The proposed bill has sparked “broad support from tech leaders and open markets,” according to an announcement from Senator Wiener’s officer:

“This is exactly the kind of common-sense antitrust reform we need if we want the next generation of startups to have a fair shot rather than watching Big Tech pull up the ladder behind them.”

— Jeremy Stoppelman CEO and Co-Founder, Yelp

“California has led the way on privacy, and now it has a chance to lead on digital competition. SB 1074 would prohibit the self-preferencing tactics that dominant platforms use to box out competitors — the same tactics that make it harder for people to discover and switch to privacy-respecting alternatives like DuckDuckGo.”

— Kamyl Bazbaz, Chief Communications and Policy Officer, DuckDuckGo

“When users can freely choose privacy-focused alternatives without artificial barriers, everyone benefits — from independent developers to everyday people who deserve control over their digital lives.”

— Raphael Auphan, Chief Operating Officer, Proton

“[The BASED act] is about stopping market corruption — the moment when a platform uses its control over the pipes to bury rivals, tax every transaction, and quietly swallow the open web. This bill restores something simple and very American: if you build something great, you should win or lose on the merits, not on whether a gatekeeper decides to rig the rules.”

— Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the enshittification of digital platforms, it’s this: *someone* is going to regulate the way you use the internet. If governments don’t step in, that regulator will be a powerful *company*, a platform that structures markets to maximize its interests, at the expense of technology makers, technology users, buyers *and* sellers.”

— Cory Doctorow

Odds are, you’ve taken pills before; it’s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer: you’re trusting that they’ve put in the specific active ingredients in the dosage listed on the package. Alas, given the world we live in, that doesn’t always happen. Double-checking actual concentrations requires expensive lab equipment like gas chromatography. It turns out checking for counterfeit pills is easier than you’d think, thanks to a technique called Disintegration Fingerprinting.

It’s delightfully simple: all you need is a clear plastic cup, a stir plate, and a handful of electronic components — namely, a microcontroller, a servo, and an IR line-following sensor. You’ve probably played with just such a sensor: the cheap ones that are a matched pair of LED and photodetector. It works like this: the plastic cup, filled with water, sits upon the stir plate. To start the device, you turn on the stir plate and actuate the servo to drop the pill in the water. The microcontroller then begins recording the signal from the photo-diode. As the pill breaks up and/or dissolves in the water, the swirling bits are going to reflect light from the IR LED. That reflectance signal over time is the Disintegration Fingerprint (DF), and it’s surprisingly effective at catching fakes according to the authors of the paper linked above. Out of 32 different drug products, the technique worked on 90% of them, and was even able to distinguish between generic and brand-name versions of the same drug.

Of course, you do need a known-good sample to generate a trustworthy fingerprint, and there’s that pesky 10% of products the technique doesn’t work on, but this seems like a great way to add some last-mile QA/QC to the drug distribution chain, particularly in low and middle-income countries where counterfeit drugs are a big problem.

We’ve featured pill-identifiers before, but machine vision is going to be much more easily fooled by counterfeits than this method. If your problem isn’t worrying that your pills are fake, but forgetting to take them, we’ve had projects to help with that, too.

Thanks to [Zorch] for the tip!

More Coffee Subscriptions WIRED Recommends

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

There are so many coffee subscriptions out there, and honestly, a lot of them are very good coffee. Some are even amazing coffee. This list would need to be three times as long to capture every one of them at the least. I have way more subscriptions I’ve loved than I have space to talk about them, so here I’ve gathered some past picks that we here at WIRED like; some of these provide very specific services too. Have a favorite we haven’t tried? Send an email to [email protected]

Gento Coffee for $48 for two bags: Gento is part of a new and welcome trend: growers who roast their own coffee and ship directly from the source. In Guatemala, Gento takes this a step further, roasting beans from other local growers that rank among the most esteemed bean farms in the world. But in this case, the beans might only travel down the road to be roasted. The single-origin subscription is really the play, here. Alongside roasts from Gento’s own beans from the Prentice family farm, you might find roasts from esteemed Guatemalan growers like Genaro Juarez and Patrona Perez. If those names don’t mean anything to you yet, they will after you try them.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Camber Coffee for $20+ per 12-ounce bag: Bellingham, Washington, roaster Camber Coffee slipped under the radar for me for maybe too long—but amid its 10-year anniversary celebrations, I finally remedied this. Camber makes distinguished, aromatic, balanced single-origin coffees and a truly chocolatey espresso blend called Big Joy that lives up to its name: it’s like a fudge brownie in espresso form. Subscriptions net you 10 percent off list price on each bag.

