As America begins a six-day state funeral for former president Jimmy Carter, Microsoft co-founder/philanthropist Bill Gates shared "my fondest memory" this week. "He and Rosalynn were among my first and most inspiring role models in global health." They played a pretty profound role in the early days of the Gates Foundation. I'm especially grateful that they introduced us to Dr. Bill Foege, who once helped eradicate smallpox and was a key advisor for our global health work.

Jimmy and Rosalynn were also good friends to my dad. One of my favorite photographs of all time shows Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and my dad in South Africa holding babies at a medical clinic. I remember my dad coming back from that trip with a whole new appreciation for Jimmy's passion for helping people with HIV. At the time, then-President Thabo Mbeki was refusing to let people with HIV get treatment, and my dad watched Jimmy almost get into a fist fight with Mbeki over the issue. As Jimmy said in a 2012 conversation at the Gates Foundation hosted by my dad, "He was claiming there was no relationship between HIV and AIDS and that the medicines that we were sending in, the antiretroviral medicines, were a white person's plot to help kill black babies." At a time when a quarter of all people in South Africa were HIV positive, Jimmy just couldn't accept Mbeki's obstructionism.
Ars Technica reported it was also Jimmy Carter who saved America's space shuttle program.

And Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House (which "were later removed by his successor, Ronald Reagan," according to Boiling Point, an environmental newsletter from the Los Angeles Times): He tried and largely failed to block construction of more than a dozen expensive, environmentally destructive water infrastructure projects such as dams, canals and reservoirs. He also tried to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, implementing the first vehicle fuel-efficiency standards and tasking researchers with bringing down the cost of solar panels — an effort he predicted could be "a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people...." And although he was largely thinking about how to free Americans from geopolitical crises that could wreak havoc on oil supplies and gasoline prices, he also had heat-trapping greenhouse gases in mind... The final report from the White House Council on Environmental Quality warned that fossil fuel combustion could cause "widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social, and agricultural patterns." It advised that to avoid such risks, we should limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the goal eventually agreed to by nearly 200 nations, 35 years later.

Even if Carter's actions were targeted more at reducing oil imports than at cutting planet-warming pollution — he was willing to increase domestic coal production if it meant less dependence on foreign crude — the political battles he fought, particularly those he lost, have lessons for those of us who care about the climate today. The historian Kai Bird, for instance, notes that after struggling to pass a tax on gas-guzzling cars, Carter wrote in his diary, "The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it's impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves." Indeed, oil and gas companies still wield huge influence. SUVs are more popular than ever.
The newsletter argues the story of Carter's life can be an inspiration, since Carter saw a lot of changes in his 100 years.

"We need to see more changes to survive. May we all be as lucky as Carter was."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. Born in 1924, he had just celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1st. If you want to catch a glimpse of his political charisma, YouTube has a clip of Carter's appearance on "What's My Line" when he was still only governor of Georgia. Within five years he'd be president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981.

But it seems like today everyone has a story to tell. More than two decades later, long-time Slashdot reader destinyland saw Jimmy Carter speak in Las Vegas in 2001 on the final day of the CTIA Wireless tradeshow. "I feel thrilled to be a part of this," 77-year-old Carter had said.... Carter applauded the work of "entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers that are transforming the face of the globe." And he noted their technologies could address problems targeted by the Carter Center.

Interrupted by a few cellphone rings, the former President conversed on a stage at the Sands Expo and Venetian Hotel with Tom Wheeler, the president of the wireless communications trade association. Wheeler reminded the audience of Carter's decidedly nontechnical background, discussing An Hour Before Daylight, Carter's memoir about growing up on a farm in Georgia during the Great Depression. "We were the only family blessed with an outhouse," Carter told the crowd.

Wheeler also asked a question many in the technology community could relate to. Carter, he pointed out, had been involuntarily retired. "What's it feel like?" The former President told the audience he'd re-focussed his energies into humanitarian efforts through the Carter Center, which is active in providing health services around the world as well as monitoring elections. Carter donated his appearance fee to the Carter Center...

