THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Bags of frozen blueberries and Swedish meatballs, packets of waffles and pizzas, and tub after tub of ice cream: all melted, floppy, spoiled, and stinking. This has been the scene at grocery stores across Europe after their fridges and freezers have been hacked.Last month, employees at hundreds of supermarkets in France came into work to find they had to trash millions of dollars’ worth of food. The machines were not simply deactivated; they had been remotely hijacked and reprogrammed to hit temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Last Monday, grocery outlets in at least seven more countries, including Estonia, Belgium, and Sweden, experienced a near-identical incident. The same day, freezers at the French national blood bank were also hacked (though staffers were able to intervene before any samples were corrupted). Depending on who you talk with, America is either next or has already been hit: In August, the Pentagon quietly revealed that freezers at commissaries on several U.S. military bases had malfunctioned in a suspected attack.No one has claimed responsibility for any of these exploits, and it’s not even clear whether they are connected. The hackers seemingly didn’t have a goal besides sowing chaos and wasting an enormous amount of food. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these widespread fridge attacks is that they haven’t happened sooner. For hackers, these appliances make perfect targets.The basic problem is that many fridges and freezers are now connected to the internet. “The attacks are very simple,” Nadiya Kostyuk, a cybersecurity researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. Each unit has a microcontroller that is connected to the local network, so even someone sitting at a computer thousands of miles away can theoretically access it. These devices are typically password protected, but they still tend to be pretty easy to crack, Kostyuk explained. “Usually it’s done by brute force,” which is to say the devices are spammed with password after password until one works. Some of the recent attacks were made simpler because usernames and passwords had never been changed from the manufacturer’s defaults. Once the hackers remotely broke into a system, they were able to take control of a heating element that can be periodically switched on to prevent frost from building up on the evaporator coils, which stops the freezer from working as effectively. Instructed to run repeatedly, that heating element has proved capable of cooking perishable food.For a home fridge,… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The most important Cybertruck ever built is probably still parked somewhere on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago. In August 2024, Donald Trump stood on the driveway of his Palm Beach club and circled a custom version of Tesla’s notorious, angular electric truck. Wrapped in a giant photo of his bloodied face after the assassination attempt that summer, the car was a gift from the MAGA influencer Adin Ross during a livestreamed interview. “Wow, that’s an Elon!” Trump said.When Trump returned to the presidency, Elon Musk’s truck became a defining symbol of his second term—a MAGA hat on wheels. Like the president himself, the Cybertruck is thought of differently by different people: brash, unsophisticated, or badass. And like the world’s richest man and former head of DOGE, the Cybertruck moves fast and breaks things with little regard for anything in its way. If nothing else, the Cybertruck is unique: Here is a car that is marketed as bulletproof and has a windshield wiper (only one wiper) that Musk has compared to a “katana.” Now the Cybertruck is about to be something else: discontinued. Early this morning, Musk announced on X that he will wind down production of the Cybertruck by the middle of next year to free up factory space to make Cybercabs, the robotaxis that Tesla is attempting to roll out across the country.No matter how you feel about it, the Cybertruck will go down as a tremendous flop in Silicon Valley history. When the car was first released, in November 2023, Musk called it the “best product” that he’s ever released. As Musk bankrolled Trump’s 2024 presidential run and then joined him in Washington, MAGA supporters enthusiastically embraced the Cybertruck. Fast-forward to 2026, and almost no one wants to buy one. The shift has been telling: The midterms were disastrous for Musk, who blew nearly $500 million boosting unsuccessful Republican candidates, especially in Texas, where Tesla is based. Musk’s discontinuation of the Cybertruck may be seen, among other things, as political triage, a way of wiping his hands clean of a car that liberals have branded as the “Deplorean.”[Read: My day inside America’s most hated car]Still, it would be a mistake to remember the truck as nothing more than the apotheosis of two years of Trumpian (and Muskian) excess. The Cybertruck was a meme and a culture-war totem, but it was also just a car. And on that front, Musk’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the past few years, Google’s low-priced laptops have become an AI Trojan horse in America’s schools. Students can use a school-issued Chromebook to automate much of their homework. Fire up the Gemini app, and Google’s chatbot will spit out a full essay about the meaning of The Giver. Type an algebra question into the Google search box, and an “AI Overview” will solve it for you. Ask a follow-up question, and the search box might give way to “AI Mode,” which turns the search engine into a full-on chatbot.Districts across the country give each student their own device, which typically comes equipped with a Google account and a suite of the company’s software. Over the past year, some of the country’s largest public-school districts, including Los Angeles and New York City, have passed policies limiting students’ screen time and banning generative-AI tools. But they hit an obstacle: Google didn’t offer schools a way to fully opt out of AI.Yesterday, the tech giant’s attempt to address the problem only made people madder. Google’s stand-alone Gemini chatbot will now be disabled by default for school accounts, the company announced. But Google quietly left out any option to turn off its most popular and widely used generative-AI features: those built into its search engine. In other words, the only way for