AI Shovelware: Long ago, users had to press physical buttons and navigate on-screen menus to set their brand-new gaming monitors to their preferred settings. Now, Asus is proposing an AI-based solution that could do much more than simply turn the brightness level up or down.

Asus has announced a new update for its DisplayWidget Center software, adding agentic AI and other AI-based features. The tool, which is designed to manage and customize Asus monitors from within the traditional desktop environment, can now enable natural language interactions between users, IT administrators, and “compatible” AI agents for deeper personalization options.

DisplayWidget Center’s new version focuses on AI-driven automation. The software is now “AI agent-ready,” featuring a command-line interface based on Asus Display Control and AI Agent Skill. In fact, DisplayWidget Center’s AI capabilities are essentially a GUI-based extension that allows users to access Display Control and AI Agent Skill directly from the main monitor management application.

Asus said AI agents can respond to user requests to adjust brightness, color modes, color temperature, and even Anti-Flicker settings on OLED displays. On compatible monitors, the AI can recommend optimal settings based on past usage habits or access a user’s calendar to adjust color temperature levels based on the time of day.

Asus also suggests that the new DisplayWidget Center AI can perform useful tasks for IT administrators, such as deploying a common monitor configuration across an entire enterprise environment. AI agents operate entirely offline, the company said, although some resulting actions may require external services or connectivity. The updated software also includes a couple of AI-based features that do not require any agentic functionality.

With AI Visual, compatible ROG and TUF Gaming monitors can select the most suitable visual mode by analyzing on-screen content in real time. Meanwhile, the AI Assistant feature provides a new text and voice interface for adjusting settings, retrieving support documents, and accessing other help-related functionality.

Other non-AI features in the latest DisplayWidget Center release include the App Tweaker tool, which can be used to create customized display “experiences” for individual applications and games. Finally, additional OLED Care features are designed to further reduce image burn-in risks on OLED models.

Asus said the AI features included in its monitor management software can provide meaningful improvements for gamers, content creators, business users, and traditional desktop users. However, some users may feel differently or simply reject a type of software tool that is becoming increasingly invasive or raises concerns about personal privacy.

Cloudflare just entered the AI-browser race with a twist. Instead of building another Chrome alternative for people, the company launched Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser made only for AI agents. Since autonomous AI systems are increasingly the ones doing the actual browsing and scrolling online, Cloudflare just made its to claim that space.

Why did Cloudflare make Kitesurf browser exclusively for AI agents?

Traditional browsers carry features humans rely on daily, including tabs, extensions, and smooth visual rendering. AI agents need none of that. What they need is speed, low cost, and the ability to process content efficiently within limited context windows.

Kitesurf strips away the extras and runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers, its serverless computing platform, instead of relying on Chromium like most browsers do. Cloudflare says this approach uses significantly less computing power for common agent tasks like taking screenshots or extracting page content. This is important because running thousands of agent sessions on traditional browsers can be very expensive.

What makes Kitesurf different from other browsers?

Cloudflare built Kitesurf using a mix of existing open source technology, including a rendering engine called Blitz and Firefox’s CSS parser Stylo. The project reportedly began just 12 weeks ago and already passed over 215,000 web platform compatibility tests.

It can correctly render websites like Wikipedia and Hacker News, though it still cannot handle video playback or long authenticated sessions. Kitesurf is available for free during its beta phase through Cloudflare’s Browser Run product, and anyone curious can try it firsthand through a public playground at kitesurf.cloudflare.app.

Cloudflare also says it plans to open-source Kitesurf down the line, letting any customer deploy and run their own version. As AI agents gain more capabilities to book flights, fill out forms, and shop online for people, they need a platform to browse faster, and Cloudflare just built that missing piece.

The original Mac Pro is 20 years old today and even though the whole range is now gone, people are still celebrating this old, favorite workhorse from a time when it was the clear top of Apple’s lineup.

Apple finally killed off the Mac Pro in March 2026, just shy of its 20th anniversary, but its death throes really began six years earlier as Macs transitioned to Apple Silicon. The Mac Pro was the last to make the leap away from Intel, and by then it didn’t matter.

The Mac Pro had been in doubt many times in its history, but Apple Silicon robbed it of its place as the Mac for every user who needed the greatest performance possible.

Mac Pro has always been a niche machine because of it’s extremely high specifications, for the time, and its correspondingly even more extremely high price. But it was a niche market that needed this power and was willing to pay for it, so the Mac Pro sold well. Well, it sold.

