A Microsoft employee has managed to circumvent a block instituted earlier this week that limited mentions of “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide” in email subject lines or in the body of a message. Nisreen Jaradat, a senior tech support engineer at Microsoft, emailed thousands of employees on May 23rd with the subject line: “You can’t get rid of us.”“As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company,” the note, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, reads. “I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees.”It’s not immediately clear how Jaradat got around the block. The email calls on Microsoft employees to sign a petition by the No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) group, which urges Microsoft to end its contracts with the Israeli government. NOAA is behind several high-profile protest actions in recent weeks, and Jaradat, a member, also encourages colleagues to join the group in different capacities. Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw directed The Verge to a previous statement it shared when the block was initially reported, saying that mass emailing colleagues “about any topic not related to work is not appropriate,” and that the company has “taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”NOAA organizer Hossam Nasr called Microsoft’s decision to block words “particularly egregious.”“Microsoft keeps telling its workers to go through the appropriate channels, and yet time and time again, those who speak up in ‘appropriate channels’ from viva engage posts to HR tickets are silenced or ignored,” Nasr said in a statement. “What Microsoft is really telling us is: make it convenient for us to ignore you. Nisreen’s email summarizes it: they cannot get rid of us. We will continue protesting in all ways big and small until our demands are met.”Microsoft put this email block into place the same week as its Build developer conference, during which current and former Microsoft employees, as well as hundreds of others, have been protesting against the company’s contracts with the Israeli government. Microsoft employee Joe Lopez disrupted Build’s opening keynote on May 19th and then sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees. The company fired him the same day.A Palestinian tech worker then disrupted Microsoft’s CoreAI head during his presentation at Build on May 20th. The next day, two former Microsoft employees disrupted a Build session, and a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI moments later. There were also protests outside the conference venue on multiple days this week.This week’s protests and emails come just days after Microsoft acknowledged its cloud and AI contracts with Israel, but it claimed that an internal and external review had found “no evidence” that its tools were used to “target or harm people” in Gaza.Read the full email below:Yesterday, Microsoft chose to utterly and completely discriminate against an entire nation, an entire people, and an entire community by blocking all employees from sending any outbound email containing the words “Palestine”, “Gaza”, “genocide”, or “apartheid”. Microsoft leaders justified this blatant censorship by saying it was to prevent you from receiving emails like the email that you are reading right now. Even though Microsoft SLT are aware that this “short term solution” is easily bypassable, as this email clearly proves, Microsoft still doubled down, insisted on not rolling back the policy, and decided to continue targeting and repressing their Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied workers. They refused to revoke this censorship tactic, despite its potential illegality, dozens of employees expressing how racist of a decision it was, and even leaders admitting they see how it can be perceived as discriminatory and targeted. This further proves how little Microsoft values Palestinian lives and Palestinian suffering.As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company. I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees. Had this useless and discriminatory policy been revoked, as I tried to request numerous times through so-called “proper channels”[1][2], I would not be sending you all this email.Despite claiming to have “heard concerns from our employees and the public regarding Microsoft technologies used by the Israeli military to target civilians or cause harm in the conflict in Gaza” in a statement riddled with lies, admissions, and absurd justifications, Microsoft has shown that they are utterly uninterested in hearing what we have to say.Microsoft claims that they “provide many avenues for all voices to be heard”. However, whenever we try to discuss anything substantial about divesting from genocide in the “approved channels”, workers are retaliated against, doxxed, or silenced. Microsoft has deleted relevant employee questions in AMAs with executives and shut down Viva Engage posts in dedicated channels for asking SLT questions. Managers have warned outspoken directs to stay quiet and have even openly retaliated against them. When my community tries to flag issues and concerns to HR/GER/WIT, we have been met with racist outcomes with double standards. Throughout all this, Microsoft has sent a clear message to their employees: There are no proper channels at Microsoft to express your concerns, disagreements, or even questions about how Microsoft is using your labor to kill Palestinian babies.Over this past week, Microsoft has shown their true face, brutalizing, detaining, firing, pepper spraying, threatening and insulting workers and former workers protesting at Microsoft Build. This email censorship is simply the latest example in a long list of recent extreme and outrageous escalations by Microsoft against my community. Enough is enough.It has become clear that Microsoft will not listen to us out of the goodness of their hearts.Microsoft will not change their stance just because it is the moral or even legal thing to do. Microsoft will only divest from genocide once it becomes more expensive for them to kill Palestinians than not. Right now, Microsoft makes a lot of money from genocide-profiteering, so we must make support for genocide even more expensive.The situation in Palestine is more urgent by the minute. More and more Palestinians are being killed of starvation under the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)‘s bombing campaign, invasion, and siege that has martyred an estimated 400,000 Palestinians. The IOF have kidnapped over 16,000 Palestinians and placed them in torture and rape camps. 