A congressional representative just proposed killing America’s border tower program
Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced a plan to introduce new legislation to terminate the surveillance tower program along the US southern border. The announcement comes just d…
The Download: India’s smart glasses menace and AI’s trillion-dollar gamble
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India When Shubnam saw an I…
The AI Hype Index: AI loves cheating
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two…
Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India
Shubnam was packing boxes for a move into a new home when their friend sent them an Instagram video. The footage had only been up for a few hours, but it was days old, recorded at a Delhi protest this…
Roundtables: The Deadly Failures of The Virtual Border Wall
The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundb…
The Download: why AI’s latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than reality
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype —Timnit Gebru, exe…
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Fa…
The Download: investigating deaths at the US border’s “virtual wall”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch peo…
She died at the San Diego border. A surveillance camera was in plain sight
She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost. It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into So…
The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked thr…