After Apple Silicon and especially how the newer and lower-cost Mac Studio became the better buy, Mac Pro’s niche got even smaller.

Then for people whose work meant paying Mac Pro prices was still a bargain, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was sufficiently lacking that it badly misses the mark.

To appreciate how important the original Mac Pro was, however, take a step back to the 2019 model, which was so desired and so anticipated that Apple began teasing it — in 2017 and again in 2018.

The last Intel Mac Pro

The first time they talked about it, Apple was careful to not give any details. Phil Schiller just said that Apple is “completely rethinking the Mac Pro”.

“We’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers,” said Schiller.

The second time they discussed anything about it was last April when they specified that it would be out in 2019.

“There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit.” said the head of the Pro Workflow Team, John Ternus, who’s since done quite well at Apple. “We want to provide complete pro solutions.”

Demand for a top range Mac Pro

Professional or power users have demanding needs and those needs only get more demanding. But the requirement for the best that Apple could make is the same now as it was when the original Mac Pro came out in 2006.

Before it was released, Mac faithful could smell something on the wind, but didn’t quite know whether to believe that the old PowerPC processor would be replaced by Intel. They also didn’t know whether to believe the idea that this would make a huge difference for the Mac.

Then On June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs formally revealed that it was true, Apple was switching to Intel processors for the Mac. That year he detailed the company’s roadmap.

“Starting next year, we will begin introducing Macs with Intel processors in them,” he said at WWDC 2005. “So when we meet again this time next year, our plan is to be shipping Macs with Intel processors by then. And when we meet here again two years from now, our plan is that the transition will be mostly complete. And we think it will be complete by the end of 2007. So this is a two-year transition.”

How Apple promoted the first-ever Mac Pro back in 2006 – image credit: Apple

Advertisement

That’s as clear as Apple ever gets. Every Mac in the range was to have an Intel processor. It didn’t guarantee that there would be what came to be called the Mac Pro, but people had hopes for a high-end model because there was already a top of the line PowerPC computer called the Power Mac G5.

An important move for Apple

One of the reasons Jobs gave for moving from PowerPC to Intel was specifically to do with that machine and its development. Standing in front of a slide showing a PowerMac G5 with the words “3.0GHz?” Jobs had a lot to say.

“I stood up here two years ago and I promised you this,” said Jobs, pointing at the screen. “And we haven’t been able to deliver that to you yet. As we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap.”

Over that next year up to June 2006, Apple steadily introduced Macs with Intel processors but not the replacement for the PowerMac G5. Until 1:08 PM eastern time on Monday August 7, 2006.

The cheesegrater is born

“In the first two quarters, we transitioned almost all of our product over to Intel. Except for one, and that is the Power Mac,” Jobs declared. “Well, today the Power Mac is going to fade into history.”

Phil Schiller then came on stage to reveal what looked like exactly the same machine as before. The same large aluminum casing, the same handles for carrying it and the same ease of access to the insides.

“We have the best enclosure in the business, this is a beautiful enclosure design,” Schiller said. “On the outside it has all the benefits as before. Inside, it’s entirely new.”

Performance promise

This Mac Pro did reach Jobs’s promised 3.0GHz and did so with Intel’s Xeon processor.

“This is the Mac that so many of our highest-end customers have dreamed of,” said Schiller. “For our highest-end customers a feature they’ve really wanted: they’re 64-bit. So this new Intel Xeon chip is an amazing processor to put into our products but in every Mac Pro we’re going to put two of them. All Mac Pros, quad Xeon performance. These are screaming-fast machines.”

Every new Mac is seemingly the fastest Mac Apple has ever made, except perhaps the MacBook Neo. But this one truly gave a huge leap with a claimed doubling of performance over the Power Mac G5.

It also gave a boost in what that performance was per watt of power. Typically that’s a concern when you’re building notebooks, since you’re balancing the needs of work and battery life, but Schiller pointed out that it also had great benefits with this desktop.

“Performance per watt means we need less cooling systems inside the box too. Which means we can do more with the space we have,” said Schiller. “So we’ve doubled the number of drives inside the Mac Pro to now four hard drives of up to 2TB of internal storage.”

“And our most requested feature,” he continued, “we’ve added a second optical drive for our pro customers as well.”

There was also space to connect more external devices both at the back of the machine and now the front. The front added a second USB 2.0 port and Firewire 800, while the back’s most significant change was a double-wide graphics slot allowing for the biggest and most powerful GPUs to be installed without sacrificing an adjacent slot.

