from the hypocrisy-is-a-part-of-the-job dept

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to Paxton’s campaign on June 3, 15 and 25, asking why he remained registered to vote in Collin County when he appeared to no longer live there and about his connection to the Denton County property. A reporter also left a voicemail on his personal cellphone on June 25. The news organizations sent his government office and campaign staff an email on Monday with a detailed list of questions, including a request for Paxton’s response to election lawyers’ belief that he may be violating the law. 

Paxton and his office did not reply until Monday’s email. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy did not answer the questions from the news organizations. Instead, she issued a statement saying that the attorney general has been “a national leader on election integrity, with a long record of defending Texas elections.” Cercy said that “attempting to insinuate otherwise and tear him down with a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story is not real reporting.”

Asked twice to provide specifics about what they believed was inaccurate, the campaign did not respond. 

Voting in an election when the voter is ineligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. But prosecutors rarely bring cases challenging individual voters’ residency claims because they are hard to prove, the election lawyers said.

State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.

Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.

“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”

Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.

“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.

Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.

“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.

Paxton has advocated for strict enforcement of the state’s election fraud law, including in cases against voters his office alleged had falsified records about where they lived. In 2018, the attorney general’s voter fraud unit arrested nine people on suspicion of using residential addresses where they did not live to vote in a municipal election in Edinburg, in the state’s Rio Grande Valley. County prosecutors, acting on behalf of Paxton, later dismissed the charges after failing to secure a conviction against the mayoral candidate they alleged had encouraged those voters to register at false addresses. The candidate, Richard Molina, said he was innocent and said the prosecution was politically motivated.

Clark Birdsall was not the attorney on those cases but defended another resident whom Paxton prosecuted for illegal voting. Birdsall was stunned that the attorney general appears to have voted under an address where he does not live.

He called it “especially egregious that someone such as Ken Paxton appears he’s not conforming to the law.”

State privacy laws allow some politicians and law enforcement officials to shield their voter registration information from public view. Paxton does not do so. His opponent in the Senate race, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, does. Talarico’s campaign said he lives and is registered at the north Austin home he purchased in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune were not able to independently confirm this.

Paxton’s campaign did not raise any issues with Talarico’s voter registration. In her statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, however, Cercy said, “Talarico has actively campaigned against voter security measures” and has said he opposes voter identification requirements. She pointed to a 2021 Fox News interview in which the state representative said he opposed voter identification rules that would require Texans to provide their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for mail ballots. Talarico said hundreds of thousands of Texans, who don’t drive, lack a driver’s license. He did not directly answer a question about Social Security numbers during the interview.

The Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Paxton’s living arrangements since he separated from his wife are not public, but information obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune offers some indication of where he may have been residing since February.

In mid-February, a trust bought a 5,000-square-foot home listed for $2.4 million in a gated community in Denton County, according to the appraisal district and the seller’s real estate agent. The trust did not disclose its ownership to Denton County officials. Trusts are not required to by law, a spokesperson for Travis County’s appraisal district said.

Paxton shares a separate blind trust with his wife, Angela, that they have used to purchase property and other assets. For years, the address listed for that blind trust had been an office building in Collin County. But that address was changed to the Denton County home a week after the property was purchased.

Angela Paxton said through a spokesperson that she has no connection to the Denton County home or the trust that purchased it. The trustee of the Paxtons’ trust, family friend Chip Loper, did not respond to questions about the address change.

In June, a reporter knocked on the door of the Denton County home. No one answered. When the reporter placed a letter for Paxton in the mailbox, an envelope addressed to Warren Paxton, the attorney general’s given name, was visible.

Later that week, Paxton appeared on a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Video from the podcast showed Paxton seated in front of a fireplace and mantle that were nearly identical to those depicted in the home’s online real estate listing. One resident also told the newsrooms that they spotted Paxton in the gated community.

Separately, the Daily Mail reported in May that Paxton had moved into the Denton County home with Tracy Duhon, whose extramarital affair with Paxton, the news outlet said, prompted his wife’s divorce filing. The Daily Mail also published a video of Paxton and Duhon that it reported was taken at an airport in Iceland in late June. The video was quickly seized upon by Talarico, who depicted Paxton as out of touch with Texans. Duhon did not respond to questions about her connection to the Denton County property or about the Daily Mail reporting.

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.

“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”

Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.

“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”

Filed Under: elections, ken paxton, texas, voting, voting fraud

A glitch with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world’s fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Oops!

Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning, he woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be upwards of $3 billion.

“I’ve had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski tells WIRED. He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly AWS invoices. They each came out to $0.01.

Based on replies to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received similarly shocking quotes: $22 billion; $75 billion; $110 billion. “Blud why did you hit me with a cost of 5 million USD what did I even do,” one user wrote. “Please explain man my heart will explode.”

When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s not clear exactly how many customers have been affected, the dashboard characterized the issue as “global.”

The dashboard also said that the billing console “began displaying incorrect estimated billing data” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET.

The company began investigating the issue about six hours later, per the dashboard, and concluded that the “root cause” of the error was “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.” It did not specify what the issue was.