Midway through the hour-long discussion, the former President touted his administration's record of deregulating several industries, including transportation, energy, and communications, saying "If it hadn't been for that deregulation, this environment in which you all live wouldn't have been possible." Carter also shared with the business crowd that it was a belief in free enterprise that made him want to enter politics, drawn from his experiences selling peanuts as a young boy for a dollar a day.

The audience greeted the former president warmly, giving him a standing ovation both when he took the stage and when he left. Carter joked it was almost enough to make him want to get back into politics.
Everyone has their own opinion. When a friend of mine was in high school, she got to meet Jimmy Carter early in his presidency. He'd seemed unusually kind and good, she said, but remembered her first reaction. "They're going to eat you alive." And yet then, pointing to the humanitarian work he would continue for four decades, she said he was also clearly America's very best ex-president.

And the liberal blog Talking Points Memo argues Carter's accomplishments as president are being re-evaluated: Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights. And some just liked him. A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.... "People assume that because he wasn't warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn't get much through," said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. "He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson."

That record includes, by Alter's count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter's more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971. What's most wrenching about Carter's improvements in energy and environmental policy now is what he wasn't able to accomplish. On his way out of office, he issued a report that included recommendations for cutting carbon emissions — at exactly the same rate the Paris Climate Accords coalesced behind 35 years later....

His Carter Center has virtually eradicated certain devastating diseases on the African continent, part of the work for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He and Rosalynn have also helped build and repair over 4,000 homes for Habitat for Humanity, work that continued well into his 90s.
I've got my own story. As a young boy I saw Jimmy Carter give a speech in 1977 — just six months after he'd assumed the presidency. A crowd of teenagers thrilled to see the president gave him a long, loud round of applause. And when it finally died down, Carter said...

"I wish I got that kind of reception from Congress."

The FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan's Manhattan apartment, seizing his phone and electronic devices. A source close to the matter told The New York Post it was politically motivated due to Polymarket's successful prediction of Trump's election win. It's "grand political theater at its worst," the source said. "They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons."

Although no charges were filed, the raid has sparked controversy, with speculation of political retribution and concerns over potential market manipulation, as Polymarket faces scrutiny both in the U.S. and from French regulators. The New York Post reports: Coplan was not arrested and has not been charged, a Polymarket spokesperson told The Post on Wednesday evening. "Polymarket is a fully transparent prediction market that helps everyday people better understand the events that matter most to them, including elections," the rep said. "We charge no fees, take no trading positions, and allow observers from around the world to analyze all market data as a public good."

Coplan posted on X after his run-in with the feds: "New phone, who dis?" Polymarket does not allow trading in the US, though bettors can bypass the ban by accessing the site through VPN. The FBI's investigation comes a week after Coplan said Polymarket is planning to return to the US. [...] In 2022, the online gambling platform was forced to pause its trading in the US and pay a $1.4 million penalty to settle charges with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it had failed to register with the agency. [In France, regulators are investigating Polymarket's compliance with national gambling laws, with concerns about unauthorized gambling activities within the country.] A Fortune report published a week before the election found widespread evidence of wash-trading on Polymarket. "Polymarket's Terms of Use expressly prohibit market manipulation," a Polymarket spokesperson told Fortune in a statement.

An anonymous reader shares a post from Financial Times: The economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world. From America's Democrats to Britain's Tories, Emmanuel's Macron's Ensemble coalition to Japan's Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi's erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records. Ultimately voters don't distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain's July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years. That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday's American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

But it's not just about inflation. An update of economist Arthur Okun's "misery index" -- the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates -- for this era might swap out joblessness and replace it with immigration. On this basis, the past couple of years in the US, UK and dozens of other countries have been characterised by more economic and societal upheaval than they have seen in generations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...]

The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State. "Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers.

"Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

Major media outlets are beginning to declare former President Trump the winner of the 2024 presidential election, having secured 270 electoral votes. "He becomes the first president in more than 120 years to lose the White House, and then to come back and win it again, after President Grover Cleveland in 1892," notes The Hill. As with previous election announcements on Slashdot, this is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

In a victory speech, Trump said that he was the leader of "the greatest political movement of all time." He said: "We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible," adding that he would take office with an "unprecedented and powerful mandate." President Trump has vowed a radical reshaping of American government, tasking SpaceX and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk "with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms."