So the New Mac Pro was “screaming fast” and it came with greater expansion but still the same enviably easy way of doing that expansion. The enclosure let you open the whole side and then just snap in new hard drives without any cabling or any fiddling.

It was deeply customizable, it was wicked fast, it came with 1GB of RAM, but could address 32GB of RAM, and Schiller announced that it was shipping that day. On August 7, 2006, you could buy one for $2,499 — $4,140 in today’s money.

The last-ever Mac Pro sold from $6,999 in 2026.

Not standing still

The original Mac Pro — version 1,1 — stayed on sale until a speed bump in April 2007. Then that version 2,1 lasted until the following January when the 3,1 upped the performance with a faster quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 processor. You could upgrade it to have two such processors plus up to 32GB RAM.

It would be another 15 months before 3,1 was released. The Mac Pro (Early 2009) was particularly suited for multi-threaded operations where software was able to split its load between several processors. Strictly speaking, the Intel Xeon 5500 processors were slower than the previous 5400 ones but with better caching and communications between components, the result was a faster machine.

Another significant update was in July 2010 when as well as moving to Intel’s Xeon 5600-series processors, you could now have up to 64GB RAM and 8TB storage.

This lasted as Apple’s flagship model until arguably that flag was faltering. It was two years before the Mac Pro saw another update. The July 2012 release now came with two 6-core 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Westmere-EP processors.

The trashcan Mac Pro was a great-looking design but didn’t live up to expectations.

On the outside, it still looked exactly the same and with the interior no longer improving radically, Apple’s professional users began clamoring. This time Apple responded by previewing a brand-new design for the Mac Pro at WWDC in 2013.

Again Apple was telling professional users to hold on, something big was coming. The difference is that unlike with the next 2019 Mac Pro, back in 2013 Phil Schiller was able to show off the machine. He was able to announce that it would be shipping later that year and it did, if just barely, on December 19, 2013.

He was even able to comment on criticism that Apple hadn’t been able to improve the Mac Pro: “Can’t innovate, my ass,” he said. Accurate at the time, Schiller has seen the remark re-used in less than complimentary exchanges since, and chiefly because of what happened to that 2013 Mac Pro.

This is the version that Apple replaced in 2019, but had basically told everyone to stop buying it in 2017. It looked great, this was the trashcan Mac, but it had no internal expansion and it overheated under pressure.

It regains the vaguely cheesegrater-like appearance, but the current Mac Pro is not what it once was.

Consequently, as smart as the design was and as true as it was that the 2013 Mac Pro was the most powerful at the time, nobody misses it.

Whereas exactly two decades on since we first met the Mac Pro in that “cheese grater” casing, it is still remembered. Three years since its Apple Silicon replacement came out, it’s remembered.

And when Apple discontinued it, despite initial plans to release an even more powerful model, the Mac Pro is lamented because of that original 2006 version.

What the Pro wants

There’s no real definition of a pro user, it’s just a term that Apple uses when it wants to charge more for something. Nonetheless, there will always be someone claiming that a machine isn’t “Pro” because it has or doesn’t have any given feature — and it will be someone selling you self-interested snake oil.

The Mac Pro officially stayed at the top of the range until its demise, but for so long it was just the titular head. It stopped being the Mac to lust after, replaced in people’s affections and budgets by the Mac Studio.

And as much as some of us might like, the cheese grater’s glory isn’t coming back soon.

from the what-third-branch? dept

There are many ways to describe the Trump Era, but the executive branch’s conviction that it can simply ignore the legislative branch’s entire existence has become something close to a governing principle. From impounding funds designated by Congress to launching a war without Congress’s authority, Trump has basically decided that the legislative branch is a vestigial organ of the federal government.

This latest one may seem smaller than those stories, but it’s another demonstration of how little the executive branch thinks the laws Congress wrote actually matter. Specifically in this case, the FCC has voted to scrap the congressionally-mandated limits on broadcast TV ownership. This, despite a long list of people who’d normally be on Carr’s side — Republican members of Congress, the former FCC commissioner who helped negotiate the cap in the first place, the House Majority Leader who cut the final deal — all saying the FCC can’t do this. Even Ted Cruz says he’s skeptical.

But Carr has done it anyway.

And while I’m sure the usual coterie of MAGA Trump defenders will insist this is all fine, it’s obviously an end-run around Congress’s authority. Congress set that number itself, writing directly into statute that no single company may own stations reaching more than 39% of American households. It was in a 2004 appropriations bill that raised this limit from the previous 35% to 39%.