1.93 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, and over 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank.While a hostile work environment is difficult, it cannot compare to the horrors taking place in Palestine - horrors that we as Microsoft employees are complicit in. These futile attempts to silence our community, while painful at times, are evidence that the pressure we are applying is working. This is not the time for baby steps or gradual progress. Starving infants cannot wait any longer. We, as a company of over 200,000 employees, are providing the technological backbone for Israel’s genocidal war machine in Palestinian. We, as employees of this company, have a responsibility to end our employer’s complicity in this AI-assisted genocide! Now is the time to escalate against Microsoft and end this Microsoft-powered genocide!I am calling on every employee of conscience to:Sign No Azure for Apartheid’s petition calling for a termination of all Microsoft contracts with the Israeli military and government: https://noaa.cc/petitionStrongly consider whether you want to stay in the company and fight for change from within, or if you want to leave and stop contributing labor to genocide.If you choose to leave Microsoft to no longer be complicit in genocide, do not go quietly. The No Azure for Apartheid campaign is ready to help you make an impact on your way out for Palestine, and we will also do our best to provide you support before leaving. Reach out to us expressing your interest to leave here.If you choose to stay, continue to fight from the inside to end Microsoft’s, and your own, complicity in war crimes, join the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. If you are worried about being public with your affiliation, rest assured that as a worker-led grassroots movement, we have members with all levels of anonymity and risk level. Some of our members are publicly visible and will even publicly confront our war-criminal executives, such as Satya Nadella, Mustafa Suleyman, and Jay Parikh at major Microsoft events like the 50th Anniversary celebration and Microsoft Build. Other members choose to stay completely anonymous and still contribute to the critical work of the campaign. There is room for everyone: https://noaa.cc/joinWhile I do understand that as Microsoft employees, we cannot fully boycott Microsoft, most of us can focus on the priority targets set by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, which recently set Microsoft as a priority target. The main target of the boycott is Microsoft Gaming, especially X-Box. We can also encourage our friends and family to boycott Microsoft where possible.To Microsoft Senior Leadership team specifically:You cannot silence Palestine.You cannot silence Gaza.You cannot hide your involvement in genocide and apartheid.Fre e PalestineNisreen JaradatSee More:

On Wednesday evening, the American Jewish Committee held a reception at DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. The gathering, aimed at Jewish foreign policy professionals between the ages of 22 and 45, featured speakers from humanitarian groups. One such groups, IsraAID, said in a statement that the event “focused on bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza through Israeli-Palestinian and regional collaboration.”At around 9 pm, a gunman killed two attendees leaving the event. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim: They were young people working at the Israeli Embassy and a couple planning to get married.Their murders were undoubtedly political. In video of the perpetrator’s arrest, he yells “free Palestine” — a slogan that eyewitnesses also heard him repeat after the killing. A manifesto, published on Twitter/X under the shooter’s name, lays out a clear motivation: punishing those he saw as complicit in Israel’s mass killing of the Palestinians.Reflecting on this sequence of events, it’s hard not to spiral into ever-greater depths of anger and despair. This is partly for personal reasons: I grew up Jewish in Washington, DC, and am the kind of young professional this event would be marketed to. But more fundamentally, it’s for political ones: these murders underscore how dangerous the current political moment is, and may materially make it worse.Wednesday was not the first time that a pro-Palestine activist in America attempted political murder. Last month, a man attempted to burn down the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania in retaliation for, in the suspect’s words, “what [Governor Josh Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people.”These events were not only predictable but predicted. Since October 7, 2023, prominent elements of the pro-Palestinian movement have glorified political violence. Though repeatedly warned that this was harmful, including by fellow critics of Israel’s war, this kind of talk became normalized — including in the sort of online left-wing social media spaces where the DC suspect apparently spent time. The vast majority of the pro-Palestine movement is peaceful, but the most radical subfaction created a climate where real-world violence might become more thinkable.