Exclusive: ICE Glasses Homeland Security is making “smart glasses” to collect intelligence inside the U.S.

🚨 ICE Glasses are coming - specialized smart glasses designed by and for the Department of Homeland Security, documents reveal:
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-...

The Generative Stack Trying to find the best tool or platform for generative software in 2026 is a mistake that could haunt you for decades

Every layer of the software toolchain is changing at the same time. New spec formats, new generation strategies, new evaluation frameworks, new feedback mechanisms

Most teams are responding by trying to pick winners. This could lead to regrets....

How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web You give up more privacy than you might think each time you open an email.

In honor of Tim Cook's stepping down, here is the story of how I emailed him, not once but twice, with open email tracking enabled, only to discover that, not once but twice, my emails to the CEO of Apple were opened on a computer running Windows.

This is a real problem and I hope the solution is neither “cloudflare++” nor “stop APIs from being useful”.

If the hyperscalars and AI labs want to do some good for the world they’ll turn cutting edge models and tons of donated compute at finding and rapidly fixing vulnerabilities in the many pieces of open infrastructure that already exist…

I expected it to be bad from the description but it's so much worse. I really do wonder what they put in the water for professors at Harvard Law

what—and I cannot stress this enough—the fuck are you talking about

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter.

But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t:

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

How Big Tech Lobbied the EU to Hide Data Centers' Environmental Toll The European Commission has adopted industry-drafted language shielding data center emissions data from public view, report Nico Schmidt and Ella Joyner.

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their data centers, @investigate-europe.eu reports in collaboration with Tech Policy Press and other media partners.

It’s all well and good for tech leaders to endorse UBI. But it feels convenient to only focus on a distant political prospect. The GOP, right now, is doing reverse-UBI (work requirements on SNAP). It’d be nice to hear more objections to that.

NPR announced $113 million from two charitable donors, including billionaire philanthropist Connie Ballmer, months after Congress voted to strip federal dollars for public media.

Ballmer gave $80 million, the largest gift by a living donor in the organization’s history. https://wapo.st/4cvzfOa

Kauna Malgwi, a former worker at Sama, said: “This issue is not confined to one company or contract. It shows how the global AI industry is shaped. Power sits with large technology companies. Risk flows downward, affecting outsourced workers, often in the global south, who have the least protection”

Lewd messages linked to University of Michigan regent who led campaign against pro-Palestinian students Jordan Acker, who pushed legal action against protesters, is running for re-election in race reflecting tensions on Israel

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

It's not longing for inconvenience, it's wanting to restore agency:

newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s21e...

The New York Times is now blocking The Wayback Machine from accessing its articles.

That means you'll no longer be able to view archived versions of NYT stories published in 2026 and beyond on archive.org.

(All those posts you see tracking changes to NYT headlines and ledes? They relied on WBM).

there's only 2 kinds of optimization in AI land:
- spend more tokens for better results
- spend less/cheaper tokens for the same result

most people chase 1, but 2 is the real value

EPIC joins ACLU’s ‘Eyewear, Not Spyware!’ campaign to fight Meta’s surveillance glasses Updates

EPIC is proud to join 70+ organizations in calling on Meta to halt and publicly disavow its plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses.

We don't consent to this profound invasion of privacy, and you shouldn't either.

Let's make a plan to leave Substack together! · Luma Let's make a plan to leave Substack together! Now is the time. This is the place. Here's how we're going to use our time: - Opening discussion about biggest…

Once again, I am holding a FREE event to help publishers leave Substack this Thursday.

luma.com/qho2psws

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held. But if faced with the same tests today, those barriers — and people who held the line — would l...

Media people think I'm funny and/or crazy when I start every conversation about Murthy, the CenSorShIp InduStrial ComPlex, CISA, etc with "So some election deniers did a thing..."

But it has been the whole game the whole time and this article explains it: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Permissioned data is what we’re all waiting for. There is no [uptake of X social networking behavior] without control over audience

And yes, creators need privacy too!

This is so astonishing. I keep trying to explain to people who aren't following protocol conversations what it was like, going to #atmosphereconf. I'm just going to show them this—both as a record of the conference and as an example of people JUST BUILDING THINGS that are extremely cool.

I’m seeing some of the arguments in the comments but I feel many of them miss the point here; substack is run by people who openly admit to allowing and enabling harm.

If moral objections are a factor in your platform use, substack should be a nonstarter for damn near everyone. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Feds Try Secret Grand Jury to Unmask Reddit ICE Critic An ICE summons to get the user’s identity failed. Advocates worry the move to a grand jury signals an escalation of the war on dissent.

US now turning to grand juries as a potential way — circumventing immediate first amendment arguments — to force intermediaries like Reddit to de-anonymise users who are criticising government policy theintercept.com/2026/04/10/r...

white text on a green background "selling safety: a journalist's guide to covering police technology

A reminder that we put out a report that explains the shady ways technology companies are marketing and selling their devices to police, including how they come up with the claims of effectiveness. Everyone, especially journalists and law makers, should read this.

www.eff.org/document/sel...

Verge headline: Sorry kid, drones are for war now by Sean Hollister Picture of a DJI drone in the sky

DJI is banned in the US, but no company has rushed to serve the videographers and farmers that use DJI gear.

Instead, US dronemakers are largely focused on a more lucrative opportunity: a billion dollars the Pentagon has earmarked for drones that kill.

Read more: buff.ly/QapZmtI

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

One thing that Tara touches upon but that I want to spend more time on is that the master's tools that are problematic are the *epistemic* ones.

Tech has unexamined epistemic assumptions inside of which there is no liberation.

Are they gonna cut the butts out of their pants? because they’re already showing their whole ass

Rudy wasn’t playing yall.