This Week in Tech (Audio) – Details, episodes & analysis

Elon Musk faces a multi-billion dollar verdict after a California jury finds his tweets misled Twitter shareholders, raising the stakes for tech CEOs with unchecked social media influence. Plus, CBS kills its legendary radio news service while podcasting explodes, signaling a dramatic shift in how America consumes, trusts, and pays for news.

• CBS News Shutters Radio Service After Nearly a Century
• A US appeals court puts on hold an earlier ruling that had blocked Perplexity from using its agentic shopping tool to shop on Amazon's marketplace
• FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms
• The 49MB Web Page
• Microsoft unveils MAJOR improvements coming to Windows 11 this year — movable Taskbar, reduced RAM usage, less AI and ads, and much more CONFIRMED: "We are evolving how Windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar"
• Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access in June
• Meta changes course on Horizon Worlds VR shut-down
• Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups
• Jury agrees that Musk's tweets during Twitter takeover misled investors
• After three months, Samsung is ending sales of the $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold
• 200,000 Devices Erased? Pro-Iran Hackers Hit US Firm With Data-Wiping Attack
• Japan to allow 'proactive cyber-defense' from October 1st
• Sears Exposed AI Chatbot Phone Calls and Text Chats to Anyone on the Web
• Arizona AG files criminal charges against Kalshi over 'illegal gambling'
• Major League Baseball Steps Into the Prediction Markets, Strikes Deal With Polymarket
• Polymarket is opening a bar where you can drink and watch the world unravel in real time
• It's been 20 years since the first tweet
• Project Hail Mary is movie medicine
• The futurist who helped define tech trend reports just killed them (literally)
• This new cassette player has USB-C and Bluetooth, in case you want to ditch Spotify

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Janko Roettgers, Dan Patterson, and Lisa Schmeiser

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Big Tech just faced a courtroom reckoning, with Meta and Google found liable for platform "addictiveness" in a social media trial that could unleash a tidal wave of lawsuits. Find out why attorneys, entrepreneurs, and everyday users are suddenly on edge.

• Social media addiction lawsuits hit Meta, Google, YouTube
• Section 230 and First Amendment implications debated after court verdicts
• Supreme Court sides with Cox; ISPs not liable for user piracy
• Elon Musk's lawsuit over X (Twitter) ad boycotts thrown out
• Anthropic versus Department of Defense: AI contracting dispute and retaliation claims
• FCC's confusing foreign-made router ban and consumer tech fallout
• Major supply chain attack: LiteLLM malware infects AI devs
• The rise (and risks) of AI agents with voice, identity, and personification
• Turing Award honors pioneers of quantum cryptography
• Antimatter on the move: CERN's oddball truck experiment
• Sci-fi and reality blur as Neal Stephenson walks away from the metaverse
• Privacy and consent worries escalate with AI-powered recordings and surveillance
• Digital shelf pricing arrives at Walmart and Kroger
• Flipper Zero: voice-controlled hacking gadget gets an AI upgrade
• Age verification laws create headaches for OS and app developers
• Official White House app called out for surveillance and security blunders
• Is AI progress barreling toward a dystopian tech future?

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Harper Reed, Brian McCullough, and Cathy Gellis

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This week's episode confronts the mounting legal battles over addictive social apps, questioning whether court rulings should reshape Instagram and YouTube's design. Explore the heated clash between user autonomy, scientific uncertainty, and the next wave of regulation.

• NASA: Artemis II
• Artemis II Live Tracker – Real-Time Orion Spacecraft Position, Speed & Trajectory
• NASA did eventually solve Artemis II's Outlook glitch
• How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'? I mapped every one
• Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
• Claude Code's Source Didn't Leak. It Was Already Public for Years. | AfterPack Blog
• Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra
• OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for 'low hundreds of millions'
• The latest Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are more customizable and expensive
• After 16 Years and $8 Billion, the Military's New GPS Software Still Doesn't Work - Slashdot
• Why the Pentagon loves Xbox controllers for laser weapons
• Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai — Amazon reportedly declares "hard down" status for multiple zones
• Iran's hackers go to war
• Breaking down the government's bizarre router ban
• How to turn anything into a router
• You Can't Defeat the Robots!': Baseball's AI Strike Zone Is Must-Watch Television
• Tech Companies Are Trying To Neuter Colorado's Landmark Right-to-Repair Law - Slashdot
• Delta to Tap Amazon Satellite-Internet Service for In-Flight Wi-Fi
• The IBM scientist who rewrote the rules of information just won computing's highest prize
• Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones
• ZomboCom was stolen by hacker, put up for sale, and has now been...

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Patrick Beja, Abrar Al-Heeti, and Iain Thomson

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Anthropic has built an AI model so sharp it's being withheld from the public, sparking debate over who gets access to world-changing tech and who's left behind. Hear how this "too dangerous" AI could tip the balance for the world's most powerful players. This episode unpacks the fresh moral minefields created when cutting-edge tech collides with politics, security, and human lives.