“Fears of anti-Israel political violence on the left are real, and last night that threat became deadly,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of the pro-peace J Street activist group, said in an emailed statement. “We urge all those in the pro-Palestine movement to take stock of this moment and recognize the danger of extreme rhetoric as it hits the ears of unhinged individuals.”Moreover, the killing in DC actually endangers the chances for peace in Gaza — changing the domestic politics on Israel-Palestine in a way that decreases the chances of the US government reining in Israel even as it begins a nightmarishly violent offensive.“Every single act & word that can associate the Palestinian cause with terrorism, hatred & antisemitism is an act or word that hurts Palestinians in Washington, DC. [This] act of terrorism did all three,” writes Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at NYU Abu Dhabi.There is no good here, no silver lining. Two young people were murdered in cold blood by an ideologue who convinced himself that murder, not democratic activism, is the right way to advocate for the downtrodden. He is not the first to do so — and the track record of those like him is bloody.How pro-Palestine extremists made violence more likelySince the October 7 attacks, a number of leading American pro-Palestine voices have publicly and loudly embraced violence.Students for Justice in Palestine, the national convening group for campus protests, described Hamas’s killings on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Within Our Lifetime, a New York-based activist group that embraces violence as a Palestinian tactic, uses similar language. University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). Prominent left-wing media figures compared October 7 to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and valorized anti-Israel terrorist groups. Perhaps the most relevant case for current purposes is Khymani James, a Columbia student who served as a spokesperson for the campus protest group CUAD. James fantasized about going out and murdering “Zionists” — a loose label that could include, say, attendees at a Jewish networking group in DC. While CUAD initially condemned James, the group later reversed its stance and issued a statement calling for more violence.“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group said. “In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”I want to be clear: these extremists do not speak for the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists and demonstrators. There have only been a handful of incidents of violence at pro-Palestine rallies in the United States since October 7; these examples of extreme rhetoric are not a justification for painting an entire movement with a broad brush. And yet, the fact that there are influential organizations and individuals talking like this matters. It creates a social and political climate where violence targeting American Jews becomes more likely, even if we cannot (and should not) draw a straight line between any one instance of extreme rhetoric and the violence on Wednesday.In trying to understand the role of violent ideology in inciting terrorism, scholars Donald Holbrook and John Horgan suggest thinking of ideas as fundamentally “social” things. Most people who come across radical ideologies online, even explicitly pro-violence ones, do not become terrorists. But when there are communities either online or in person that are seen as validating violence, individuals become more likely to escalate to real-world killing.This is part of why we saw a deadly wave of white nationalist violence in 2019. Even though each killer acted independently, the existence of online spaces valorizing their acts of violence creates incentives for more people to turn violent.“The sharing of ideas that convey an understanding of collective grievance, aspiration and a sense of community is relevant to terrorism in a variety of often interweaving ways. Perhaps the most obvious concerns ways in which ideological output legitimizes certain targets or methods employed through terrorist violence,” they write.The DC shooter says something similar in his alleged manifesto. He writes that violence would have been justified as far back as 11 years ago, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. However, he writes, there were not enough Americans who would have agreed with his actions to make it politically effective. In 2014, he wrote, people would think it simply insane; today, he thinks “there are many Americans” who will see the killings as “highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”His expectations were not wrong. Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine journalists in America, published a post condemning the DC shooting — only to face a wall of replies justifying the violence. (“The only good zionist is a dead Zionist” is but one of many examples.)The likely political consequences for Palestinians are disastrousMore broadly, there is good reason to believe that the evil in Washington is likely to abet Israel’s ongoing evil in Gaza.Israel has launched a new offensive in Gaza with a horrifying endgame: essentially, the full and complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Yet the offensive is in its early days, and there is still time to prevent the worst-case outcome from coming true.A lot will depend on the political climate in the United States. As Israel’s chief weapons provider and patron, Washington has immense leverage to push Jerusalem to back down. The question is whether Trump cares enough to pick a fight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prior to the attack in DC, the two men were seemingly growing apart. Barak Ravid, Axios’s well-sourced Israel-Palestine correspondent, reports that Trump is increasingly “frustrated” with the ongoing Gaza war but still has not applied significant pressure on Netanyahu to back down.Now, however, the spotlight has been turned away from Gaza and back on the domestic American pro-Palestine movement — with much of the MAGA base seeing the Washington shooting as proof that the pro-Palestine left is indeed an internal enemy that deserves to be crushed. Andy McCarthy, a right-wing legal analyst at National Review, predicted a renewed crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech:I believe the consequences of these terrorist murders will include a stepping up of civil rights investigations of antisemitic violence and intimidation by the Justice Department, as well as a reaffirmation of the administration’s commitment to deport from the United States aliens — even legal aliens — who have participated in pro-Hamas agitation on American campuses and elsewhere.The political winds have shifted in a direction that makes the Trump administration less likely, not more likely, to confront Netanyahu.