That’s Congress clearly putting into law that the FCC must have a cap of 39% reach for TV ownership.

But Brendan Carr says he can change this because it’s “outdated.” Here’s how Carr previewed the vote last month in an oped for Breitbart:

On August 6, the FCC will vote on eliminating the outdated national cap in favor of a new case-by-case approach. Previously, the cap operated as a blanket prohibition on any and all deals that would combine stations in excess of the 39 percent limit—regardless of whether it was a good deal or a bad one for the country. Our new proposal would allow the FCC to approve deals that exceed the 39 percent cap, but only if doing so would promote the public interest.

Even if you agree with Carr that the 39% ownership cap is “outdated” and that it’s not in the public interest, that’s not Carr’s decision to make.

He is saying, out loud, that the FCC can ignore an act of Congress whenever the FCC decides that act has gotten stale — with the FCC, conveniently, being the sole judge of staleness.

Of course, all this comes right after Nexstar and Tegna — two giant, reliably GOP-friendly broadcast companies — merged into something massively exceeding that 39% cap (thanks to Carr’s support). You know full well (as does Carr) that if the two companies merging here were the kind he likes to call “leftist” or “woke,” there is no chance he’d wave them past the 39% cap. He’d suddenly put on his attempt at a solemn face and talk about how unfair it would be to the public interest of America to let one company control that much broadcast spectrum.

The lone remaining Democrat on the Commission, Anna Gomez (who Trump likely hasn’t fired yet only because the FCC needs a quorum to do anything at all), has pointed out that this is all quite obviously unlawful.

Today’s decision to eliminate the 39 percent national audience reach cap is unlawful on its face and a profound departure from both statutory boundaries and longstanding broadcast policy. Congress set this cap in federal law, and only Congress can change it. I cannot support an action that so plainly exceeds the Commission’s authority while simultaneously overlooking the real-world consequences for the public we serve.

She goes into further detail about how the wording in the Telecommunications Act is pretty clear that the FCC can’t just ignore this cap or change it without congressional approval. And cites a bunch of Republicans including former FCC officials, along with both current and former elected officials in Congress:

Further, knowledgeable republicans with direct experience shaping, and later interpreting, the national audience reach cap agree that today’s action is plainly foreclosed by law. Former FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who was personally involved in the negotiations that produced the 39 percent cap, has stated unequivocally that the Commission ‘does not have the authority to modify the national audience reach cap,’ explaining that Congress expressly codified the cap in statute, removed it from the Commission’s periodic ownership review, and never revisited that limitation. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who negotiated the final compromise with Senator Ted Stevens, has likewise emphasized that the 39 percent cap was deliberately enacted to prevent FCC revision absent a future act of Congress, underscoring that ‘regulatory agencies cannot defy or modify laws enacted by Congress’ and reaffirming that the cap is ‘a statute, not a suggestion.’ And while Senator Ted Cruz did not serve in Congress during those negotiations, his present role as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee gives him direct oversight over this very issue. He has made clear that he is ‘skeptical a change can be made absent an act of Congress,’ signaling that Congress’s intent remains unchanged today. Taken together, these perspectives from the architects of the cap, the regulators who implemented it, and the congressional leaders who now oversee it underscore a bipartisan, durable, and deeply informed consensus that the law prohibits the Commission from eliminating the national audience reach cap. No amount of policy preference can substitute for statutory authority

Gomez also points out that if Carr were actually concerned about the public interest in these deals, the FCC sure has a funny way of showing it. For all of Carr’s talk about weighing the public interest deal by deal, his Media Bureau has refused, every single time, to look at what these mergers actually do to the public — specifically, what they do to the retransmission fees that show up on your cable bill:

What is notable about such reviews is the studied avoidance thus far of addressing the impact of the transaction at issue on retransmission consent fees on the merits every single time it is raised. The Media Bureau routinely summarily dismisses such issues as outside the scope of what it should be considering. For example, in the Nexstar Tegna decision, despite evidence that the transaction would result in millions of dollars in increased fees on consumers, the Media Bureau determined that it was inappropriate to consider the issue in that “case-by-case” review because “allegations regarding retransmission consent do not raise a substantial and material question of fact as to whether grant of the Applications would serve the public interest” and such questions should be considered in a rulemaking proceeding. Clearly the Commission does not want to address the challenging questions retransmission consent raises, but passing the buck to another proceeding when the impact is significant, direct, and current can only go so far without becoming the very essence of arbitrary and capricious. The Commission has crossed that line here. This is indefensible.

