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Tech News
Labor unions are increasingly pushing back against data-center construction, warning politicians who support these projects that they risk losing union backing. The move signals that blue-collar workforce concerns are becoming a central point of contention in the broader public backlash against data-center expansion.
OpenAI, io Products, and former Apple employees Chang Liu and Tang Tan have filed a fresh petition seeking to have Apple's trade secret misappropriation lawsuit dismissed with prejudice. The move follows Apple's rebuttal defending the specificity of its claims after the defendants' earlier motion to dismiss argued the company failed to identify protectable secrets or prove harm.
Pixel 10 owners attempting to trade in their phones for the new Pixel 11 on the Google Store are reporting broken trade-in workflows, according to complaints on Reddit's Pixel community. Users describe receiving conflicting confirmations about whether their trade-in was accepted, only to have their cards charged the full price anyway, with Google reportedly unable to retroactively apply the promised credit.
Archaeologists at the University of South Carolina found traces of cacao DNA on pottery shards from an 11th-century feast at Etowah, a Mississippian mound city near present-day Atlanta. Since cacao trees only grow in tropical regions roughly 3,000 kilometers away, the discovery indicates the Mississippian people maintained extensive trade networks reaching into Central America.
The webcomic XKCD published a strip poking fun at the logic and rhetoric surrounding international trade and tariffs. As with all XKCD content, the comic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, allowing free sharing but not commercial resale.
New analysis of trade data breaks down the 2025 tariff exchange between Washington and Ottawa into three measurable pieces: duties U.S. importers have actually paid on Canadian goods, Canada's retaliatory tariffs on American exports, and a modeled estimate of how much of that cost gets passed on to American households through higher prices. The household figure is explicitly flagged as an estimate rather than a hard count, since no government dataset tracks how much of a tariff businesses pass on versus absorb.
After trade talks collapsed, Canada announced tariffs of 25-50% on nearly 900 US goods, including toilet paper and tissue products, set to take effect September 8. This is retaliation for a 50% US tariff hike, and since Canada supplies $328 million worth of toilet paper to the US annually, prices are expected to climb on both sides of the border.
Apple has filed a reply defending its request for expedited discovery in its lawsuit against former employees, OpenAI, and io Products over alleged trade secret misappropriation. The move follows OpenAI's opposition, which argued the request was overbroad and unnecessary since regular discovery would largely overlap with Apple's proposed accelerated timeline. Apple is seeking early document production, forensic device imaging, and depositions within 30 to 50 days, alongside a separate preliminary injunction request to halt use of its alleged proprietary information.
Canada's requirement that streaming services fund and feature domestic content has drawn attention as a potential irritant in trade negotiations with the United States. US officials and industry groups have pointed to these rules as a barrier that disadvantages American streaming companies operating in Canada.
The EU has enacted the AI Act, a roughly 50,000-word, 113-article law representing the first comprehensive AI regulation worldwide. The U.S., by contrast, has no federal AI law, instead relying on executive orders, agency guidance from bodies like NIST and the FTC, and a rapidly growing number of state laws, which more than doubled from 49 in 2023 to 131 in 2024.
Samsung's latest foldable, the Galaxy Z Fold8, refines the design but still forces buyers to choose between competing priorities like thinness, durability, battery life and camera quality. Rather than solving foldables' core engineering tensions, it shifts which trade-offs users accept.
The U.S. Department of Justice settled its lawsuit against TikTok, ByteDance and affiliated companies for $400 million over repeated violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The suit, filed in 2024, alleged TikTok let children under 13 create standard accounts outside its restricted Kids Mode, collected their data without parental consent, and failed to delete accounts when parents requested it. TikTok will pay $300 million immediately, with an additional $100 million due if a court vacates an earlier 2019 consent decree tied to its predecessor app, Musical.ly.