Microsoft goes quiet after church groups ask for 1% of data center costs

Microsoft goes quiet after church groups ask for 1% of data center costs

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

Microsoft has spent all year telling communities that when it brings a new data center into their area, it is committed to being a “good neighbor." It will pay local property taxes that support local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries, and it will invest in “vital services the community cares about,” the company promised. And it has sent liaisons into those communities to learn what those needs are.

But ask those liaisons how much the company is willing to invest, and the answers can be hard to come by.

At community meetings, Microsoft representatives have seemed unprepared to answer questions that go beyond the company's “good neighbor” campaign materials, Ars has learned. The company has acknowledged in public-facing documents that simply matching its employees’ charitable donations—which totaled $229 million across 29,000 nonprofits in 2024—isn't enough. But it has been vague about what more substantial local investments might look like. And to critics, Microsoft’s local investments seem especially small compared with the estimated hundreds of millions in state-level tax breaks that data center developers get in 38 states—exemptions that often last more than a decade.

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How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump’s culture war

How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump’s culture war

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared.

The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”

It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

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Tesla’s big electric truck faces an even bigger infrastructure challenge

Tesla’s big electric truck faces an even bigger infrastructure challenge

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has insisted investors think of his electric automaker as a robotics and autonomous vehicle company now. He’s targeted a $20 trillion valuation—nearly four times the value of market leader Nvidia—on that premise. But his Tesla team was in Sparks, Nevada, on Thursday to focus on, well, an electric vehicle: the long-awaited Tesla Semi.

The Semi concept first rolled onto a Tesla event stage in late 2017. Nearly a decade later, Tesla officially launched high-volume production at a livestreamed but invite-only event at the company’s factory. It targeted a niche audience: the cost-conscious people who manage large trucking fleets. A handful of them, all men, trooped across the stage to be thanked for their orders to a pulsing techno beat.

“It’s going to be, really, a driver’s truck. It’s like a sports car in truck form.” Musk said in a pre-taped video played during the evening event. (Musk, for years the ringmaster at Tesla’s circus-like events, skipped his second vehicle debut in a row; he was attending a White House China State Dinner featuring President Xi Jinping.)

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Can Trump ever be wrong? His pick to lead FDA refused to say.

Can Trump ever be wrong? His pick to lead FDA refused to say.

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

Heidi Overton, President Trump's nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, went before the Senate health committee Thursday, facing questions about her stances on vaccines, flavored vapes, birth control, and abortion, among other issues. She spent nearly two hours stonewalling senators, even on softball questions.

Overton, a physician with a doctoral degree in clinical investigation, is currently the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. She previously worked at a conservative think tank and has taken a clear stance opposing abortion, raising obvious questions about her objectivity. The FDA is currently reviewing the safety of the abortion pill, mifepristone, despite extensive data showing it is extremely safe.

Overton also notably stood behind President Trump at a press conference in August during which Trump falsely called the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine "quite lethal." He further claimed that vaccine doses for infants are "like the size of a soda bottle," and called for the MMR vaccine to be split into three separate immunizations, despite no evidence of benefit from such a split and no such individual immunizations being available in the US.

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Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features

Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

A US appeals court today approved the Department of Defense's blacklisting of Anthropic technology. Judges decided the Trump administration had authority to blacklist Anthropic for withholding certain AI features from the military even if Anthropic had no malicious intent.

In a 2-1 ruling issued by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a panel of judges said the "case raises profoundly difficult questions about the appropriate military uses of an almost unimaginably powerful new technology." The US "raises the deeply sobering prospect of overly constrained AI models shutting down unexpectedly and thus causing important military operations to fail. Anthropic raises the deeply sobering prospect of unconstrained AI models hallucinating inappropriate targets for lethal military force," the ruling said.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "must determine how best to balance the competing risks," the court said. "In doing so here, the Secretary did not transgress any limits on his authority under the Supply Chain Security Act or the Constitution. Accordingly, we deny the petitions for review." The same court previously denied Anthropic's emergency motion for a stay in April.

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Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements

Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Tesla’s pivot from making electric cars to humanoid robots is facing challenges because of complex robot hands and disgruntled employees pushing back against training their robotic replacements. The struggle to scale up production comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet the company’s future on AI and robotics.

As someone who frequently makes claims that fail to materialize, Musk has described the Optimus humanoid robot as potentially “the biggest product ever” during Tesla’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call. But he also acknowledged that making an autonomous humanoid robot capable of handling many different tasks is “one of the hardest things to solve”—and now extensive reporting by The Information has revealed multiple complications that Tesla is trying to tackle while developing general-purpose robots and scaling up for mass production.

Tesla’s Fremont factory in California has already stopped making the Model S sedan and Model X SUV as of May 2026, with the company switching both line workers and engineers over to working on Optimus, according to The Information.

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Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center.

The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their devices, or divulge personal information. From August 31 to September 14, security firm Netskope observed users from 619 customer organizations click on the malicious ads, although none of them were actually scammed because Netskope blocked the content.

Roughly 62 percent of the organizations were based in the US, with Japan and Australia accounting for the Nos. 2 and 3 spots. Since the firm has visibility into only a tiny sliver of Internet activity, the number of people exposed to the ads—including those who fell victim to it—is likely much higher. Netskope tracked more than 250 Google Ads campaign IDs across at least 284 legitimate publisher sites.

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