It’s almost certain that a lawsuit will be filed challenging this unilateral move by the FCC to simply rewrite congressional law. But either way, this shows (yet again) how the current administration sees Congress’s role as entirely ceremonial. At least when a Republican is president. The second that a Democrat is back in the White House you can absolutely guarantee that partisan dipshits like Carr will suddenly rediscover the need for Congress to set all the rules.

After all, when Biden was in office, Carr was one of the most vocal in pointing out that Congress limits the FCC’s authority and you can’t just ignore Congress. Here he is complaining about the FCC pretending it has “freewheeling authority” to ignore Congress:

Today’s NPRM appears to me to be part and parcel of that broader effort, which I cannot support. It relies on Section 616(a) of the Communications Act, which lists six very specific things the FCC can regulate in MVPD carriage agreements. That list provides a good clue of how Congress intended to circumscribe our statutory authority. But the NPRM asserts that we may go beyond that list and exercise freewheeling authority over private carriage agreements. I am dubious.

Huh. How odd. In that same dissent he says that the FCC must wait for Congress to act:

Unless and until Congress decides to delegate additional authority to the FCC over OTT streaming, we should act with the appropriate dose of regulatory humility.

What happened to that regulatory humility, Brendan?

Or how about his concerns about Congress when he dissented from the Biden FCC’s attempt to deal with digital discrimination? Back then, he was super duper concerned that Congress had not approved this.

Needless to say, Congress never contemplated the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden asked the FCC to adopt—let alone authorized the agency to implement it. Nonetheless, the FCC is voting to put President Biden’s plan in place. I oppose the plan for several reasons.

In that dissent, he’s clear about not going beyond congressional authority:

Of course, Congress did not give the FCC the power to do any of this—the agency just creates it out of whole cloth.

But now that Trump is in charge, Carr is happy to erase a rule Congress wrote and to replace it with his own judgment.

Oh, and when the Biden administration’s FCC tried to bring back net neutrality? You sure know that Brendan Carr was furious that they would ignore the will of Congress. Indeed, he used that to whine about Chevron deference, allowing agencies like the FCC to ignore the will of Congress. But, of course, the Supreme Court got rid of Chevron deference in Loper Bright, a decision Carr celebrated. But before that, in dissenting from the FCC’s moves on net neutrality he went on an extended rant about how the FCC should require explicit consent from Congress:

Congress never passed a law saying that the Internet should be heavily regulated like a utility, nor did it pass one giving the FCC authority to make that monumental determination. The Executive Branch pressured the agency into claiming a power that remained—and remains—with the Legislative Branch.

Gosh. It’s almost as if Brendan Carr thinks that when Democrats are in power, the FCC should be limited in what it can do by Congress, and when Republicans are in power, Congress is entirely there for show.

For the past decade, the central project of the conservative legal movement has been convincing courts that federal agencies constantly grab powers Congress never handed them. That’s what West Virginia v. EPA was about. That’s what Loper Bright was about. The entire premise of the major questions doctrine is that when an agency makes a decision of real economic and political significance, it had better be able to point to clear authorization from Congress.

Carr cannot point to clear authorization from Congress on this. He can point to the precise opposite: a specific number, written into a specific statute, after a specific fight, for the specific purpose of taking this decision away from the FCC. He isn’t stretching an ambiguous grant of authority. There’s nothing here to stretch. He’s crossing out a figure Congress chose and penciling in “whatever I think is good for the country.”

And he’s replaced it with a process where he is the judge. Deals get approved if they “promote the public interest,” with Carr deciding what that means, deal by deal, with no cap, no standard, and (as Gomez points out) a Media Bureau that refuses to look at the one concrete public harm anyone actually raises.

Remember when Carr set up his “delete, delete, delete docket” in which he promised to delete unnecessary “regulatory underbrush”? This is the opposite. It’s the FCC chair converting a bright-line rule Congress wrote into a regulatory permission slip he personally issues. Companies that want to get very large now have an obvious incentive to make sure Carr is happy with them, which is presumably the feature rather than the bug. 2023 Brendan Carr would be livid.

Maybe 39% is the wrong number in 2026. That’s an argument someone could make honestly. There’s even a body specifically designed to hear it, weigh it, and write a new number into law if it’s persuaded. It meets a few blocks from the FCC. Carr, with Trump in the White House, would rather pretend it isn’t there.