Sunday Coffee Project for $27 per box ($45 for two): Portland’s Sunday Coffee Project is a roaster without a café, a fun art project, and a home to some of the most distinctive, funky, fruity, interesting coffee I know in this country. This could be a yeast-fermented Thai light roast that tastes a whole lot like Sangria, or an Ethiopian so floral you’ll swear you got invited to a spring wedding. Plus, your coffee comes in a little art box, designed to look like a coffee-themed children’s cereal complete with games on the back and a little cartoon character on the front: maybe a sheep lifting weights or a snake playing tennis. It’s a wee roaster, and they’ve dialed back their offerings from weekly new roasts to monthly new roasts. But if you like light and adventurous coffee, a box from Sunday Coffee Project may be your favorite thing you get in the mail that month.

Courtesy of Trucup

Trücup for $17 per 12-ounce bag: Are you sensitive to the acids in coffee, but you love coffee? Trücup makes unique, low-acid coffee through what it calls a natural steam process, which makes it a great option for caffeine lovers with sensitive stomachs or those who suffer from gastroesophageal reflux disease or heartburn. (Standard disclaimer: If you’ve been diagnosed with GERD, talk to your physician before you try any coffee.) Either way, even those with well-fortified stomachs may want to take note. WIRED Reviewer Scott Gilbertson loves this coffee for a more mellow cup in the afternoon or evening.

Grounds and Hounds for $19: We’ve recommended this as a top pick in the past, for its mix of feel-good donations to animal shelters and excellent roasts. Grounds and Hounds offers small-batch roasted blends and single-origin beans, with 20 percent of its profits going to benefit animal shelters. The brand has some of WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson’s personal favorite coffees, especially the dark roasts. (Try the Snow Day Winter Roast when it’s available.) Subscriptions are mostly recurring, individual-bag subscriptions.

Wonderstate Coffee for $19 to $21 per 10.5 ounce bag: Wisconsin’s Wonderstate, previously named Kickapoo, is quite possibly the nation’s first fully solar-powered roaster—and has a long and vocal commitment to providing higher pay to farmers. It’s also a quite excellent roaster. The most recent batch of single origins I tried had a tendency toward light, subtle, mild-mannered, and lightly tannic brews—a cosmopolitan palate that’s also Midwestern-polite.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

French Truck Coffee for $18 to $22 a bag: French Truck Coffee got its start in New Orleans and now has a dozen of its signature yellow storefronts scattered around town. WIRED operations manager Scott Gilbertson is a fan of the Big River blend, which has a deep, rich, and very robust flavor profile that’s especially well-suited to pour-over brewing. In fact, French Truck has some of the most detailed brewing instructions around.

Birds & Beans Coffee for $18+ a bag: Like birds? Clear-cut coffee farms can be hard on them. But Birds & Beans is a coffee roaster devoted to making sure its coffee is grown in Smithsonian-certified, bird-friendly farms with tree cover that helps birds thrive. The dark roasts in particular are delicious and genuinely dark: Scarlet Tanager is a favorite of WIRED operations manager Scott Gilbertson.

Stone Creek Coffee for $40 (two bags): Milwaukee-based Stone Creek Coffee delivers its fresh, flavorful coffee in big 1-pound bags, with a variety of blends and single-origin options available. The Cream City blend in particular is a delightful medium roast with some warmer flavor notes like chocolate and brown sugar rounded out by some fruity flavors, according to former WIRED coffee writer Jaina Grey, giving the coffee an almost cacao nib flavor. Add a little milk and it’s almost like drinking hot cocoa. A monthly subscription delivers two bags a shipment.

Grit Coffee for $17+ a bag: From its roastery in Charlottesville, Virginia, Grit Coffee roasts up excellent blends, including an excellent, roasty, chocolatey Side Hustle blend with a subtle high note of acidity to balance it out. But what really differentiates Grit from other roasters is grit. The roaster makes long-term, often 10-year commitments to its coffee farmers.

Photograph: Jaina Grey; Getty Images

Lady Falcon for $49 (two bags): Lady Falcon Coffee Club may draw you in with the art nouveau-style bags. But the luscious, velvety coffee within is what will keep you coming back, according to former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey. Each coffee blend is thoughtfully mixed to heighten the flavors present in the contributing coffees, and the flavor notes are spot-on.

Angels’ Cup for $28 a bag: Angels’ Cup is more like a distance-learning coffee school than a box subscription service, and the Black Box subscription is like a blind coffee tasting from afar. You will learn what you actually like and dislike about coffee, along with some education through the app, roaster’s notes, and notes from fellow tasters.

