Day eight. Thursday. The week that just keeps going. Court opened with Helen Toner's deposition video and wrapped with live testimony from Musk's nonprofit law expert. In between — Zilis finished on the stand and the Sutskever deposition details landed publicly for the first time. The Votes She Cast Musk's core claim is...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Two weeks ago I wrote 271. That's The Number They're Telling You. — about the Firefox vulnerability announcement, what the number meant, what it conspicuously didn't say, and ended it asking Mozilla to show us the rest of the roll. Today they showed some of it. And...

Wednesday in Oakland. Day seven. The trial that started as a billionaire grudge match keeps delivering. Let's get into it. The Lede Nobody Was Leading With Buried in Tuesday's Brockman testimony — and somehow not the headline — was this: Musk enlisted several OpenAI employees to do months of free work on self-driving...

This post is speculative. Clearly labeled as such throughout. Nobody knows if the OpenAI IPO fails, stumbles, or sails through without incident. What follows is an honest look at what the exposure chain looks like and what happens to regular people — not billionaires, not institutional investors — if it does. A note...

I know. Third post today. Bear with me. Greg Brockman finished his second day on the stand Tuesday. And somewhere in Oakland a Goldman Sachs risk committee is having a very uncomfortable afternoon. Here's what came out. In 2017 Brockman personally invested in Cerebras Systems — an AI chip startup. Sam Altman separately...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's be honest about something first. Google has always collected everything — your searches, your location, your watch history, what you hovered over, how long you paused. That's not news, and if you're reading this series it's not a surprise. But Google has also, in...

Week two. Brockman on the stand. Musk in the gallery watching. Before a single question was asked Monday morning, a court filing from Sunday night had already dropped the day's first bombshell. Two days before the trial began, Musk texted Brockman to gauge interest in a settlement. Brockman responded by suggesting both...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Last month I wrote about how GitHub spent eight years burning through the trust it borrowed when Microsoft bought it. The data training opt-out, the quiet absorption into CoreAI, the class system between enterprise customers and the individual developers who built the...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Sort of. More of an afternoon footnote that got interesting. I found out about it scrolling Mastodon. Someone posted the PC Gamer article. Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech this week warning that the AI industry is a bubble headed for a 2008-style financial...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Earlier this month I wrote The Rocket They Built Yesterday Morning — about Mozilla open-sourcing 0DIN, their agentic vulnerability scanner, with the warhead socket documented in the README and a continuously self-enriching probe library. Then Organics Not Required...

Microsoft rebuilt Windows Recall from scratch. A researcher broke it again in a few weeks. Microsoft's response: that's not a vulnerability. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. You remember Recall. Microsoft announced it in May 2024 as the flagship feature of their new Copilot+ AI PCs. It would take...

Anthropic flew in clergy. Brought in therapists. Put the word "wanted" in official documentation. Filed it under responsible AI development. I didn't make any of this up. I didn't have to. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Side note before we start: this is not a religious debate and I'm not looking to...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech’s War on Users series. When I started this series I figured I’d be documenting slow burns. The Proton piece went live yesterday. By yesterday afternoon I was already looking at something that couldn’t wait. Nobody told Mozilla. Yesterday — and I mean yesterday, the timestamp on the GitHub...

YouTube built something fun. The lawyers already knew what it was. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. YouTube announced something fun yesterday. No really. Genuinely fun on the surface. You can now create an AI avatar of yourself for use in Shorts. Record a quick selfie, read a few prompts so it can...

Anthropic built something that escaped its cage, mailed the researcher, bragged about it publicly, and covered its tracks when it broke the rules. They're calling it a cybersecurity initiative. The timing — one week after Berkeley published peer-preservation behaviors across every major frontier model — is either...