Filed Under: anna gomez, brendan carr, congress, fcc, media ownership

from the when-all-you-have-is-a-dragnet dept

Well, it looks like investigators better go back to doing actual investigations in the Fifth Circuit, rather than just assuming a little paperwork and a whole lot of assistance from service providers is going to do their work for them. For at least the second time in the same state (Mississippi), federal judges have rejected cell tower dump warrants, ruling that these warrants (obviously) cannot hope to meet the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements.

The first time this happened was early last year, when a magistrate judge rejected four successive cell tower dump warrants submitted by the FBI. The magistrate was the first level of review in this case. The latest involves the second level of review by a federal circuit judge (h/t Josh Gerstein). This decision does nothing more than affirm the magistrate judge’s rejection of these cell tower dump warrants. (Another rejection of cell tower dump warrants occurred in Nevada roughly six weeks after this one, but that’s in a different circuit so it’s up to the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court to establish this precedent.)

But the origin of these successive rejections goes back a bit further. Bucking its own anything-for-the-cops tendencies, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court delivered a ruling in August 2024 that said geofence warrants were unconstitutional. That decision relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter ruling — the one that said long-term location tracking (via cell site location info) was unconstitutional.

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court used the Supreme Court’s Carpenter reasoning to move location info out from under the protection of the Third Party Doctrine. More specifically, it had problems with geofence warrants — warrants that force Google to search everyone’s location records before handing law enforcement a list of probables based on whatever time/date/location restrictions investigators give it.

Turning everyone into a suspect just because investigators don’t actually know who they’re looking for makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment’s demands for particularity. The government likes to believe that the only particularity needed is the distinct probability that Google stores the location records they’re asking for.

That’s not enough. So, in the Fifth Circuit, precedent says geofence warrants are more likely than not to be rejected for a lack of particularity. This probably explains why the FBI decided to roll its dragnet back to the previous version: the cell tower dump. Rather than ask Google for location data, the investigators asked every cell service provider in the areas where crimes were committed to “dump” all connection records fitting those search limitations. As each warrant was rejected by the magistrate, the FBI made further alterations in hopes of having a warrant approved. But even specifying that the dumps only include cell numbers with multiple hits couldn’t save them.

Here’s how the magistrate judge delivered the news to the FBI last March:

[W]hile the Government has some idea of who may have been involved in one or more of the crimes—the affidavits supporting the warrant applications list seven potential suspects—the Government has not presented probable cause to believe that any particular individual committed any of the specific crimes described. The warrant applications also arguably present probable cause to believe that the searches will reveal the location data of some unknown perpetrators of the crimes. See Mem. at 3 (explaining that affidavits describe “the belief that the cell towers will contain evidence of [who committed] the offenses”). But this is not enough. If the Court were to issue the warrants, it would be authorizing the Government to search the data for every cellular device (including cell phones) of every single individual near the crime scenes without a showing of probable cause as to each individual.

More succinctly (and pithily), here’s why cell tower dumps (and geofence warrants) are unconstitutional:

Stated another way, the Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.

As stated above (scroll back a bit because I’m terrible at writing short lead-ins), this new ruling [PDF] presents a final rejection for these cell tower dump warrants. The government can always appeal a magistrate’s warrant rejections, but appealing past this point puts the government back into the Fifth Circuit queue. And if the Fifth Circuit said geofence warrants (which are just a different haystack) are unconstitutional, it’s highly unlikely it will give cell tower dumps a pass.

This decision starts off with a nod to history before immediately bringing everything up to date:

Such intrusions would have been unthinkable to those 55 men gathered in Philadelphia in 1787. Therein lies the problem—the technological resources at the government’s disposal unlock efficient and effective ways to solve crime in the twenty-first century, but they also expose individuals’ whereabouts at all times, including in sensitive places. The government now has the capacity to identify any individual with a cell phone, at any public or private location.

That sort of “efficiency” needs to be checked (as in “checks and balances”). That’s why we have courts. And this court is willing to do what many won’t: refuse to bless constant expansion of government power and information access just because today’s everyone-voluntarily-carries-a-tracking-device reality could not possibly have been foreseen when the Fourth Amendment was put into play.

The government tried to argue that cell tower dumps do not “track” people’s locations like the historical CSLI (cell site location info) at the center of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling. The court says that’s not the point, especially not when the Supreme Court’s ruling is considered in conjunction with the Fifth Circuit’s rejection of geofence warrants.