Mistobox for $20+ a bag: With more than 500 different coffees from 50-plus roasters, Mistobox makes a good gift subscription, especially if you don’t know what kind of coffee to get someone. Somewhere in those 500 choices, your coffee fanatic should find something that will make them happy. One of the most compelling and surprising offerings: Misto lets you choose the most you’re willing to pay per shipment, and your offerings will change accordingly. Delivery frequency can also be customized down to the day. But as it appears they’re in the process of transferring to a new back end, we’ll give them a moment before assessing the new website and ordering system.

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When you have multiple keyboards installed, you can manage them on iOS by opening Settings, then choosing General > Keyboard > Keyboards. To swap between keyboards you’ve installed, tap and hold the globe icon that appears in the lower left corner of all your keyboards.

On Android, you can find your keyboards via System > Keyboard > On-screen keyboard from Settings. To switch between them, tap and hold on the globe icon that appears in the lower right corner whenever a keyboard is on the screen.

The Best Phone Keyboards to Try

Gboard (Android, iOS) is a good option to start with here. It’s preinstalled by default on Pixel phones, but it’s also an excellent keyboard pick for iPhones and Android phones not made by Google. It’s fast and clean, works really well for GIFs, emoji, and stickers, and supports glide typing (where you swipe over letters to form words rather than tapping on each individual letter).

Then there’s SwiftKey (Android, iOS), which is developed by Microsoft. As you might expect, there’s Copilot AI integration built right in, so if you’re stuck for something to say, you can use generative AI to do your writing for you. SwiftKey will also learn your writing style as you go, meaning autocorrections and suggestions get more accurate over time.

SwiftKey comes with a range of settings to play around with.

Photograph: David Nield

Typewise (Android, iOS) demonstrates how third-party keyboards can be a little out of the ordinary. It offers an unusual layout that makes use of hexagonal letter and character tiles, and which Typewise says can seriously speed up your typing speed. There’s also support for multiple languages, AI integrations, and custom gestures.

You may be familiar with Grammarly from the web and the desktop (and from the recent news about its missteps), but the grammar and spell checker service is also available as a keyboard on iOS and as a keyboard extension on Android. As well as checking on your writing, Grammarly puts AI front and center: You can get writing suggestions from a prompt, for example, or change the tone of an existing message with a couple of taps.

If you’re interested in customization options above everything else, then consider Mister Keyboard for iOS. It’s stacked with ways to tweak the look and layout of your iPhone’s keyboard, and to access features like emoji and the clipboard. Either pick one of the preset themes, or take pixel-by-pixel control over the keyboard.

Mister Keyboard isn’t available for Android, but there is theming support in Futo Keyboard for Android. It also includes smart autocorrect and text editing tools, and prides itself on its privacy. The keyboard app doesn’t ask for permission to connect to the internet, so you know that your keystrokes aren’t being sent anywhere.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into electric vehicle startup Faraday Future, despite SEC staff on the case recommending an enforcement action last year, TechCrunch has learned.

Four sources familiar with the investigation, who were granted anonymity to speak about the government case, told TechCrunch that the SEC informed the company and people involved in the probe about the closure this past week.

The dismissal of the case comes amid a historic drop in enforcement actions by the SEC, which only initiated four cases against publicly-traded companies in its 2025 fiscal year, a recent report shows. The SEC did not respond to an after-hours request for comment.

The investigation into Faraday Future lasted for nearly four years. The SEC was looking at whether the EV startup made “false and misleading statements” when it went public in a 2021 merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and was also probing whether Faraday Future faked the sales of its first electric vehicles in 2023 — a claim that’s been made by at least three former employee whistleblowers.

The financial regulator sent the startup multiple subpoenas, regulatory filings from Faraday Future show. The SEC also took depositions of multiple former employees and executives in 2024 and 2025, three of the people familiar with the case have told TechCrunch.

In July 2025, Faraday Future revealed the SEC had sent the company and multiple executives — including founder Jia Yueting — letters known as “Wells Notices.” The SEC sends Wells Notices when staff working a case have decided to recommend the agency take enforcement action.

It’s not clear if Faraday Future ever responded to the Wells Notices sent last year. As recently as February, the company disclosed in regulatory filings that it had not. “The Company and executives plan to engage with the SEC to explain why enforcement action is not warranted,” Faraday Future wrote in such a filing last month. A company spokesperson said Sunday that Faraday Future would share more information later Sunday.

The Department of Justice also sent Faraday Future requests for information after the SEC opened its investigation in 2022. Faraday Future has referred to this as an “investigation” in regulatory filings; the DOJ has never confirmed if it opened a full probe, and it did not respond to an after-hours request for comment.

