went on until trackers alerted the court last month that Schneider appeared to be an impostor.

In a sworn declaration, the actual filmmaker behind the movies cited in the complaint wrote that he had no association to the plaintiff in the case. “I am not involved in, nor have I ever appeared in, this case,” Schneider wrote.

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The Boston city government abandoned Flock Safety's license-plate reader cameras after the company shared data nationwide in violation of a contract provision, according to city officials.

"We have actually abandoned Flock," Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in her monthly "Ask the Mayor" segment on GBH News last week. Wu made the comment a few days before the release of Boston's annual surveillance technology report, which said a Flock "vendor error" resulted in nationwide data sharing.

The report, which covers 2025, describes how the Boston Police Department deployed about 45 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras in a trial with Flock from April to September last year. The unauthorized data sharing occurred during the first few days of the pilot, the report said:

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On the heels of the hottest summer on record and a United Nations report warning that global temperatures are likely to push climate risks to “increasingly dangerous heights,” the Trump administration overturned most of a Biden-era rule limiting climate pollution from power plants, the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said exceeds its authority under the Clean Air Act by requiring control technologies “that are not adequately demonstrated.” The agency also proposed revoking “all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants,” arguing their emissions “have no material impact on climate change.”

The plan to revoke the Carbon Pollution Standards was initially revealed last spring.

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Elon Musk is seemingly done attacking Apple over its decision to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone features.

Back in 2024, when the partnership was first announced, Musk slammed the integration as an agreement from Apple to let OpenAI install “creepy spyware” on users’ devices. The next year, he sued, claiming the partnership gave the firms a “monopoly” on Apple users’ AI prompts, which allegedly harmed competition in both smartphone and chatbot markets.

For Musk, the fight with Apple seemingly escalated after he believed that his chatbot, Grok, was perhaps being illegally blocked from topping Apple’s App Store rankings. Last August, he claimed that “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation.”

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The US is not backing down from its fight to deport noncitizen technology researchers who monitor safety risks on the biggest online platforms.

In July, a judge blocked as unconstitutional an immigration policy that the US relied on to weigh whether to detain and deport people who flag illegal or harmful online content as national security risks. In his announcement of the policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that by targeting a list of researchers—which he stood “ready and willing” to expand—the policy supposedly served to prevent foreign nationals from manipulating digital town squares and censoring Americans.

However, in his order siding with the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and staying the policy, US District Judge James Boasberg said the US showed no evidence linking any targeted researchers to a foreign power that might be attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Deemed too broad, the policy could sweep in seemingly any noncitizen working in content moderation, the judge said.

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The use of coal to generate electricity on the US grid has been plunging for nearly two decades, and the first Trump administration was unable to affect the trend. So his second administration has attempted more aggressive interventions to prop up coal use. One of its most direct means of doing so is to order coal plants that were scheduled to close to remain open, even if there is no need for them.

The administration's justification for these orders is a statute that allows the Department of Energy (DOE) to declare an emergency in the case of wartime or a sudden shortfall in generation. A number of parties, including states where coal plants have been slated to close, have challenged this declaration. And on Friday, in the first of these cases to make its way through the courts, the declaration was judged to be contrary to the statute. While this only affects a single coal plant in Michigan, the reasoning of the decision will apply to every coal plant closure that has been blocked by the DOE.

No emergency

The decision was issued by a unanimous three-judge panel from the DC Circuit's Court of Appeals. It focuses on the J.H. Campbell Generating Plant, which was scheduled to close last year but has been kept open by a total of five emergency declarations by the DOE, each limited to 90 days by the Federal Power Act. At issue was section 202(c) of that Act, which allows the DOE to declare emergencies when the US is at war or when “an emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy, or a shortage of electric energy.”

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The New Mexico Supreme Court held a ChatGPT-using lawyer in direct contempt of court for submitting a brief with "false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," including fake police testimony and other mistakes. The state's top court referred the lawyer to a disciplinary board for further proceedings and concluded that he "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client."

Attorney Stephen Aarons "admitted to the Court that he did not verify the factual claims and legal authority in his AI-generated brief before signing it and filing it with the Court, and that he did not inform his client of this failure or that the brief in chief contained multiple factual and legal misrepresentations," the state Supreme Court said in an order on Wednesday.

Aarons has been a criminal defense lawyer in New Mexico for over 40 years and was hired by a defendant's family members to appeal a murder conviction. Aaron's now-former client, Oscar Renee Sandoval, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2025 after being convicted of killing Shiereen Al-Jibury, who was his partner and the mother of his children.

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LinkedIn beat two lawsuits over its practice of scanning users’ browser extensions, with a judge granting the Microsoft subsidiary's motion to dismiss the cases. The users who sued LinkedIn failed to adequately allege that they have standing to sue because neither asserted that they "had browser extensions installed that conveyed private information to LinkedIn," ruled Judge Vince Chhabria in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

In his ruling on Tuesday, Chhabria gave the plaintiffs leave to amend their complaints but said he doubts they can make a plausible case. "Given LinkedIn’s further arguments that users voluntarily download browser extensions, which by their nature intentionally expose data to websites, it seems unlikely that the plaintiffs will ever be able to allege a privacy violation, much less prevail at the end of the day," Chhabria wrote.

California residents Nicholas Farrell and Jeff Ganan separately filed class actions against LinkedIn in April, seeking to represent themselves and other LinkedIn users. Ganan's attorney, J.R. Howell, said he is evaluating whether to bring the claims in a California state court, which has different requirements on standing, or to appeal the US district court ruling in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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Doug Kreuzkamp was shocked when news outlets reported that Google won an auction to buy a huge amount of operational data as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings.

Kreuzkamp founded a startup called Springshot in 2011, which created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundreds of airports use it globally.

Springshot powered Spirit’s technology stack for the last three years, right up to the “very last flight,” Kreuzkamp told Ars. Yet his company got no notice when Spirit prepared to auction off a massive dataset that he thinks likely improperly includes a substantial amount of data and intellectual property (IP) that Springshot owns—not Spirit.

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ABC's Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission.

Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC's attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he'll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.

In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said.

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