schools to go AI-free is to cut off students’ access to Google Search, the world’s most popular website.Tech companies threatening to withdraw products rather than modify them has become part of Silicon Valley’s playbook. (Meta once responded to a Canadian law requiring the company to share revenue with news publishers by banning news articles from its platform altogether.) Online, the move drew outrage, including from congressional Democrats who will soon hold newfound legislative and subpoena powers. “Google is once again prioritizing profits over people,” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut posted. “Clearly, the Tech Giant is more concerned with forcing Gemini into schools than enabling students to succeed.”Google contended that the anger was based on a misunderstanding. “Today’s announcements give schools more choice, not less,” the company posted on X, evincing a faith in the power of boldface font to get its message across. That much is true. Google has never offered schools an AI-free version of its search engine (though there is a “Web” tab that limits results to links). What was new in Google’s announcement was that both Gemini and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For years, public anxiety and frustration over AI have been mounting. More than 80 percent of Americans think the technology is moving too quickly, and more than 70 percent oppose data-center construction in their area. Meanwhile, tech companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this election to combat regulations and candidates they deem a threat. Yesterday, months of skirmishes between these two political forces culminated, for the first time, in a nationwide contest. All over the country, Silicon Valley was on the ballot. And for the most part, Silicon Valley lost.Residents of at least 10 states voted on dozens of proposals to restrict data-center development—local moratoriums, new zoning regulations—and several towns recalled mayors accused of putting the interests of data-center companies over those of constituents. Democratic candidates in some of the most consequential Senate races, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, made AI and data-center regulation central to their campaigns. In California, the home of Silicon Valley, residents voted on a proposed “billionaire tax” that tech executives came out in droves to oppose.[Read: The data-center rebellion is just beginning]Again and again, Americans repudiated the AI boom and Silicon Valley, while candidates who made a point of blasting the tech companies won easily. Dozens of bans and restrictions on data-center development sailed through at the local level, and at least nine governors who support a statewide data-center ban will be in office next year. “The titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction,” Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia declared in his victory speech. His job, he said, will be to bring “Big Tech to heel.”For a quarter century, tech companies have been able to marshal capital and connections to beat back meaningful regulation with relative ease. In 2024, crypto spent more than $100 million to crush a slate of candidates, including Brown, then a three-time incumbent. But such wealth and influence have perhaps grown too great—yesterday’s results show that reining in Silicon Valley is now an urgent and galvanizing issue in our politics. Although federal regulation seems unlikely under a Trump presidency, towns in Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Florida, and elsewhere passed anti-data-center measures, including temporarily banning or advising city governments to ban new data-center construction. More than 30 of these referenda passed, in red and blue counties alike; only one so far, to my… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Here are a few things $474 million can cover: roughly 77 million Big Macs, about 12,814 Tesla Model 3s, or approximately 2,724 years of a U.S. senator’s average salary. If you’re Elon Musk, it could also buy you one deeply disappointing evening in November.This year, Musk became the single largest non-candidate donor in any election cycle ever. His contributions to campaigns and organizations account for about one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans received in 2026. More than $168 million of that money went to super PACs supporting the Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who lost yesterday to James Talarico, the first Democrat to be elected to the Senate in Texas in 38 years. Musk gave $216 million to his own political action committee, America PAC, much of that going toward canvassing operations and advertising. Other donations went to either individual Republican candidates or organizations at both state and federal levels. In almost every instance, that money failed to buy the richest man in the world the results he wanted.[Read: You can believe everything]What does this mean for Musk? One could see it as a repudiation of the near trillionaire—a suggestion that he and the causes he stands for have become a toxic political influence. Though he was helpful in Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, he has fumbled politically over the past two years, including with his disastrous run advising the Department of Government Efficiency. In 2025, he backed a failed state-supreme-court campaign in Wisconsin. Musk’s money in Paxton’s race may have backfired, signaling to Texans that a tech oligarch was trying to buy an election. At the very least, Musk’s influence seems to have galvanized Talarico. He made Musk and other rich donors a centerpiece of his campaign. During his victory speech last night, Talarico said the state sent a message to “every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor,” and “to the people at the top: We will not be conquered.”Musk was just the most prominent member of an entourage of Silicon Valley executives and investors who have enthusiastically supported Trump in his second term. In Trump and the MAGA movement, this Tech Right coalition saw opportunities for favorable legislation on issues such as crypto and little to no regulation on AI buildout and safety. Culturally, MAGA offered this cohort a permission structure for loud and proud anti-wokeness. Impressed by their money and perceived power, Trump let Silicon Valley leaders into government operations,… [TheTopNews] Read More.