Township Leader Resigns in Tears Over OpenAI Data Center Death Threats

The treasurer of Saline Township, Michigan, publicly resigned last week citing death threats she’d received related to the construction of an Oracle and OpenAI datacenter.  “I’m submitting my resignation effective May 29th. I can’t take it anymore. The threats. The ‘I’m gonna tar and feather you.’ I hope you get bit by ah […] it’s…

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War and Data Centers Are Driving Up the Cost of Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way for militaries to beat their…

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University Claims Withholding Water From Nuclear Weapons Data Center Is ‘Unlawfully Discriminatory’ to Data Centers

The University of Michigan has sent a legal threat over a yearlong pause that would prevent water hookup to a proposed nuclear weapons research and AI data center. Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Michigan are looking to build a $1.2 billion, 220,000 square foot data center in Ypsitlanti Township. On April 22,…

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The AI Hard Drive Shortage Is Making It More Expensive and Harder to Archive the Internet

Skyrocketing hard drive and storage costs caused by the AI data center boom are making it more expensive and more difficult for digital archivists, academics, Wikipedia, and hobby data hoarders to save data and archive the internet. Specific drives favored by some high profile organizations like the Internet Archive have become far more expensive or…

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Trump Wants to Double Production of New Nuclear Weapon Cores

Trump’s proposed 2027 budget would almost double the budget for plutonium pits, the chemical filled metal sphere inside a nuclear warhead that kicks off the explosion in a nuclear weapon. The same budget would slash almost $400 million from nuclear environmental cleanup. The budget request follows a leaked National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) memo calling…

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Podcast: How the FBI Extracted Deleted Signal Messages

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel…

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Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight

In February, Oklahoma native Darren Blanchard attended a city council meeting in Claremore with the plan to speak out against a proposed datacenter in the community. When he went a few seconds over his allotted 3 minute time limit, the city ordered Blanchard arrested and transported to the county jail. The city charged Blanchard with…

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