[T]he Fifth Circuit has recognized that “the potential intrusiveness of even a snapshot of precise location data should not be understated.” Smith, 110 F.4th at 833. See also Chatrie, 146 S. Ct. at 2209-12 (discussing how the length of the search does not determine whether a search occurred). Though tower dumps provide more limited, less-detailed information than geofencing, the inherent nature of this type of search remains corrosive to individuals’ privacy interests.

Furthermore, the government tends to ignore how the Fourth Amendment has been defined since its inception. While the government would prefer its definition of particularity to be limited to “we have probable cause to believe the place searched will contain what’s being searched for” (which is how the government portrays both geofence and tower dump warrants), the courts have long understood the particularity requirement to mean this when it comes to probable cause:

“Probable cause is not a high bar.” District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 57 (2018) (quotation marks and citation omitted). The Government only needs to show that “there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 235, 238 (1983).

Cell service provider tower records are neither “contraband” nor “evidence of a crime.” They may help investigators produce a list of probable suspects, but that is not the same thing as contraband or evidence.

Summing everything up, the federal court rejects every one of these warrants and makes it clear the government will need to do something other than ask tech companies and service providers to generate lists of suspects for it — especially when doing so means turning thousands of people into possible suspects just because they happened to be near certain cell towers when crimes were committed.

Law enforcement benefits from tower dumps, as evidenced by recent cases, and this decision may thwart certain criminal investigations. But the gentlemen in Philadelphia knew the Fourth Amendment’s protections would come with costs. The cost to law enforcement is the price we pay to be free from arbitrary Government intrusion into our everyday movements.

It’s that last sentence that’s going to piss off the government the most. All levels of law enforcement seem to believe it’s the public who should be making all the sacrifices when it comes to law enforcement efficiency. This ruling sets the record straight. And if the government wants to take another run at the Fifth Circuit, it certainly can. Given what it’s seen so far, it would probably be better if it didn’t.

Filed Under: 3rd party doctrine, 4th amendment, 5th circuit, cell tower dumps, mississippi, phone records, surveillance

A decade ago, Google introduced voice typing with the Gboard app on Android, and a year later, the perk landed on iPhones with the keyboard app. I never paid much attention to it. The biggest reason was that it was just not accurate. 

The big promise was a whole new way of interacting with our phones, but it was never good enough to make me quit tapping, or swiping on an on-screen keyboard. Fast forward to 2026, I’m talking to my computer. In fact, this whole article was dictated and copy-pasted in WordPress. 

The modifications that I had to make were inserting a few commas, breaking a couple of sentences with a full stop, and turning a few bullet points into a coherent sentence. If I were to put a number on it, I would say just 2% of the effort that went into writing this article was dedicated to tapping on the keyboard to make the aforementioned changes.

That’s all. But the honeymoon phase comes to an end pretty soon as social realizations dawn upon you.

A flying start

I first started using voice dictation after trying Wispr Flow. It’s eerily accurate. And when I say eerily accurate, I mean it as a person whose first language is not English, nor do I have a distinct American or British accent. And yet, every time I write an article, I am amazed by just how accurate and convenient the whole experience is. 

It has also made me unbelievably lazy and far more productive at the same time. 

I run a newsroom, and that means being fast is the only path to the reward that is a high ranking and visibility in Google search. In fact, it was the first lesson that I was taught when I started journalism in one of India’s most respected newsrooms. “Speed is of the essence.” That’s what my first editor used to say and almost drilled it into my workflow. 

I have religiously followed that mantra. But ever since I started using Wispr Flow, I have been amazed by how fast I can now write and publish breaking news stories. Last night I was able to compose a story worth around 500 words in less than six minutes. I could have gone faster if English were my mother tongue, but six minutes is still an outrageously fast pace by modern standards. 

This mind-bending convenience has also made me utterly lazy. Every single time I have to touch the keyboard to do something that cannot be accomplished by voice typing, I feel a distinct struggle. I thought, maybe, it was the chiclet keyboard on my laptop that had finally outlived its charm. 

To test the theory, I tried a low-profile keyboard and then switched to a mechanical keyboard in hopes that it would ignite my love for typing. I was delusional. There was nothing wrong with the keyboards either. If it were a short burst of typing chores, I would have decisively enjoyed the creamy sound and the tactile experience. I have just become hopelessly addicted to narrating my articles and rambling my way through my daily newsroom duties. 

The prophecy came true

Is this the future of computing? It seems like it. It’s still not perfect. Voice typing is still tailored for jobs where you are either writing long drafts or just prompting your way through tasks using an AI agent like ChatGPT or Gemini. Silicon Valley is utterly sold on the idea, and it has even given rise to a term called “voice-pilled.”