In subsequent updates, AWS said that it’s “rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem,” and said it was attempting to revert to its “last known good estimated bill computation.” It also said it had “paused estimated billing computations.”

The issue should be resolved by this weekend, and “there are no customer actions required at this time,” the company wrote.

Ultimately, some customers have decided to post through it.

One Reddit user posted a screenshot of their current “Cost and usage overview” to the AWS subreddit, which showed that they had incurred $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1—more than twice Amazon’s market cap.

VC Jeremy Levine has a wry solution to something that routinely annoys him, according to a new Wall Street Journal article on the rise of AI transcription apps. On Zoom, he is no longer “Jeremy Levine” but instead “Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording.”

It may sound petty or brilliant, depending on your point of view, but what’s clear is that always-on recording is becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a growing crop of AI note-taking apps and devices, many of which we’ve covered here at TechCrunch (we’ve even ranked some).

VC Eric Bahn tells the outlet he now automatically assumes his meetings with founders will be recorded, even before he sees a phone slide across a conference table. One founder tells the WSJ she records most of her first dates with the Granola app, then feeds the transcript to Claude afterward to see if she could be more “engaging or empathetic,” while also assessing who did most of the talking.

Levine calls the whole trend “socially unacceptable behavior” that can completely kill spontaneous conversations. Others in the piece note it’s a legal minefield.

But there’s another wrinkle: if every meeting, watercooler conversation, and romantic outing gets transcribed and summarized, who’s actually reading any of it? At what point does this audio landfill of every conversation stop being useful and just become another recording no one has time to play back?

Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.

Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and seeing the live broadcast of the Curiosity rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.

SpotiSlop: Large language models and sophisticated audio-generation tools are disrupting the traditional music industry. Digital listening platforms such as Spotify have become prime targets for AI-powered spammers, but trade organizations are fighting back with new labeling programs.

Spotify’s Sam Duboff recently revealed that the platform was forced to remove 75 million AI-generated tracks in 2025 alone. As Spotify’s senior director and global head of marketing, policy, and music business, Duboff believes that AI has not introduced any entirely new tactics for spam operations. However, he also argues that generative AI and other machine learning technologies have taken audio spam to the next level.

Spotify now has systems designed to combat both AI-generated “slop” uploads and data scraping by companies seeking new content to train their generative AI models. Duboff confirmed that the company has a “big team” dedicated to identifying potential new attack vectors that could make life easier for spammers (or scraping bots).

The executive also provided several eye-opening figures highlighting the growing prevalence of AI-generated music on digital platforms. Every day, bots upload around 100,000 different “songs” to Spotify’s servers, and a large portion of these tracks are most likely “made” using generative AI services or custom LLM-based setups.

Duboff acknowledges that not every genAI track can simply be dismissed as slop. The 75 million songs removed last year were low-effort content with very little human creativity involved beyond a lazy chatbot prompt. However, “real” artists are increasingly using AI technology in their production workflows, blurring the lines between fake music and human-curated efforts.

Spotify is certainly embracing AI across its business these days. Earlier this year, co-CEO Gustav Söderström said that the company’s engineers are essentially allowing AI agents to handle much of their coding work. Spotify also said that AI tools approved by music labels are now fair game for creating remixes and covers that can then be sold on the platform.

Beyond Spotify’s growing pains with spammy tracks, generative AI is forcing the entire music industry to develop new solutions to the increasingly relevant AI slop problem. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the RIAA, and other major trade organizations recently announced a “voluntary” program to properly label AI-generated music, giving listeners a clear indication when a song has been entirely created through a chatbot prompt. These labels should also identify “AI-assisted” music that was primarily created by human artists.

Apple has raised the monthly price of its Family and Premier Apple One bundles in the US. The Family plan now costs $27.95 per month, up from $25.95, while Premier has climbed from $37.95 to $39.95. Both plans are now $2 more expensive each month, adding another $24 to the annual bill. The Individual plan remains unchanged at $19.95 per month.

The increase arrives shortly after Apple raised subscription prices for Apple Music across its student, individual, and family plans. New AppleCare+ customers buying coverage for Macs and iPads have also been hit by higher prices recently.

What changed for Apple One subscribers?

Apple One Family includes Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud+ storage. The services can be shared with up to five other family members.

The Premier plan includes the same services, alongside Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, and 2TB of iCloud+ storage.

Apple has not added any new services, storage, or other benefits to either bundle. Family subscribers will now spend $335.40 over a full year, while the Premier plan works out to $479.40 annually.

Apple’s subscription costs keep climbing

Apple has not explained why the two Apple One bundles have become more expensive. The company blamed its recent Apple Music increase on rising licensing costs, and the service is included in every Apple One plan. However, the unchanged Individual bundle suggests Apple Music is unlikely to be the only reason behind the latest adjustment.

The company has also raised AppleCare+ prices for new Mac and iPad customers by $0.50 per month or $5 per year. Those changes followed broader price increases across Apple’s Mac, iPad, Vision Pro, HomePod, and Apple TV lineups. Despite the price increases, Apple One still offers a discount compared to paying for every included service separately.