TECH NEWS
12:49 PM PDT · July 17, 2026 The city of San Francisco has ordered Apple and Google to remove dozens of “nudify” apps — — software programs that can digitally alter pictures to unclothe the people in them — from their app stores. California law criminalizes any activity that “knowingly facilitates” or “recklessly
TECH NEWS
Creators can have TikTok scan for unauthorized AI deepfakes. by Jay Peters Jul 17, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. TikTok is
TECH NEWS
OpenClaw has become one of the most widely adopted agentic frameworks, but it has yet to prove itself at enterprise scale. Agents need real credentials — API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts — to work effectively, and Brex found that traditional guardrails couldn't contain what those agents were doing with
TECH NEWS
Legacy infrastructure, not the models themselves, is what's actually slowing AI agents down. That was the shared conclusion of three infrastructure leaders — from LinkedIn, Walmart, and Zendesk — at VB Transform 2026. The panel brought together Animesh Singh, senior director of AI platform and infrastructure at LinkedIn, Desiree Gosby,
TECH NEWS
* An internal DHS readout shows analysts twice dismissed intrusion alerts on the HSIN information-sharing network as false positives * This effectively gave hackers roughly three weeks of undetected access before a breach was declared on June 4 2026 * The as-yet anonymous attackers altered server files, ran malicious code through a legitimate
TECH NEWS
Hot dogs, beach days, and iced tea on the porch are some of the rites of summer. But in an era of global warming, a new rite has emerged: choking down smoke from wildfires burning hundreds of miles or more away. The Midwest, Northeast, and parts of Canada have been
TECH NEWS
Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky says buyers of its new e-paper smartwatches should know what they’re signing up for and trust Pebble to make things right if they run into issues, despite the short warranty. “I think the most important thing is trust,” Migicovsky told me in an interview this
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TL;DR Kimi K3 topped Arena’s coding leaderboard in 24 hours. Trump advisor Sacks warned the US is losing. Khosla blamed immigration. A Wall Street CIO called it bad news for closed AI labs. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 topped Arena’s frontend coding leaderboard within 24 hours of
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TL;DR Karp says AI could make him 20x wealthier ($300B) while middle-class salaries merely double. He called AI wealth inequality “a problem for society.” Palantir CEO Alex Karp estimated that AI could make him “20x wealthier,“ implying a fortune approaching $300 billion, up from roughly $15 billion today. Middle-class
TECH NEWS
TL;DR The Pentagon froze permitting for 155 wind projects (44GW) across 24 states over drone concerns. Developers have lost $2B. Industry filed suit calling it politically motivated. The Pentagon has frozen the permitting process for at least 155 new wind projects in 24 states for nearly a year, citing
TECH NEWS
TL;DR Anthropic is in early talks for a ~$10B compute deal with Meta, the NYT reported. Meta spent $145B on AI infra and is building a cloud business to monetise it. Anthropic is in very preliminary talks to lease computing power from Meta in a deal worth about $10
TECH NEWS
TL;DR An AWS billing bug sent users estimated bills in the billions and trillions. Amazon confirmed it was a unit pricing error and is recomputing all estimates. AWS users woke up Friday to find estimated billing emails showing charges ranging from hundreds of millions to $2.5 trillion. A