• Anthropic says its most powerful AI cyber model is too dangerous to release publicly — so it built Project Glasswing
• Sam Altman Fire Bombing Response
• OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters
• Samsung flags eightfold jump in quarterly profit as AI chip demand pumps prices
• SpaceX Posted Nearly $5 Billion Loss Last Year from AI Spending
• Trump administration plans to cut cybersecurity agency's budget by $700 million
• CPUID hijacked to serve malware as HWMonitor downloads
• GTA 6 Developer Rockstar Reportedly Hacked, Data Being Ransomed
• FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages - 9to5Mac
• ICE acknowledges it is using powerful spyware
• Helium Is Hard to Replace
• John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to-Repair Settlement
• France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk
• The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet
• DOJ Top Antitrust Litigators Exit After Ticketmaster Settlement
• My Quest to Solve Bitcoin's Great Mystery
• Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%
• 'Abhorrent': the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Doc Rock, Jason Hiner, and Mike Elgan

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As Anthropic, OpenAI, and industry giants race to outpace each other, data centers and supply chains are straining, while job markets and open-source communities feel the heat. Listen in for a roundtable on whether AI is fueling innovation, burnout, or just the next tech bubble.

• Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, concedes it trails unreleased Mythos
• Nobody knows how many CVEs Anthropic's Project Glasswing has actually found
• You're About to See a Lot of Critical Software Updates. Don't Ignore Them.
• Cal.com Is Going Closed Source Because of AI
• AI anxiety is turning volatile
• Humanoid robots race past humans in Beijing half-marathon, showing rapid advances
• Snap Is Laying Off 16% of Full-Time Staff as It Embraces A.I.
• Musk v. Altman Is a Battle for OpenAI's Soul
• The Little Probe That Could: Why Voyager 1 Matters, and Why NASA Just Switched Part of It Off
• Sam Altman's project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.
• Meta Must Face Youth Addiction Lawsuit by Massachusetts, Court Rules
• Section 230 Is Dying By A Thousand Workarounds, And Massachusetts Just Added Another One
• Live Nation and Ticketmaster lose monopoly case
• Anna's Archive told to pay Spotify and record labels $322 million over unprecedented music scraping
• Roblox agrees to a $12 million settlement with Nevada
• Judge sides with creators of banned ICE trackers who allege DHS and DOJ violated their First Amendment rights
• What's the point of the App Store, if it can't protect users?
• TotalRecall Reloaded tool finds a side entrance to Windows 11's Recall database
• Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
• It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation
• Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data. | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Billionaire Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings is leaving the company
• Venture capitalist Ron Conway says he is starting treatment for a 'rare' cancer

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Louis Maresca, Wesley Faulkner, and Glenn Fleishman

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Campus hacks bring final exams to a standstill, a blockbuster study on AI in education gets pulled, and the world's biggest technology companies face government crackdowns with barely a dent to their bottom lines. Plus, Apple returns to Intel as chip wars reshape US tech!

• Anthropic and OpenAI IPO Chatter
• Canvas Breach Disrupts Schools & Colleges Nationwide
• The Canvas Hack Is a New Kind of Ransomware Debacle
• Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags - Ars Technica
• Anthropic Says It Has Eliminated Undesirable Behaviour Like Blackmail From Claude By Deeply Explaining To It Why It Was Wrong
• Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI
• Intel's comeback story is even wilder than it seems
• Apple, Intel Have Reached Preliminary Chip-Making Agreement
• Meta challenges Ofcom in UK High Court over the Online Safety Act, which calculates levies based on global, not UK, revenue, in a case scheduled for October
• Meat Industry Price Fixer Sentenced to Make Money
• Chrome's Prompt API: A Unilateral Gamble That Is Fracturing Web Standards
• NHTSA says the 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first car model to pass the agency's new ADAS tests;
• Tesla conducted the tests and submitted the results to the NHTSA
• Here is Yarbo's promise to fix the robot mower that ran me over
• Social Media Sites Got Information from Ad Trackers on US State Health Insurance Sites
• Pinterest crosses $1 billion quarterly revenue as AI-powered visual search drives advertising growth that social platforms cannot match
• Cloudflare beat earnings, cut 1,100 jobs because AI agents do the work now, and lost a quarter of its stock price in a day
• Motherboard Sales 'Collapse' By More Than 25% - Slashdot
• The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number
• Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache
• FCC to allow banned drones and routers to receive critical updates until 2029

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Berber Jin, Iain Thomson, and Paris Martineau

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Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions into AI, but with rising signs of an industry bubble and some real-world fallout, this week's episode digs into who actually wins, who stands to lose, and whether Apple's patient strategy may outsmart the hype.