UPDATE 12:30 PM PST: Vice President Kamala Harris has officially conceded the 2024 presidential election, calling former President Trump to offer her congratulations. She's expected to make a concession speech at Howard University at 4:00 PM EST. You can stream the speech here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant's cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place "to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics" in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn't specifically mention the protests or the Israel-Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company "is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform." "We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally," Pichai continued. "When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that." The sit-in protest was staged against Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government. During the nearly 10-hour protest, employees wore "Googler against genocide" T-shirts and occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

The report notes how tech companies, "previously famed for their progressive culture where nap pods and abortion benefits were welcome," are increasingly restricting political discussions to avoid internal conflict. Pichai notes in his memo that Google has previously enjoyed "a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Perplexity launched an election information hub that relies on data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works to provide live updates and information about the 2024 US general election, which takes place on Tuesday, November 5. "Starting Tuesday, we'll be offering live updates on elections using data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. The site will pull data from special data sources (called APIs) hosted by the two organizations. As of Monday, Perplexity's hub currently provides interactive information on voting requirements, poll times, and summaries about ballot measures, candidates, policy positions, and endorsements. Users can ask questions about the information similar to using a chatbot like ChatGPT.

Perplexity's embrace of providing election information is an exception in the AI field. Wary about accidentally providing misinformation, competitor AI assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic currently direct users elsewhere or decline to answer election questions. OpenAI's ChatGPT Search directs election result queries to The Associated Press and Reuters. Perplexity describes its new elections hub as "an entry point for understanding key issues." But like other AI models, Perplexity can produce confabulations (plausible incorrect information) when generating responses. That could present an accuracy problem because the site's Voter Guide service uses AI language models to summarize and interpret information pulled from the web. Here's what Ars Technica advises: "Take what you see on Perplexity's site with a huge grain of salt -- do not rely on it without verifying the information with a trustworthy external source."

For months, the Colorado Department of State inadvertently exposed partial passwords for voting machines in a public spreadsheet. "While the incident is embarrassing and already fueling accusations from the state's Republican party, the department said in a statement that it 'does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado's elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted,'" reports Gizmodo. From the report: Colorado NBC affiliate station 9NEWS reported that Hope Scheppelman, vice chair of the state's Republican party, revealed the error in a mass email sent Tuesday morning, which included an affidavit from a person who claimed to have downloaded the spreadsheet and discovered the passwords by clicking a button to reveal hidden tabs.

In its statement, the Department of State said that there are two unique passwords for each of its voting machines, which are stored in separate places. Additionally, the passwords can only be used by a person who is physically operating the system and voting machines are stored in secure areas that require ID badges to access and are under 24/7 video surveillance.

"The Department took immediate action as soon as it was aware of this, and informed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which closely monitors and protects the [country's] essential security infrastructure," The department said, adding that it is "working to remedy this situation where necessary." Colorado voters use paper ballots, ensuring that a physical paper trail that can be used to verify results tabulated electronically.

A writer for the New York Times editorial board argues we don't yet fully understand the impact of warehouses. "Thanks to the rise of online shopping and the proximity to so many American doorsteps, warehouses have become a major source of blue-collar employment," both in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and beyond. "In Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, more than 19,000 people work in the warehouses that prepare our packages. Thousands more drive the trucks that deliver them."

But while the total number of warehouse-related jobs almost replaces the jobs lost from the closure of a major steel plant, "the political power that blue-collar workers once wielded has not been replaced." Despite their large numbers, their importance to the economy, and their presence in Northampton — a swing county in a crucial battleground state — warehouse workers don't form an influential voting bloc in the way that steelworkers did... It turns out that making stuff isn't the same as distributing it. Working in a steel mill is a communal act that lends itself to the pursuit of political power in a way that warehouse jobs do not. Steelworkers toiled alongside one another, forming lifelong bonds, bowling leagues and unions that delivered a reliable voting bloc. Back when thousands of workers streamed out of the gates of Bethlehem Steel at quitting time, "politicians would come out to shake our hands," Jerry Green, retired president of United Steelworkers Local 2599, told me.

