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May 14, 2025
REAL ID Day After-Action Report: Stalemate
D-Day is more than just the glorious day that began the end of World War II. It is the general term for any major military operation, along with H-Hour and perhaps M-Minute in cyber war. Here’s my report from a curious move in our nation’s War on Terror: REAL ID Day. On May 7, 2025,…
May 14, 2025
Loosening an Ownership Cap and Tightening a News Rule: Can Carr’s FCC Reconcile Its Objectives?
Can the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) square its statutory authority to ensure that over-the-air television broadcasters provide local content that serves the public interest with potentially eliminating a federal rule that bans owners of broadcast stations from reaching more than 39 percent of all US TV households? Maybe, but before scrapping the cap, the Commission…
May 13, 2025
The FTC Is Trying to Rewrite the Story of Instagram
Every startup story is a mosaic of choices, chances, and context. But in its lawsuit against Meta, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has adopted a sharply linear view of innovation—one where the key moment happens in 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram, and everything before or after is a footnote. That’s a mistake. The full story of Instagram…
May 12, 2025
Agents, Access, and Advantage: Lessons from Meta’s LlamaCon
Meta was kind enough to extend an invitation for me to attend its inaugural LlamaCon—a one-day developer summit devoted to the Llama family of open-source large language models. It offered the chance to better understand the direction in which both the technology and its surrounding ecosystem are moving, and therefore merits a close read by…
May 12, 2025
Where in the Supply Chain Should Minors’ Access to Internet Content Be Managed?
A new bill, the App Store Accountability Act, puts the onus of age verification on app stores as a means of promoting online safety for children. According to proponent Senator Lee, “for too long, Big Tech has profited from app stores through which children in America and across the world access violent and sexual material while…
May 9, 2025
RIP NOAA’s Billion Dollar Disasters
Last June, my peer-reviewed paper on problems with NOAA’s Billion Dollar Disaster (BDD) tabulation was published. Today, NOAA announced that the BDD tabulation would no longer be updated by the agency, explaining that it has been “retired.” While some media have chosen to make the BDD retirement about the Trump administration, there has also been some excellent reporting indicating…
May 9, 2025
Trump’s Retributive Attacks on Speech and Press Rights Overshadow His Early Righteous Embrace of Online Free Expression
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump took a large, righteous step toward promoting a cherished First Amendment value by signing Executive Order (EO) 14149. Titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” the EO extends unfettered protection for free expression, bluntly proclaiming that “[g]overnment censorship of speech is intolerable…
May 8, 2025
China’s AI Strategy: Adoption Over AGI
Last week, the Center for a New American Security held an event on “The Stakes of Sino-American AI Competition.” Near the end, audience member Harry Krejsa of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology posed the most important question of the session, asking: “Why hasn’t this already been more destabilizing in the US-China relationship?…
May 7, 2025
Ice Surprises
Earlier this week the New York Post asked me to help its readers make sense of some surprising new research on ice dynamics at both poles. The new research appears in a new peer-reviewed paper and a preprint that was just posted. At the South Pole, Wang et al. 2025 find a record accumulation of ice on the Antarctic…
May 7, 2025
The Underappreciated Importance of Climate Variability
One of the most pervasive misunderstandings of climate — even among some who publish on climate — is the belief that any long-term trend in a measured climate variable indicates a change in climate, as defined by the IPCC. In practice, “long-term” is often defined to be only a few decades worth of observations. Some…