A customer refuels a car at a Chevron gas station in San Francisco on Thursday, May 22nd, 2025. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Things are getting nutty in the world of vehicle fuel economy standards.
Last week, Transportation Secretary (and ex-reality TV contestant) Sean Duffy declared that he was resetting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that govern vehicle fuel efficiency in the US. Duffy confidently declared that the current CAFE standards, in which fuel economy would increase 2 percent per year for passenger car model years 2027-2031 and 2 percent per year for light-duty trucks model years 2029-2031, "illegally" considered electric vehicles, and therefore were null and void. So while it works on reversing those standards, Duffy said the Trump administration would simply stop enforcing the current ones.
The rules were being rewritten to make "vehicles more affordable and easier to manufacture in the United States," Duffy said. Experts say rolling back the CAFE standards will have the opposite effect: cars will be less fuel efficient, forcing their owners to shell out more for gas over time.
While it works on reversing those standards, Duffy said the Trump administration would simply stop enforcing the current ones
"Making our vehicles less fuel efficient hurts families by forc …
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A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.
CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest’s air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts.
The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.
Eater of streamers, studios, and those delicious Mickey Waffles, the Walt Disney Company is rubbing its hands together and licking its lips, as DoorDash reports that the rest of its Hulu order is on the way. Per Reuters, Disney has completed its two-year appraisal process of Hulu and finalized its purchase of the streamer. It’s a long time coming. Disney acquired a majority stake in the service in its purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019. At the time, Comcast agreed to fork over its 33% stake in the streamer. Six years later, Disney has completed its order, agreeing to pay Comcast an additional $439 million for The Bear‘s den.
The number is likely a massive disappointment for Comcast. In 2023, Disney announced it would pay at least $8.61 billion for Comcast’s stake. However, Comcast contested that the streamer was worth much more and demanded an additional $5 billion, starting a years-long appraisal process that resulted in a much smaller evaluation. Disney will pay only a fraction of what Comcast wanted.
In a statement, presumably with little crumbs of Nine Perfect Strangers and The Handmaid’s Tale dotting his lips, Bob Iger said the purchase will lead to “deeper and more seamless integration of Hulu’s general entertainment content with Disney+ and, soon, with ESPN’s direct-to-consumer product.” Isn’t it nice living in a world where two or three entertainment conglomerates essentially own everything? It paves the way for the seamless integration of subscribers’ cash with Disney’s coffers.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube videos may be getting a bit more pernicious soon. Google's dominant video platform has spent years removing discriminatory and conspiracy content from its platform in accordance with its usage guidelines, but the site is now reportedly adopting a lighter-touch approach to moderation. A higher bar for content removal will allow more potentially inflammatory content to remain up in the "public interest." [...]
Beginning late last year, YouTube began informing moderators they should err on the side of caution when removing videos that are in the public interest. That includes user uploads that discuss issues like elections, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship. Previously, YouTube's policy told moderators to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated policies. Now, the exception cutoff has been increased to half. In addition, staff are now told to bring issues to managers if they are uncertain rather than removing the content themselves.
"Recognizing that the definition of 'public interest' is always evolving, we update our guidance for these exceptions to reflect the new types of discussion we see on the platform today," YouTube's Nicole Bell told the New York Times. "Our goal remains the same: to protect free expression on YouTube while mitigating egregious harm."
Most of the videos hosted on YouTube won't be affected by this change, the company says. "These exceptions apply to a small fraction of the videos on YouTube, but are vital for ensuring important content remains available," a YouTube spokesperson tells Ars. "This practice allows us to prevent, for example, an hours-long news podcast from being removed for showing one short clip of violence."
Over the weekend in Los Angeles, as National Guard troops deployed into the city, cops shot a journalist with less-lethal rounds, and Waymo cars burned, the skies were bustling with activity. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flew Black Hawk helicopters; multiple aircraft from a nearby military air base circled repeatedly overhead; and one aircraft flew at an altitude and in a particular pattern consistent with a high-powered surveillance drone, according to public flight data reviewed by 404 Media.
The data shows that essentially every sort of agency, from local police, to state authorities, to federal agencies, to the military, had some sort of presence in the skies above the ongoing anti-Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) protests in Los Angeles. The protests started on Friday in response to an ICE raid at a Home Depot; those tensions flared when President Trump ordered the National Guard to deploy into the city.
On Saturday 404 Media started looking for government aircraft in flight tracking data published by ADS-B Exchange, a site where a community of feeders provide real-time updates on the location of flights. Law enforcement and other authorities often fly aircraft above protests. Sometimes this can be for visual surveillance, either with a crew’s own observations or with video equipment. Some aircraft are also used for electronic surveillance, such as planes loaded with IMSI-catchers that can record what phones were in a certain location at a particular time.
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Do you know anything else about these flights? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
On Saturday an aircraft with no callsign, which is usually broadcast by an aircraft to identify itself, took off from March Air Reserve Base to the east of Los Angeles, before repeatedly circling above Paramount, where many of the protests were at the time. It flew at an altitude of around 9,000 feet for hours before eventually returning to the base. On Sunday, two aircraft took off from the same air base and circled above both Paramount and downtown Los Angeles, where by Sunday many of the protests had moved to.
Because the aircraft did not have callsigns, it was not immediately possible to tell what specific model of aircraft these were. The National Guard directed a request for comment to USNORTHCOM. USNORTHCOM told 404 Media in an email “I'm sorry; we don't have any comment about this aircraft.” The main Pentagon press department directed an inquiry to the Air Force. The Air Force directed a request for comment to the California Air National Guard and DHS.
On Sunday another aircraft with no callsign flew above Paramount and downtown Los Angeles at a much higher altitude of around 23,000 feet. This aircraft flew in distinctive hexagonal patterns circling the protest areas. Eventually it left the Los Angeles area and flew to the U.S. border with Mexico. Again, because the aircraft had no callsign it is not clear which type of aircraft this was, but the flight pattern and altitude strongly resembles that of a high-powered surveillance drone. In 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew one of its Predator drones over Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests in a similar manner, an aircraft most people might assume is limited to warzones overseas but is regularly flown over the borders with Mexico and Canada. I then found CBP was regularly flying Predator drones above U.S. cities. CBP acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a statement in time for publication.
On Sunday, a Black Hawk helicopter registered to CBP repeatedly flew in tight circles above downtown Los Angeles, according to the flight path data. Before that, a Black Hawk helicopter was filmed dropping off items into the city.
The California Highway Patrol repeatedly flew its own small aircraft over the protests. The agency told 404 Media in an email “Our aircraft has been deployed to monitor the situation and ensure public safety. Deployment of aircraft is typical during fast moving situations such as this. Through real-time aerial support, the aircraft helps ground personnel respond more effectively to incidents while reducing the risk of harm to all involved.”
“We want to be clear: the California Highway Patrol (CHP) is not and will not be involved in immigration enforcement operations. The CHP aims to serve all Californians with professionalism, integrity, and respect. We are also committed to protecting the rights and safety of every person who lives, works, or travels on California's roadways,” the statement added.
Update: this piece has been updated with a response from the Air Force.
AppleInsider reports:
The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. "Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer...
Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the "marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen.
He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products.
Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a "software erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development.
In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.")
Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history."
If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line: "I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."
Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985"), the influence of which cannot be overstated.
I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.
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