Factories were so good at political mobilization, in fact, that some credit them for democracy itself. Women and working-class men won the right to vote in the United States, Western Europe and much of East Asia after about a quarter of those populations were employed in factories, according to recent research by Sam van Noort, a lecturer at Princeton. Warehouses, by contrast, have no such mystique. Nobody campaigns outside the Walmart distribution centers here. Workers tend to be hired by staffing agencies and many stay for only a few months. They work on their own and rarely socialize. They are notoriously difficult to organize. Alec MacGillis, author of "Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon," told me that the biggest challenge for labor organizers at Amazon warehouses was getting workers to stay on the job long enough to feel a sense of solidarity.

Malenie Tapia, who moved to Bethlehem from Queens, N.Y., five years ago and took a job as a "picker" in a Zara warehouse, explained why. For eight hours a day, she grabbed items off numbered shelves and delivered them to packers who packed them into boxes. Talking to co-workers was forbidden, she said, except during a brief lunch break. "Sometimes I would go to the section in the back, where there would be less eyes on you, and sneak in a little moment of conversation," she said.
Here's what happened when the reporter asked a pair of Latino workers about their political opinions: Most of all, they fretted about being replaced by machines. They spoke with dread about a fully automated McDonald's and a robot that unloads container ships. They didn't seem to see themselves as part of a working class that could band together to demand protections for their jobs.

The hot political issue around warehouses isn't the workers at all; it's the traffic and loss of green space associated with them. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the race for a state representative seat in Northampton have vowed to stop the proliferation of warehouses, which some citizens' groups say destroys their rural way of life. If warehouse workers had a political voice, they might push back. But they don't, so they won't. Warehouses have been an economic boon. But politically, for workers, they are a loss.

Ahead of Georgia's parliamentary elections, Georgian authorities raided the homes of disinformation researchers Eto Buziashvili and Sopo Gelava, seizing personal devices. The Record: Eto Buziashvili and Sopo Gelava, both employees of the Atlantic Council think tank, had their homes searched and their own and their family members' personal devices seized by investigators working for the country's Ministry of Finance, according to friends of the pair who spoke to Recorded Future News. Both women are said to be safe, although there are concerns about the security of their devices and online accounts. The searches come a day after Buziashvili published an article detailing how the Kremlin was influencing Georgian politics by supporting the incumbent government and interfering in the upcoming elections.

Local media reported that the offices of outsourcing company Concentrix and other Georgian citizens were also subject to searches. The Ministry of Finance claimed on Facebook it launched searches of "specific facilities" related to "call centers" alleged to be engaged in illegal activity. The investigations come ahead of an election that is being seen as a bellwether of the country's future direction, either pursuing closer ties to Russia under the current prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze or moving towards the West through opposition figures. Graham Brookie, the Atlantic Council's vice president for technology programs and strategy, said the organization "is deeply concerned about this development and its impact on our staff's work shortly before Georgian elections. [Gelava and Buziashvili] are engaged in independent, non-partisan work aimed at defending and strengthening democracy from those who would undermine it in online spaces, including research related to foreign influence efforts, the targeting of marginalized communities, and other online harms."

"We trust that Georgian authorities will provide more clarity on their actions, ensure the safety and security of our staff, return their property, and allow them to continue their contributions to Georgian democracy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As November 5 draws closer, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) warned on Wednesday that malicious foreign influence operations launched by Russia, China, and Iran against the US presidential election are continuing to evolve and should not be ignored even though they have come to feel inevitable. In the group's fifth report, researchers emphasize the range of ongoing activities (source may be paywalled; alternative source) as well as the inevitability that attackers will work to stoke doubts about the integrity of the election in its aftermath.

In spite of escalating conflict in the Middle East, Microsoft says that Iran has been able to keep up its operations targeting the US election, particularly targeting the Trump campaign and attempting to foment anti-Israel sentiment. Russian actors, meanwhile, have been focused on targeting the Harris campaign with character attacks and AI-generated content, including deepfakes. And China has shifted its focus in recent weeks, researchers say, to target down-ballot Republican candidates as well as sitting members of Congress who promote policies adversarial to China or in conflict with its interests.

