Politics

This time it’s Smartmatic settling with Newsmax, which it sued for libel after the 2020 election, for an undisclosed amount. As The Guardian notes, a Smartmatic suit against Fox is still in progress — though the network cut a huge surprise settlement deal with another voting company, Dominion, last year.

The AI Act came into law on August 1st, but some rules for “high risk” systems won’t be enforced until August 2027. Now, companies like Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Samsung are promising to make a head start.

Meta and Apple (which have been critical of the EU’s AI stance) are notably absent, but OpenAI has signed the pledge despite previous grumblings.

That’s according to UK Defence Secretary John Healey, giving the iconic “Lord Kitchener Wants You” recruitment slogan (which inspired the Uncle Sam poster) a modern spin at yesterday’s Labour Party conference.

That said, both the UK and US armed forces aren't strangers to using gaming prowess as a lure to entice younger folks to enlist.

This profile goes from a donation by Jobs to Harris’ first DA run in 2003, through personal trips together, and into their joint interview in 2017 at AllThingsD.

It also reports on Jobs’ role in mobilizing donors against Joe Biden’s continued presidential campaign:

One of her top aides, David Simas, a former Obama staff member who oversees her political research, circulated focus-group and polling data to other donors that painted a dire portrait. Several said that Mr. Simas’s research was influential in encouraging them to mobilize against Mr. Biden.

Bloomberg reports that “a formal chargesheet” is being prepared by EU officials, taking issue with how it presents rivals on search services like Google Flights and Google Hotels.

Search is already under antitrust fire in the US, and those findings could lead to a big financial penalty under the DMA, although things could change before a final decision is due before April 2025.

No, an Autocomplete Interview isn’t going to answer all of our policy questions. But it does produce these 10 minutes of the presidential candidate answering the internet’s most searched queries in Wired’s now-standard format.

I’ve been going to this extremely wonky and jargon-y trial almost every day, and I joined Decoder to translate the highlights so far. The trial — which is only accessible in-person from an Alexandria, VA courtroom — is in its second week. Google is expected to start calling witnesses any day now, once the Justice Department wraps its chief case.

A joint statement from ODNI, FBI, and CISA follows up on last month’s reports about Iranian Election Influence Efforts, which Iran’s government has denied.

Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails. There is currently no information indicating those recipients replied.

In 2019, three years after the case began, the European Commission fined Google €1.5 billion after determining that it forced customers of its AdSense business to sign anticompetitive contracts. On appeal, the EU’s second highest court said it “upholds the majority of the findings” but annuls the fine. But don’t worry! The Commission can still appeal the decision ensuring another year or two of legal fees.

From a blog post:

Initially, Russian influence operations struggled to evolve their efforts following President Biden’s departure from the 2024 US presidential race. However, in late August and September, we observed two Russian actors MTAC tracks closely — previously reported as Storm-1516 and Storm-1679 — using videos designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign.

NBC News reports the following statement from an unnamed Meta spokesperson:

After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.

The move follows warnings by the Biden administration that RT is part of Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 US election and a State Department notice last week saying, “[W]e now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”

Former US President Donald Trump, who posted AI-generated images of Taylor Swift implying that she had endorsed him for President, now says he hates her, in a post on Truth Social.

(Swift has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the office.)

In an Instagram post shared shortly after the first presidential debate between Harris and Donald Trump, the star ended the will-she-won’t-she speculation and threw her support behind the Harris/Walz ticket. Interestingly, she cited recent AI-generated fake images of herself:

Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter.

Meanwhile, Trump claims that under a Harris presidency, “Oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar.”

I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States and in fact I was the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases on fracking.

Climate advocates previously hoped Harris would take a tougher stance against fracking. This statement in tonight’s debate repeats a promise she made in her CNN interview last month.

In tonight’s debate, she describes her China policy as making sure the US “wins the competition for the 21st century” through investments in “American-based technology,” claiming that under Trump, American chips were sold to China and used to modernize its military.

Trump counters, “They bought their chips from Taiwan. We hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have.” He then winds himself up into a tirade on Marxism?