• Big Tech firms beat earnings expectations amid AI spending questions
• RIP the $599 Mac Mini, you were too beautiful for this world
• Microsoft lifts 2026 AI spend by $25 billion to cover component price rises
• Microsoft speeds up in Big Tech's data center spend-off
• Crosswording the Situation
• Meta's historic loss in court could cost a lot more than $375 million
• Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks
• Australia unveils a 2.25% levy on Meta, Google, and TikTok
• Meta found in breach of EU law for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram
• Meta inks deal for solar power at night, beamed from space
• Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models
• OpenAI-backed 1X opens California factory targeting 10,000 home humanoid robots in year one
• Sam Altman asked GPT-5.5 to plan its own launch party. Its requests were 'beautiful' but 'strange.'
• Sam Altman says Elon Musk can come to his GPT 5.5 party: 'World needs more love'
• The US Senate unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on prediction markets like
• Kalshi and Polymarket, amid rising concern over insider trading
• 'We Know You Live Right Here': No Secrets in America's New Surveillance Dragnet
• California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws
• China Suspends New Autonomous Driving Permits After Baidu Outage
• China has decided that firing a worker because an AI can do their job is illegal. No Western country has done the same.
• Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores
• The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed
• Hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, used by millions of websites
• The Hottest Anti-AI Gadget Is a Cyberdeck
• Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public
• GameStop eyes eBay takeover in audacious $46 billion bet on Ryan Cohen's e-commerce vision
• AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars
• Ukraine says it's training drone pilots in 'Grand Theft Auto V'
• This free website is like Wikipedia meets the CIA
• Light Phone III Is a Delightfully Minimalist Smartphone Alternative
• Valve Steam Controller is here, it's a gamepad in search of a console
• Bluetooth Connected - The Voices Behind the Connection
• Spirit Airlines shuts down after Trump's war on Iran doubled jet fuel prices
• Ask.com has shut down, marking the official farewell to the Internet's favorite butler
• Pioneering geneticist and decoder of the human genome J. Craig Venter dies at age 79

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Nicholas De Leon, Devindra Hardawar, and Mikah Sargent

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Tim Cook's surprise departure shakes Apple just as AI and product strategy take center stage, sending big questions through Silicon Valley about what comes next. From Toyota's camera-filled Woven City to questionable US police tracking and a Signal privacy gap, this episode digs into how quietly surveillance tech is encroaching on daily life.

• Toyota Woven City
• Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO
• Continuous glucose monitoring made me continuously crazy
• Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce, the company told staff today
• Meta projected $16 billion in scam ad revenue. Now the lawsuits are piling up.
  In another wild turn for AI chips, Meta signs deal for millions of Amazon AI CPUs
  Google is investing up to $40 billion in a company that is beating Gemini. That is the point.
• OpenAI Releases 'Spud' GPT-5.5 Model
• China's DeepSeek previews new AI model a year after jolting US rivals
  Now we know who paid $100,000 to unlock a Sam Altman podcast interview
• Scoop: NSA using Anthropic's Mythos despite Defense Department blacklist
• Anthropic: No "kill switch" for AI in classified settings
• Mozilla Used Anthropic's Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox
• Unauthorized group has gained access to Anthropic's exclusive cyber tool Mythos, report claims
• What smart people are saying about SpaceX's $60 billion deal with Cursor: 'The Hunger Games have just begun'
• Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Isn't Working. Half Their Teens Still Have Access, Survey Finds
• Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones
• Nevada Police Can Now Track Cellphones Without a Warrant
• Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
• 'Scattered Spider' Member 'Tylerb' Pleads Guilty
• Iran claims US used backdoors in networking equipment
• The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars
• 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win $34,000 bet
• To buy this Bay Area home, you'll need Anthropic equity | TechCrunch
• This Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price
• The Hottest Phone for Kids Right Now Is a $100 Landline
• This pasta sauce wants to record your family

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Victoria Song, and Stacey Higginbotham

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Is the era of American tech dominance ending? Get an inside look at how China's pragmatic approach to AI, robotics, and hardware is shifting the global balance, and why the US might need a new playbook to keep up.

• Trump and the CEOs go to China
• NVIDIA CEO joins Trump in China despite 'awkward' politics
• US clears H200 chip sales to 10 China firms as Nvidia CEO looks for breakthrough
• Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, circle cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers
• The Class of 2026 is cooked
• Chinese AI groups pull ahead of US rivals in video generation race
• Google Weighs Using SpaceX to Launch Orbital Data Centers
• What smart people are saying about OpenAI's new $10 billion company to help businesses deploy AI
• Bitcoin trader recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago — bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup
• Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Harper Reed and Amy Webb

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Google is rewriting the rules of search, CBS News Radio just died after 99 years, and billionaires now own the newsrooms. This episode dives into what happens when technology giants tighten their grip on how we get information.

• Google's new Universal Cart wants to follow your entire shopping journey across the internet
• Hands-On With All of Google's New Upcoming Android XR Smart Glasses
• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is launching a Twitch show
• U.S. Invests $2 Billion and Takes Stake in Quantum Firms
• Elon Musk lost his case against Sam Altman
• GM Driver Data Privacy Lawsuit: California Fines GM $12.75 Million
• A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
• 'Creepy' Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn't Actually Work, FTC Says

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Larry Magid, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Jacob Ward

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