Crucially, MTAC says it is all but certain that these actors will attempt to stoke division and mistrust in vote security on Election Day and in its immediate aftermath. "As MTAC observed during the 2020 presidential cycle, foreign adversaries will amplify claims of election rigging, voter fraud, or other election integrity issues to sow chaos among the US electorate and undermine international confidence in US political stability," the researchers wrote in their report. As the 2024 campaign season enters its final phase, the researchers say that they expect to see AI-generated media continuing to show up in new campaigns, particularly because content can spread so rapidly in the charged period immediately around Election Day. The report also notes that Microsoft has detected Iranian actors probing election-related websites and media outlets, "suggesting preparations for more direct influence operations as Election Day nears." "History has shown that the ability of foreign actors to rapidly distribute deceptive content can significantly impact public perception and electoral outcomes," wrote MTAC general manager Clint Watts. "With a particular focus on the 48 hours before and after Election Day, voters, government institutions, candidates and parties must remain vigilant to deceptive and suspicious activity online."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn't have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won't break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency's list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days. "Data caps, especially by providers in markets with no competition, are nothing more than an arbitrary money grab by greedy corporations. They limit and stifle innovation, cause undue stress, and are unnecessary," wrote Lucas Landreth.

"Data caps are as outmoded as long distance telephone fees," wrote Joseph Wilkicki. "At every turn, telecommunications companies seek to extract more revenue from customers for a service that has rapidly become essential to modern life." Pointing to taxpayer subsidies provided to ISPs, Wilkicki wrote that large telecoms "have sought every opportunity to take those funds and not provide the expected broadband rollout that we paid for."

In response to Trump-appointed FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington's coffee refill analogy, internet users "Jonathan Mnemonic" and James Carter wrote, "Coffee is not, in fact, internet service." They added: "Cafes are not able to abuse monopolistic practices based on infrastructural strangleholds. To briefly set aside the niceties: the analogy is absurd, and it is borderline offensive to the discerning layperson."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Donald Trump said Apple CEO Tim Cook called him to discuss the billions of dollars that Apple has been fined in the European Union. Trump made the statement during his appearance on the PBD Podcast -- and said that he won't let the EU "take advantage" of US companies like Apple if reelected. "Two hours ago, three hours ago, he [Cook] called me," Trump said. "He said the European Union has just fined us $15 billion... Then on top of that, they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion." In March, the EU fined Apple around $2 billion after finding that Apple used its dominance to restrict music streaming apps from telling customers about cheaper subscription deals outside the App Store. The EU later won its fight to make Apple pay $14.4 billion in unpaid taxes.

"He [Cook] said something that was interesting," Trump said. "He said they're using that to run their enterprise, meaning Europe is their enterprise. "I said, 'That's a lot... But Tim, I got to get elected first, but I'm not going to let them take advantage of our companies -- that won't, you know, be happening.'" Trump has talked to several Big Tech executives over the past several months. "During an interview this week, Trump said he spoke with Google CEO Sundar Pichai to complain about all the 'bad stories' the search engine shows about him," notes The Verge. "Elon Musk recently spoke at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Trump over the summer 'a few times,' according to the former president."

After nearly 30 years of covering Kamala Harris, the San Francisco Chronicle is now letting ChatGPT do it. Sort of...

"We're introducing a new way to engage with our decades of coverage: an AI-powered tool designed to answer your questions about Harris' life, her journey through public service and her presidential campaign," they announced this week: Drawing from thousands of articles written, edited and published by Chronicle journalists since 1995, this tool aims to give readers informed answers about a politician who rose from the East Bay and is now campaigning to become one of the world's most powerful people.

Why don't we have a similar tool for Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president? The answer isn't political. It's because we've been covering Harris since her career began in the Bay Area and have an archive of vetted articles to draw from. Our newsroom can't offer the same level of expertise when it comes to the former president.
The tool's answers are "drawn directly from decades of extensive reporting," according to a notice toward the bottom of the page. "The tool searches through thousands of Chronicle articles, with new stories added every hour as they are published, ensuring readers have access to the most up-to-date information." Our news assistant is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o mini model, combined with OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large model, to deliver precise answers based on user queries. The Chronicle articles in this tool's corpus span from April 24, 1995, to the present, covering the length of Harris' career.

This corpus wouldn't be possible without the hard work of the Chronicle's journalists.
Questions go through OpenAI's moderation filter and "relevance check" — and if it asks how to vote, "we redirect readers to appropriate resources including canivote.org..."