It is rare for the SEC to not pursue an enforcement action after sending a Wells Notice. One study done at the Wharton School in 2020 showed that around 85% of targets who receive a Wells Notice wind up in court with the SEC.

The SEC investigated nearly every electric vehicle startup that went public in a SPAC merger over the last six years. In almost all of those cases, the agency reached a settlement with the startups. It dismissed an investigation into Lucid Motors in 2023, and as TechCrunch first reported in February, the SEC ended a probe into bankrupt EV startup Fisker late last year.

Origins of the investigation

Faraday Future was founded in California in 2014 by Jia, a businessman who at the time was running a booming tech conglomerate in China known as LeEco. It was one of many new companies trying to become the “next Tesla” or, optimistically, a “Tesla killer.”

Faraday snapped up talent from Tesla, other automakers, and also tech companies like Apple, and at one point employed as many as around 1,400 employees. But things got bumpy quickly. The company turned heads, in both good and bad ways, at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, with a flashy concept car and the lofty goal of being as disruptive as the iPhone.

The company revealed its first vehicle the following year: a luxury electric SUV called the FF91. By the end of 2017, though the company was nearly out of cash and had laid off or furloughed hundreds of workers. Jia’s company in China had collapsed, and he self-exiled to California as the government in his home country placed him on a debtor blacklist. (It was at this time that a close business associate to Jeffrey Epstein pitched the sex criminal on investing in Faraday Future, as well as other EV startups, as TechCrunch recently revealed. Epstein never invested.)

Faraday Future was rescued by an investment from major Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande. But that relationship fell apart quickly, too, with Evergrande walking away by the end of 2018 and Faraday Future laying off even more employees.

Jia nominally stepped aside as CEO in 2019 and also filed for personal bankruptcy to settle billions of dollars of LeEco debt he had personally guaranteed. But behind the scenes, he was still largely in charge of the company.

This became an issue when Faraday Future went public in 2021 and raised about $1 billion. Members of the newly-appointed public company board believed that Faraday’s executives had misrepresented Jia’s control over the day-to-day operations — especially after a short seller report was published that scrutinized Faraday Future — and formed a special committee to investigate.

That committee hired an outside law firm and a forensic accounting firm, and within the first few months it started reporting its findings directly to the SEC, the three people familiar with the investigation told TechCrunch.

Between January and April 2022, Jia was sidelined as a result of the board’s investigation, a senior VP named Matthias Aydt (who is now co-CEO with Jia) was placed on probation for six months, and another VP named Jerry Wang (who is Jia’s nephew) was suspended. (Wang ultimately resigned after “failure to cooperate with the investigation,” according to company filings, but is now back with Faraday Future.)

The committee’s work also showed that Faraday Future had, in the two years before it went public, survived in part on multi-million-dollar loans made to the company by low-level employees with connections to Jia — known as “related party transactions” in legal parlance.

On March 31, 2022, Faraday Future disclosed that the SEC had opened its investigation. The startup revealed the requests for information from the DOJ in June.

Dodging another bullet

Through the rest of 2022, and amid the early stages of the SEC investigation, employees and people close to Jia waged a campaign to regain control of the board and his company. This eventually resulted in death threats against some directors, who ultimately resigned, paving the way for people close to Jia to run the company once more.

Faraday Future finally delivered the first few FF91 SUVs in early 2023. Former employees have sued the company alleging that these were not true sales, and that the company had misled investors. The SEC investigators working the case subpoenaed Faraday Future about issues related to these sales, filings show.

Former executives and employees were initially deposed by the SEC in 2024, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The SEC sat some of them for longer depositions in the first half of 2025, the people said.

The Wells Notice sent in July 2025 said SEC staff had made “a preliminary determination to recommend that the Commission file an enforcement action against the Company alleging violations of various anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws.”

Specifically, the Wells Notice referenced “purported false or misleading statements” made during the SPAC merger process about “related party transactions” and Jia’s “role in the Company.” Jia, his nephew Wang, and two other unnamed employees also received Wells Notices.

Faraday Future is still trying to sell the FF91, but it has also recently changed its business in a few ways. The company is importing more affordable hybrid and electric vans from China. It also appears to be selling re-badged versions of Chinese robots, and turned a publicly-traded biotechnology company into a firm focused on crypto.

Those efforts have not stopped the company’s struggles. On Friday, the company announced it had received a warning from the Nasdaq that its stock price was under the minimum of $1, which could eventually lead to the company being de-listed.