Roblox rolls out parental controls and gatekeeping features, like letting parents link accounts with a child and banning text chat for under 13s outside games (Sarah E. Needleman/Wall Street Journal)

Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal: Roblox rolls out parental controls and gatekeeping features, like letting parents link accounts with a child and banning text chat for under 13s outside games  —  Videogame company has denied the allegations and says the new protections were planned before a short seller’s report

Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt begins an early trial of its digital wallet in Belgium to help deliver social services to 7M citizens, as he worries over AI’s rise (Parmy Olson/Bloomberg)

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt begins an early trial of its digital wallet in Belgium to help deliver social services to 7M citizens, as he worries over AI’s rise  —  The inventor of the World Wide Web is on a laudable mission to give everyone control of their online data.  He’s fighting an […]

How Substack is betting on politics content and recruiting stars like Nate Silver, as profits remain elusive; sources: Elon Musk sought to buy it in April 2023 (New York Times)

New York Times: How Substack is betting on politics content and recruiting stars like Nate Silver, as profits remain elusive; sources: Elon Musk sought to buy it in April 2023  —  The newsletter start-up, which once drew an overture from Elon Musk, is betting on politics content and recruiting stars.

Sources: Trump’s transition team is looking for candidates to lead the US Department of Transportation and develop a federal framework for autonomous vehicles (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: Sources: Trump’s transition team is looking for candidates to lead the US Department of Transportation and develop a federal framework for autonomous vehicles  —  – Policy leaders are being pursued for key Musk priority  — Tesla CEO, named to efficiency role, plans push on robotaxis

Sources: CISA’s director Jen Easterly and deputy director Nitin Natarajan plan to leave the agency on January 20, 2025, the day Trump will be inaugurated (Nextgov/FCW)

Nextgov/FCW: Sources: CISA’s director Jen Easterly and deputy director Nitin Natarajan plan to leave the agency on January 20, 2025, the day Trump will be inaugurated  —  Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly speaks during Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2024 on February 7, 2024.

An interview with El Salvador’s top crypto regulator Juan Carlos Reyes on taking a tech-minded approach to crypto regulation, how his agency works, and more (Tom Carreras/CoinDesk)

Tom Carreras / CoinDesk: An interview with El Salvador’s top crypto regulator Juan Carlos Reyes on taking a tech-minded approach to crypto regulation, how his agency works, and more  —  The National Commission of Digital Assets is the agency in charge of regulating crypto in El Salvador, the first nation to accept Bitcoin as legal […]

Q&A with Jakob Uszkoreit on his contribution to the Attention Is All You Need paper, Google’s conservatism, ChatGPT’s success, biological computers, and more (Benj Edwards/Ars Technica)

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Q&A with Jakob Uszkoreit on his contribution to the Attention Is All You Need paper, Google’s conservatism, ChatGPT’s success, biological computers, and more  —  In 2017, eight machine-learning researchers at Google released a groundbreaking research paper called Attention Is All You Need …

The US FTC’s DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021 (Federal Trade Commission)

Federal Trade Commission: The US FTC’s DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021  —  FTC releases annual Do Not Call Registry Data Book showing total reports about unwanted calls decreased further in 2024

US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks (GovTech)

GovTech: US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks  —  A new series of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is designed to enable cloud providers, AI developers …

Four from MIT named 2025 Rhodes Scholars

Yiming Chen ’24, Wilhem Hector, Anushka Nair, and David Oluigbo have been selected as 2025 Rhodes Scholars and will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. In addition to MIT’s two U.S. Rhodes winners, Ouigbo and Nair, two affiliates were awarded international Rhodes Scholarships: Chen for Rhodes’ China constituency and […]

FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK’s Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners (Ben Quinn/The Guardian)

Ben Quinn / The Guardian: FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK’s Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners  —  Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

Ukraine’s drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion’s tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine’s drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion’s tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming  —  Kyiv’s drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can’t be electronically jammed

An interview with Apple’s Tim Millet and Tom Boger on Apple’s chip strategy, making big changes to the Neural Engine after the 2017 transformer paper, and more (Nandagopal Rajan/The Indian Express)

Nandagopal Rajan / The Indian Express: An interview with Apple’s Tim Millet and Tom Boger on Apple’s chip strategy, making big changes to the Neural Engine after the 2017 transformer paper, and more  —  ‘No other platform can touch our power performance per watt.  That’s the tangible benefit to users,’ Tom Boger, Vice President of […]

Many Netflix viewers faced issues while watching the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight and the undercard bouts, including the stream glitching and losing sound (Dominic Patten/Deadline)

Dominic Patten / Deadline: Many Netflix viewers faced issues while watching the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight and the undercard bouts, including the stream glitching and losing sound  —  From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to […]

New emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI show Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever had serious concerns about Sam Altman as early as 2017 (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer)

Shakeel Hashim / Transformer: New emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI show Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever had serious concerns about Sam Altman as early as 2017  —  New emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI reveal that the company’s fondness of drama is hardly new.

One year after Sam Altman was dramatically ousted and reinstated, OpenAI remains dominant as it continues to push ahead on impressive new products (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg: One year after Sam Altman was dramatically ousted and reinstated, OpenAI remains dominant as it continues to push ahead on impressive new products  —  The ChatGPT maker is still the company to beat in AI despite going through a turbulent period.  —  One year after Sam Altman’s dramatic …

Palantir stock jumps 9% after announcing a move from the NYSE to the Nasdaq; its stock is up 50%+ since reporting better-than-expected earnings on November 4 (Ari Levy/CNBC)

Ari Levy / CNBC: Palantir stock jumps 9% after announcing a move from the NYSE to the Nasdaq; its stock is up 50%+ since reporting better-than-expected earnings on November 4  —  Palantir shares continued their torrid run on Friday, soaring 11% to a record, after the developer of software for the military announced plans …

Ensuring a durable transition

To fend off the worst impacts of climate change, “we have to decarbonize, and do it even faster,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Annual Research Conference. “But how the heck do we actually achieve this goal when […]

J-PAL North America announces new evaluation incubator collaborators from state and local governments

J-PAL North America recently selected government partners for the 2024-25 Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) Evaluation Incubator cohort. Selected collaborators will receive funding and technical assistance to develop or launch a randomized evaluation for one of their programs. These collaborations represent jurisdictions across the United States and demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for evidence-based […]