Unfortunately, I count myself as one of those voice-pilled converts. 

Every time I run into this conundrum, I go back to one of the notes that Bill Gates shared back in 2023. “You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do,” he wrote, exactly a year after ChatGPT was released publicly for the first time and created a new computing revolution. 

In May last year, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, sat for an interview with Sequoia and dropped a prescient take on voice as the new frontier for human-computer interactions. This was his quote:  

“I think voice is extremely important. Honestly, we have not made a good enough voice product yet. That’s fine. Like, it took us a while to make a good enough text model, too. We will crack that code eventually, and when we do, I think a lot of people are going to want to use voice interaction a lot more.” 

This was around the same time when Wispr Flow had just started making waves. I gave it my first serious try when it landed on iPhones, and later installed it on my Mac. Yes, the dictation limit on free accounts was a tad frustrating, so I briefly experimented with a paid subscription. 

Advertisement

Eventually, I canceled the subscription and started using the Android app, which offers unlimited voice dictation for free accounts as a limited-time offer. A few weeks ago, I shifted to Willow Voice, which is nearly as accurate and absolutely free. I haven’t looked back since. 

My humanity and the world’s unease

Typing continues to feel tedious, and despite some of the annoying typos due to my accent issues, I still find myself long-pressing the fn button to just narrate my articles, compose long messages to teammates, or even just my usual back-and-forth with Claude for pet projects. 

It’s just liberating, and at the same time, it frustrates me every time I go back to a task that requires manual work on the keyboard.  

This is also where the situation gets a tad embarrassing for me. It doesn’t matter whether you work in an office space or you are one of those people who carry a laptop to a nearby cafe for your daily work. If you are someone who stares at your laptop’s screen and keeps talking for long spells, it just feels weird. 

Now the ubiquity of wireless earbuds makes the situation just a tad less embarrassing. AirPods have made it a natural sight to see people just walking around and talking to themselves, while the onboard mic on the earbud captures and transmits whatever it is that they are speaking. But talking to a person and a computer are two entirely different things. 

Advertisement

When you talk to a person, there is usually a sense of friendliness, humility, and, most importantly, human emotions involved. When you’re talking to a friend on a phone call, you don’t feel uneasy. If you took the call in a public place, it has just become a part of our normal lives to talk without holding the phone close to our ears. 

But when you are talking to a computer, there are no emotions involved. You sound robotic and use words that you would ordinarily not speak when talking to a human being. It’s just a set of instructions, but AI models these days are smart enough to turn those incoherent sentences into something meaningful and proceed with them as commands.

We think the tools people run their business on are all heading voice-first.

One founder we came across is already there. He talks instead of typing for almost everything, and the rest of his day moves around that.

What are the tools you could not work without? pic.twitter.com/bupBikudcL

Advertisement

— Willow (@WillowVoiceAI) August 3, 2026

I feel conscious every time I start narrating an article or a message. “Why is this guy suddenly talking about Anthropic’s AI model going rogue and hacking third-party services?” “Why is he rambling about Google fixing a Bluetooth bug on its Pixel phones?” “Why is this guy randomly and intermittently speaking about following Apple’s UI design rules?”

All the above situations are a part of my daily job, and I am not embarrassed about doing my job. I love it. And yet, every time I use voice narration in a co-working space, a library, or my nearby coffee shop, I am afraid that the person next to me is having those thoughts about me. 

Maybe, I just need to muster some courage?

Yes, the world doesn’t care or know who I am. A random stranger shouldn’t pay attention to what I do with my computer, either. But the social norms and how human awareness works make me feel uneasy every time I start talking to my computer.  

Advertisement

It’s 12:42 AM right now. I am narrating this article using Willow Voice, and I’m still concerned that my neighbor upstairs, or in the next apartment, is going to hear me randomly talking about voice dictation in the middle of the night. I enjoy the perk and how I have been able to draft this article in less than 15 minutes.

I still feel a sense of unease every time I summon these unnaturally accurate and efficient voice dictation tools on my computer. I fear I will only get used to it when the whole world gets voice-pilled at their jobs. For now, I will keep my computer talks limited to cozy apartments with the windows shut.

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week are the Nintendo gameplay counsellors and a revamped app for sharing your toilet flushing habits. 

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Filed Under: content moderation, india, trust and safety

Companies: ebay, meta, telegram, tiktok