While Paramount and Netflix were busy trying to buy each other's content libraries, Fox just bought something different: the box sitting under your TV. Fox Corporation announced it's acquiring Roku for $22 billion Monday morning — $160 per share, $96 in cash and 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A stock for each Roku share....

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc — because this one started as a game and ended as a surveillance pipeline, so it earned both. Remember Pokémon GO? Summer of 2016. People were walking into traffic, trespassing in cemeteries, and wandering into strangers' backyards — all to catch...

Sam Altman went to Michigan last week, stood next to Governor Whitmer in a tent on a former cornfield, and said the quiet part out loud — except this time it wasn't an accident. He was proud of it. OpenAI, Oracle, and Related Digital held a groundbreaking for the $16 billion "Saline Barn" — a 1.65 million-square-foot...

Back in February, I wrote about the ad blocker war and Manifest V3 — specifically how Google's MV3 framework wasn't really about security, it was about surgical removal of the capabilities that made ad blocking effective. I said that Chromium-based browsers were the most exposed, and I said Firefox and its hardened...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. We all know the basic deal by now. Meta wants your data to sell ads. Google wants your data to sell ads. A dozen other companies you've never heard of want your data to sell to the people selling ads. And we know Apple tried to draw a line with App Tracking...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. WWDC gave us two things at once. Craig Federighi on stage talking about privacy, trust, and safety. The three-tier Siri routing confirmed. The whole carefully assembled message about how seriously Apple takes your data. And buried in the same keynote week: Apple...

WWDC 2026 was today. Tim Cook's last as CEO, Craig Federighi on stage talking about platform improvements, trust, and safety — and somewhere between the homeOS preview and the AI announcements, iOS 27 confirmed what became obvious pretty early in the 26.x saga: the Liquid Glass slider is real, it's coming, and it...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. A follow-up to Jensen's New Math. On May 5th, while the tech press was busy looking elsewhere, NVIDIA quietly announced something that got a fraction of the attention it deserved. No leather jacket keynote. No packed auditorium. Just a press release, a startup nobody'd...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Yesterday I wrote about the internal Microsoft document that labeled Phase 1 of their Scout AI rollout "Make people addicted." The document was written by Omar Shahine — Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Scout — whose name is on the document, on Microsoft's own...

Apple's Privacy Is Now Underwritten by Google and Nvidia. Let That Sink In. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple Intelligence and a smarter Siri sounds great in a world where it's your choice, your hardware, or at worst a server sitting effectively next to the iCloud you're already trusting. It...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Microsoft just announced Scout at Build 2026 — their new "always-on personal agent" built on OpenClaw and baked into Microsoft 365. Another AI assistant, another keynote. Normally I'd file it and move on, but then 404 Media got hold of the internal documents. The...

He Didn't Get the Memo. Again. Jensen Huang was at Computex 2026 this week, and he had a big day. Several big days, actually. Let's go through them. First, he told the room that AI reducing jobs is "complete nonsense." His evidence? Software engineers are being hired more because AI makes them more productive....

Florida just became the first state to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT. And I had to read that twice. Not because the lawsuit is surprising — someone was eventually going to throw the first punch, and I've been documenting why for a while. But Florida. Not California, which has been loudly performing AI safety concern for...

So Jensen Huang walked on stage at Computex 2026 in Taipei today — same leather jacket, same big energy — and announced something nobody quite saw coming from the guy who's been busy cornering the AI datacenter market: Nvidia's first ARM-based PC chip. The RTX Spark superchip — also referred to as the N1X (not the...

A meme showed up on my Mastodon feed the other day — sjvn posted it publicly — and it stopped me mid-scroll. It's a size comparison: proton, neutron, electron... and then, smaller than all of them, the close-ad-button. It's a joke. It's also a field guide to modern advertising UX. A quick disclosure before I get into...