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ICE plans to renew Thomson Reuters Special Services access up to $25M/yr for up to five years (from $24M total over the prior five-year deal), disclosed July 17, 2026. The filing cites “multiplied” data demand to identify unaccompanied minors and government-funds fraud, including vetting sponsors via CLEAR’s public records and license-plate reader data.
Patreon announced in July 2026 that it is moving beyond passive requests to actively block AI bots that scrape creators’ content for model training purposes. The membership platform is working with…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers woke up on Friday, July 18, 2026, to alarming billing estimates claiming they owed millions or even billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used….
Federal agents arrested Zyaire Wilkins, 21, on July 14, 2026, accusing him of using eight malware-infected Steam games (May 2024–Feb 2026) to steal at least $220,000 in cryptocurrency. The scheme allegedly infected ~8,000 devices, accessed 80 wallets, and one title, BlockBlasters, accounted for over $150,000 stolen.
General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has secured a $400 million loan from tech investment firm Upper90, in what may be the first financing deal to use inference-specific chips as…
Trump Media will monetize real-time access to Truth Social via “Truth API,” announced July 17, 2026, launching Aug. 1 for Wall Street. It’s billed as “in milliseconds,” operating 24/7 with post archives back to 2022; pricing wasn’t disclosed, and the Trump family is the largest shareholder in the publicly traded company.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google in July 2026 over 13 AI “nudify” face-swap apps, citing California law against deepfake pornography and nonconsensual nude images. Google says it removed five Android apps flagged by his office plus “hundreds” of similar apps.
A consumer ownership advocacy organization called Fulu announced in July 2026 a $10,000 bounty for anyone who can disable Sony’s proprietary software locks on the PlayStation 5, potentially allowing…
Roblox announced on July 16, 2026, a new mobile feature called “Build” that lets users generate basic games from a single text prompt, no programming experience required. With Build, a user can type…
Google announced in July 2026 an update to Google Vids that allows users to create a custom digital avatar modeled on their own appearance and voice. By uploading a selfie and a voice recording,…
Anthropic is pressing U.S. states to adopt stricter artificial intelligence regulations in 2026, arguing that transparency laws passed just last year are no longer adequate to address the risks posed…
In 2026, X’s upgraded Grok AI flags duplicated posts at 3× its previous rate, finding 1.5M stolen posts and redirecting $1M+ in creator payouts to original uploaders. Watermarks or edits won’t help, and follow/reply begging 3+ times can remove users from the creator program.
Newsletter platform Beehiiv announced in July 2026 a set of new features aimed at expanding the platform beyond newsletters, including a community discussion tool, an AI assistant called Copilot, and…
Sheryl Sandberg has led a $10 million investment into Self Inspection, a San Diego-based startup that uses AI and smartphone cameras to assess vehicle body damage and generate detailed inspection…
Scattered Spider members Owen Flowers (18) and Thalha Jubair (20) were sentenced to five years and six months on July 16, 2026, for a TfL attack that cost about £29 million. In summer 2024, they disabled TfL’s ticketing and real-time arrival systems for weeks; the FBI alleged Jubair targeted 120+ companies via social engineering.
Google announced in 2026 that it is renaming its AI-powered research tool NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, continuing the company’s pattern of folding its AI products under the Gemini brand. The change…
Google announced on Thursday, July 16, 2026, that users can now link and interact with select third-party apps directly within AI Mode, its conversational search experience. The initial rollout…
EU DMA rulings (July 16, 2026) require Google to share Android and Google Search access with competitors comparable to Google’s own systems. Android assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity must get Gemini-level features/data, and Search data sharing starts by January 2027; penalties can reach 10% of annual worldwide turnover.