“Less than one full day ago the global news cycle, including Israeli newspapers, were focused on Israel terrorising foreign diplomats. Now a self-proclaimed ally’s act of terrorism shoots diplomats dead, shifts our focus & snatches that moral high ground away,” writes Marks, the NYU professor.It’s hard to say exactly how much the attack damages prospects for stopping Israel’s nightmare plan for Gaza. But we can be certain that it does not help.Much like the October 7 attacks themselves, the attack in DC is thus a double crime. It is an indefensible murder of innocents that also harmed the very people it claimed to be defending.See More: Politics

Microsoft has seen a growing number of protests at recent events over the Israeli military's use of the company's AI products.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesMicrosoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group.Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli military and government amid the ongoing assault on Gaza. The company has faced disruptions to its events, including protests from employees over its provision of cloud services and other critical infrastructure used by the Israeli military.Now, the company appears to be tightening its grip on internal discourse. The terms “Israel” and “P4lestine” do not trigger a block, the group said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Last week, Microsoft attempted to do damage control over its alleged involvement in the genocide. Ahead of the annual Build event, which is aimed at developers and tech enthusiasts from all over the world, the company issued a report claiming that an internal investigation found that Microsoft’s operations did not cause harm to civilians in Gaza.Microsoft’s provision of technology to the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD) was first reported by Drop Site News, alongside The Guardian and the magazine +972, based on a trove of internal documents. The reports revealed that Microsoft actively pursued contracts with the Israeli defense ministry, offering them tailored proposals and significant discounts on cloud and AI services. These deals, negotiated and escalated over months, positioned Microsoft as a key technology provider during Israeli military operations in Gaza.Microsoft did not dispute the authenticity of the documents or the reporting, but days before its major annual events released a statement saying that it conducted an internal review and “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people.” According to internal documents and emails reviewed by Drop Site, however, just days after the October 7, 2023 attack and the start of Israeli offensive in Gaza, Microsoft started pitching to the Israeli military, anticipating major military spending. Over the next few months, Israeli military became one of Microsoft’s top 500 global customers.On Monday, No Azure for Apartheid said, an employee who disrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote at the flagship Build conference was fired. On Tuesday, during a speech by Jay Parikh, head of CoreAI, a worker shouted, “Jay! My people are suffering! Cut ties with Israel! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!” before being swiftly removed by security.Leave a comment

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 data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city.Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park. The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert—and it’s just far enough away from Nevada’s communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. Read the full story. —James Temple This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution. Check out the rest of the package here. A new atomic clock in space could help us measure elevations on Earth In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss one. The misalignment happened because they measured elevation from sea level differently. To prevent such costly construction errors, in 2015 scientists in the International Association of Geodesy voted to adopt the International Height Reference Frame, or IHRF, a worldwide standard for elevation.Now, a decade after its adoption, scientists are looking to update the standard—by using the most precise clock ever to fly in space. Read the full story. —Sophia Chen Three takeaways about AI’s energy use and climate impacts —Casey CrownhartThis week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself. This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O’Donnell (and the work of many others on our team). Over that time, with the help of leading researchers, we quantified the energy and emissions impacts of individual queries to AI models and tallied what it all adds up to, both right now and for the years ahead. There’s a lot of data to dig through, and I hope you’ll take the time to explore the whole story. But in the meantime, here are three of my biggest takeaways from working on this project. Read the full story.This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again. Artificial intelligence comes with a shimmer and a sheen of magical thinking. And if we’re not careful, politicians, employers, and other decision-makers may accept at face value the idea that machines can and should replace human judgment and discretion. One way to combat that might be resurrecting the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional think tank that detected lies and tested tech until it was shuttered in 1995. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI startupThe former Apple design guru will work with Sam Altman to design an entirely new range of devices. (NYT $)+ The deal is worth a whopping $6.5 billion. (Bloomberg $)+ Altman gave OpenAI staff a preview of its AI ‘companion’ devices. (WSJ $)+ AI products to date have failed to set the world alight. (The Atlantic $) 2 Microsoft has blocked employee emails containing ‘Gaza’ or ‘Palestine’Although the term ‘Israel’ does not trigger such a block. (The Verge)+ Protest group No Azure for Apartheid has accused the company of censorship. (Fortune $) 3 DOGE needs to do its work in secretThat’s what the Trump administration is claiming to the Supreme Court, at least. (Ars Technica)+ It’s trying to avoid being forced to hand over internal documents. (NYT $)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 4 US banks are racing to embrace cryptocurrencyAhead of new stablecoin legislation. (The Information $)+ Attendees at Trump’s crypto dinner paid over $1 million for the privilege. (NBC News)+ Bitcoin has surged to an all-time peak yet again. (Reuters) 5 China is making huge technological leapsThanks to the billions it’s poured into narrowing the gap between it and the US. (WSJ $)+ Nvidia’s CEO has branded America’s chip curbs on China ‘a failure.’ (FT $)+ There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Disordered eating content is rife on TikTokBut a pocket of creators are dedicated to debunking the worst of it. (Wired $) 7 The US military is interested in the world’s largest aircraftThe gigantic WindRunner plane will have an 80-metre wingspan. (New Scientist $)+ Phase two of military AI has arrived. (MIT Technology Review) 8 How AI is shaking up animationNew tools are slashing the costs of creating episodes by up to 90%. (NYT $)+ Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Tesla’s Cybertruck is a flopSorry, Elon. (Fast Company $)+ The vehicles’ resale value is plummeting. (The Daily Beast) 10 Google’s new AI video generator loves this terrible jokeWhich appears to originate from a Reddit post. (404 Media)+ What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “It feels like we are marching off a cliff.” —An unnamed software engineering vice president jokes that future developers conferences will be attended by the AI agents companies like Microsoft are racing to deploy, Semafor reports. One more thing What does GPT-3 “know” about me?One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it.These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s former AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found. We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Don’t shoot the messenger, but it seems like there’s a new pizza king in town ($)+ Ranked: every Final Destination film, from worst to best.+ Who knew that jelly could help to preserve coral reefs? Not I.+ A new generation of space archaeologists are beavering away to document our journeys to the stars.

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 data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park.The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert—and it’s just far enough away from Nevada’s communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. Read the full story. —James Temple This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution. Check out the rest of the package here. A new atomic clock in space could help us measure elevations on Earth In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss one. The misalignment happened because they measured elevation from sea level differently. To prevent such costly construction errors, in 2015 scientists in the International Association of Geodesy voted to adopt the International Height Reference Frame, or IHRF, a worldwide standard for elevation. Now, a decade after its adoption, scientists are looking to update the standard—by using the most precise clock ever to fly in space. Read the full story. —Sophia Chen Three takeaways about AI’s energy use and climate impacts —Casey Crownhart This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself. This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O’Donnell (and the work of many others on our team). Over that time, with the help of leading researchers, we quantified the energy and emissions impacts of individual queries to AI models and tallied what it all adds up to, both right now and for the years ahead. There’s a lot of data to dig through, and I hope you’ll take the time to explore the whole story. But in the meantime, here are three of my biggest takeaways from working on this project. Read the full story.This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again. Artificial intelligence comes with a shimmer and a sheen of magical thinking. And if we’re not careful, politicians, employers, and other decision-makers may accept at face value the idea that machines can and should replace human judgment and discretion. One way to combat that might be resurrecting the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional think tank that detected lies and tested tech until it was shuttered in 1995. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI startup The former Apple design guru will work with Sam Altman to design an entirely new range of devices. (NYT $)+ The deal is worth a whopping $6.5 billion. (Bloomberg $)+ Altman gave OpenAI staff a preview of its AI ‘companion’ devices. (WSJ $)+ AI products to date have failed to set the world alight. (The Atlantic $)2 Microsoft has blocked employee emails containing ‘Gaza’ or ‘Palestine’ Although the term ‘Israel’ does not trigger such a block. (The Verge)+ Protest group No Azure for Apartheid has accused the company of censorship. (Fortune $) 3 DOGE needs to do its work in secret That’s what the Trump administration is claiming to the Supreme Court, at least. (Ars Technica)+ It’s trying to avoid being forced to hand over internal documents. (NYT $)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)4 US banks are racing to embrace cryptocurrency Ahead of new stablecoin legislation. (The Information $)+ Attendees at Trump’s crypto dinner paid over $1 million for the privilege. (NBC News)+ Bitcoin has surged to an all-time peak yet again. (Reuters)5 China is making huge technological leaps Thanks to the billions it’s poured into narrowing the gap between it and the US. (WSJ $)+ Nvidia’s CEO has branded America’s chip curbs on China ‘a failure.’ (FT $)+ There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review)6 Disordered eating content is rife on TikTokBut a pocket of creators are dedicated to debunking the worst of it. (Wired $) 7 The US military is interested in the world’s largest aircraftThe gigantic WindRunner plane will have an 80-metre wingspan. (New Scientist $) + Phase two of military AI has arrived. (MIT Technology Review)8 How AI is shaking up animationNew tools are slashing the costs of creating episodes by up to 90%. (NYT $) + Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry. (MIT Technology Review)9 Tesla’s Cybertruck is a flop Sorry, Elon. (Fast Company $)+ The vehicles’ resale value is plummeting. (The Daily Beast)10 Google’s new AI video generator loves this terrible joke Which appears to originate from a Reddit post. (404 Media)+ What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “It feels like we are marching off a cliff.” —An unnamed software engineering vice president jokes that future developers conferences will be attended by the AI agents companies like Microsoft are racing to deploy, Semafor reports. One more thing What does GPT-3 “know” about me?One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it. These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s former AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + Don’t shoot the messenger, but it seems like there’s a new pizza king in town 🍕 ($)+ Ranked: every Final Destination film, from worst to best.+ Who knew that jelly could help to preserve coral reefs? Not I.+ A new generation of space archaeologists are beavering away to document our journeys to the stars.

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 data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park.The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert—and it’s just far enough away from Nevada’s communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. Read the full story. —James Temple This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution. Check out the rest of the package here. A new atomic clock in space could help us measure elevations on Earth In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters above the Swiss one. The misalignment happened because they measured elevation from sea level differently. To prevent such costly construction errors, in 2015 scientists in the International Association of Geodesy voted to adopt the International Height Reference Frame, or IHRF, a worldwide standard for elevation. Now, a decade after its adoption, scientists are looking to update the standard—by using the most precise clock ever to fly in space. Read the full story. —Sophia Chen Three takeaways about AI’s energy use and climate impacts —Casey Crownhart This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself. This data-heavy story is the result of over six months of reporting by me and my colleague James O’Donnell (and the work of many others on our team). Over that time, with the help of leading researchers, we quantified the energy and emissions impacts of individual queries to AI models and tallied what it all adds up to, both right now and for the years ahead. There’s a lot of data to dig through, and I hope you’ll take the time to explore the whole story. But in the meantime, here are three of my biggest takeaways from working on this project. Read the full story.This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again. Artificial intelligence comes with a shimmer and a sheen of magical thinking. And if we’re not careful, politicians, employers, and other decision-makers may accept at face value the idea that machines can and should replace human judgment and discretion. One way to combat that might be resurrecting the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional think tank that detected lies and tested tech until it was shuttered in 1995. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI startup The former Apple design guru will work with Sam Altman to design an entirely new range of devices. (NYT $)+ The deal is worth a whopping $6.5 billion. (Bloomberg $)+ Altman gave OpenAI staff a preview of its AI ‘companion’ devices. (WSJ $)+ AI products to date have failed to set the world alight. (The Atlantic $)2 Microsoft has blocked employee emails containing ‘Gaza’ or ‘Palestine’ Although the term ‘Israel’ does not trigger such a block. (The Verge)+ Protest group No Azure for Apartheid has accused the company of censorship. (Fortune $) 3 DOGE needs to do its work in secret That’s what the Trump administration is claiming to the Supreme Court, at least. (Ars Technica)+ It’s trying to avoid being forced to hand over internal documents. (NYT $)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)4 US banks are racing to embrace cryptocurrency Ahead of new stablecoin legislation. (The Information $)+ Attendees at Trump’s crypto dinner paid over $1 million for the privilege. (NBC News)+ Bitcoin has surged to an all-time peak yet again. (Reuters)5 China is making huge technological leaps Thanks to the billions it’s poured into narrowing the gap between it and the US. (WSJ $)+ Nvidia’s CEO has branded America’s chip curbs on China ‘a failure.’ (FT $)+ There can be no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review)6 Disordered eating content is rife on TikTokBut a pocket of creators are dedicated to debunking the worst of it. (Wired $) 7 The US military is interested in the world’s largest aircraftThe gigantic WindRunner plane will have an 80-metre wingspan. (New Scientist $) + Phase two of military AI has arrived. (MIT Technology Review)8 How AI is shaking up animationNew tools are slashing the costs of creating episodes by up to 90%. (NYT $) + Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry. (MIT Technology Review)9 Tesla’s Cybertruck is a flop Sorry, Elon. (Fast Company $)+ The vehicles’ resale value is plummeting. (The Daily Beast)10 Google’s new AI video generator loves this terrible joke Which appears to originate from a Reddit post. (404 Media)+ What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “It feels like we are marching off a cliff.” —An unnamed software engineering vice president jokes that future developers conferences will be attended by the AI agents companies like Microsoft are racing to deploy, Semafor reports. One more thing What does GPT-3 “know” about me?One of the biggest stories in tech is the rise of large language models that produce text that reads like a human might have written it. These models’ power comes from being trained on troves of publicly available human-created text hoovered up from the internet. If you’ve posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world’s most popular LLMs.Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s former AI reporter, wondered what data these models might have on her—and how it could be misused. So she put OpenAI’s GPT-3 to the test. Read about what she found.We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + Don’t shoot the messenger, but it seems like there’s a new pizza king in town 🍕 ($)+ Ranked: every Final Destination film, from worst to best.+ Who knew that jelly could help to preserve coral reefs? Not I.+ A new generation of space archaeologists are beavering away to document our journeys to the stars.

Microsoft employees have discovered that any emails they send with the terms “Palestine” or “Gaza” are getting temporarily blocked from being sent to recipients inside and outside the company. The No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) protest group reports that “dozens of Microsoft workers” have been unable to send emails with the words “‘Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide” in email subject lines or in the body of a message.“Words like ‘Israel’ or ‘P4lestine’ do not trigger such a block,” say NOAA organizers. “NOAA believes this is an attempt by Microsoft to silence worker free speech and is a censorship enacted by Microsoft leadership to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies.“Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that it has implemented some form of email changes to reduce “politically focused emails” inside the company.“Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues,” says Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw in a statement to The Verge. “Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”The block of these terms comes in a week when current and former Microsoft employees have been protesting against the company’s contracts with the Israeli government during Microsoft’s Build developer conference. A Microsoft employee, Joe Lopez, disrupted the opening keynote of Build on Monday. During CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote Lopez yelled, “How about you show Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?” Lopez then sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, and the company fired him on Monday.On day two of Build, a Palestinian tech worker disrupted Microsoft’s head of CoreAI during his presentation, and then on Wednesday, two former Microsoft employees disrupted a Build session, and after the commotion a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI.This week’s protests come just days after Microsoft acknowledged its cloud and AI contracts with Israel, but claimed that an internal and external review had found “no evidence” that its tools were used to “target or harm people” in Gaza.See More:

Microsoft employees have discovered that any emails they send with the terms “Palestine” or “Gaza” are getting temporarily blocked from being sent to recipients inside and outside the company. The No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) protest group reports that “dozens of Microsoft workers” have been unable to send emails with the words “‘Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide” in email subject lines or in the body of a message.“Words like ‘Israel’ or ‘P4lestine’ do not trigger such a block,” say NOAA organizers. “NOAA believes this is an attempt by Microsoft to silence worker free speech and is a censorship enacted by Microsoft leadership to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies.“Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that it has implemented some form of email changes to reduce “politically focused emails” inside the company.“Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues,” says Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw in a statement to The Verge. “Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”The block of these terms comes in a week when current and former Microsoft employees have been protesting against the company’s contracts with the Israeli government during Microsoft’s Build developer conference. A Microsoft employee, Joe Lopez, disrupted the opening keynote of Build on Monday. During CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote Lopez yelled, “How about you show Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?” Lopez then sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, and the company fired him on Monday.On day two of Build, a Palestinian tech worker disrupted Microsoft’s head of CoreAI during his presentation, and then on Wednesday, two former Microsoft employees disrupted a Build session, and after the commotion a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI.This week’s protests come just days after Microsoft acknowledged its cloud and AI contracts with Israel, but claimed that an internal and external review had found “no evidence” that its tools were used to “target or harm people” in Gaza.See More: