When Facebook parent Meta had agreed to a $17 billion settlement in August, you couldn’t blame consumers for shrugging. Facebook has faced big fines before, with little impact. But last year’s Flo Health period tracking app case is different. It went to trial. Victims testified. Experts exposed Meta’s misbehaviors. A [Keep reading]
A quick mental exercise: Imagine electricity were just discovered, and during the residential rollout, there were no rules. No fire safety measures, no voltage standards, no common size for outlets. I imagine there’s one image that comes to mind. FIRE! Everywhere. That’s kinda what we’re hearing from some quarters about [Keep reading]
The Debugger miniseries ‘Sugar High’ examines the impact Big Tech and AI will have on the music industry. In this conclusion, folk musician Tift Merritt and Duke Professor David Hoffman discuss all the tools society has to encourage both innovation and art. And we learn a bit more about Tift’s [Keep reading]
I sat down at his table and he had probably 100 cards and letters and gifts and boxes and he said, ‘I bet there’s at least 500 …. This isn’t nearly all of it.’ And he really lost count. There were just stacks of love letters and gifts and cards, [Keep reading]
We just learned that Waymo is recalling about 4,000 self-driving cars because they can’t read highway construction signs. According to Road & Track, some Waymo cars “failed to recognize and drove past ramp closure signs into pre-planned freeway construction zones; Waymo recorded six of these events in April 2026 in [Keep reading]
In our world of black and white, it’s difficult to be a tech skeptic without being labeled a Luddite. The Holy Grail is progress, so the thinking goes, and any pesky question asking threatens to stifle innovation. Do you want us to lose to the Chinese!?!? It’s ok, I’ve been [Keep reading]
Keyboard warriors. Instagram. Finance bros. Crypto scammers (and their enablers). And most of all, financial hoarders masquerading as super-humans. Pope Leo XIV had words for all these groups and many more in that “AI-must-be-disarmed” encyclical the Vatican released this week. You’ve seen the headlines about artificial intelligence and the risks [Keep reading]
Dr. Maurice Sholas has a beautiful, challenging calling — he cares for very sick children. He takes on the saddest of cases, and works with families so kids with spina bifida or traumatic injuries can still “win” at life. For some, that means gaining the ability to visit the bathroom [Keep reading]
The most dangerous hack is a brain hack. And criminals are getting very, very good at that. Meanwhile, I fear, the rest of us have spent precious little time learning to defend against brain hacks. Hopefully today’s piece will help a little. Today I’m going to discuss an important way [Keep reading]
Once in a while, a human being does the right thing and you wonder why it took so long I’ve long held the opinion that the only real use case for cryptocurrency is fraud; we can debate that. Crypto kiosks, on the other hand, leave little room for discussion. These [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan