from the ah-yes,-the-ministry-of-truth dept

Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher tapped to lead it, received death threats. The whole thing was shut down within weeks because of the outcry.

Of course, all of it was an exaggeration. That board was actually set up to coordinate efforts to counter foreign disinformation — not to police Americans’ speech. We said so at the time, even while criticizing DHS for the monumentally stupid way they named and rolled it out. The name was terrible. The communication around it was worse. But the underlying mission — helping coordinate the government’s own efforts to respond to (not censor) foreign influence operations — was legitimate and, frankly, important in this era of information warfare.

Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just signed a cable doing something that sounds vaguely similar, but way worse. Specifically, he’s directing U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda — and the cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool for the effort. It also admits that this is pure psyops work:

The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.

“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”

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Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.

This is far more expansive than anything the Disinformation Governance Board ever even contemplated — and the same people who screamed about the Ministry of Truth are, once again, completely silent.

Kate Klonick has written an excellent deep dive on this for Lawfare, tracing the structural transformation that made this possible. She puts it plainly:

The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.

And see if any of this sounds familiar:

Rubio identifies five operational goals—countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and “telling America’s story”—and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.

Why, that sounds quite similar to what the Biden DHS said about the Disinformation Governance Board. Except, suddenly: no partisan freakout. No weeks of stories on Fox News. No screaming in the NY Post about speech police. Gee. I wonder why.

The U.S. State Department is instructing embassies to recruit local influencers to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed. This is, by definition, a covert influence operation. It’s the kind of thing that, when other countries do it, we call propaganda. It’s the kind of thing the Global Engagement Center was specifically designed to expose.

Oh, right. About the Global Engagement Center.

You may recall that one of the early moves of the returning Trump administration was to shut down the GEC, the State Department office specifically created to help identify and counter foreign influence campaigns. At the time, Rubio — the same Marco Rubio who just signed this cable — framed the shutdown as a free speech victory:

Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.

That was always a lie. The GEC (just like the Disinformation Governance Board) didn’t “silence and censor” Americans. It studied foreign influence campaigns — the kind run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, by ISIS recruitment networks, by Chinese state-linked information operations — and helped expose them. It’s the kind of work that requires sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and sophisticated analytical capacity. The kind of thing you can’t just spin up overnight when you suddenly realize you need it.

So all of the hand-wringing about the Disinformation Governance Board, the GEC, and the idea that governments were too close to social media platforms was a bunch of nonsense all along. It was always about trying to gain and then keep power, destroying the institutions that dealt with foreign disinformation campaigns until they could capture them for their own purposes.

Klonick traces how Twitter/X became susceptible to exactly this kind of capture:

Musk systematically dismantled Twitter’s trust, safety, and content moderation infrastructure. The teams that had worked, however imperfectly, to maintain platform integrity not just for commercial reasons but to limit the spread of coordinated inauthentic behavior, state-linked influence operations, and targeted harassment were gone within months of Musk’s ownership. With both the corporate accountability architecture and the internal operational safeguards stripped away, the platform’s amplification and suppression mechanics became, in effect, tools that could be deployed at anyone’s, but namely Musk’s, discretion.

Before Musk’s acquisition, the major US tech platforms — whatever their flaws — generally bent over backwards to avoid being captured as instruments of state messaging.

The Rubio cable, on the other hand, specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a tool for countering “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech.” Klonick correctly identifies this as:

…a remarkable exercise in circular reasoning: the government endorsing, for use in state-directed information operations, a moderation tool on a platform owned by a former (and perhaps still current) senior government advisor.

But it’s worse than circular reasoning. Community Notes is a crowdsourced system. Its outputs are determined by which users participate and how they coordinate. While it’s (actually very cleverly) designed to avoid brigading attacks, that does not mean it’s perfect in avoiding manipulation. If the U.S. government can organize sympathetic actors to use Community Notes to surface pro-American narratives as part of a formal PSYOP-adjacent campaign, then so can every other government on the planet. China can coordinate its own actors. Russia already runs exactly these kinds of operations. Iran has entire units dedicated to this. The cable essentially advertises to every adversary exactly how to game the system — and the people who actually understood these vulnerabilities, the trust & safety teams, the GEC researchers, the disinformation scholars, are exactly the people this administration spent years attacking and driving out of their jobs.

Oh, unless they expect Elon Musk to tilt the playing field to their advantage — which is exactly the kind of thing these very same people were loudly freaking out about when Biden was president.

Now, some might point out that the broader “censorship industrial complex” crusade wasn’t only about counter-messaging efforts like the DGB and the GEC. It was also about the Murthy v. Missouri case, which dealt with something categorically different: the allegation that the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove third-party users’ speech. The Rubio cable, by contrast, directs government employees themselves to use the platform for their own messaging. These are genuinely different things.

But the supposed animating principle behind the entire crusade was that the government had no business being entangled with social media platforms on matters of information and speech. Not just “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove user content,” but the much broader claim that any government-platform coordination on information amounted to a sinister censorship machine.

Jim Jordan’s “censorship industrial complex” hearings didn’t just target White House communications with platform trust & safety teams. They went after researchers. They went after the GEC. They went after nonprofits studying foreign manipulation. The message was that any institutional involvement in the information ecosystem was inherently suspect. That principle, it turns out, had an expiration date — specifically, January 20, 2025.

And remember, in the Murthy case itself, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Biden admin’s communications with platforms constituted coercion. The plaintiffs couldn’t even establish standing because they couldn’t show the government actually changed platform behavior. Meta felt totally comfortable telling the White House “no” — as Zuckerberg himself admitted repeatedly on Joe Rogan, just weeks before telling Elon he was happy to silence people at the Trump White House’s request.

So the same political movement that treated government staffers sending cranky emails — emails that platforms felt perfectly free to ignore — as an existential constitutional crisis now sees nothing wrong with a formal State Department cable directing coordination with a specific privately-owned platform and military PSYOP. If the principle only matters when your political opponents are the ones in the White House, it was always just about weaponizing the systems of government for your own benefit.

Klonick puts the broader structural picture together:

The privatization of Twitter removed all traces of public accountability. The gutting of content moderation infrastructure removed operational resistance. The political alliance between the administration and the tech sector removed institutional resistance. And now a formal diplomatic cable removes the last pretense of arms-length separation between U.S. government messaging objectives and the platforms that carry them.

The legal questions that Murthy left unresolved—about when government pressure on private platforms crosses the constitutional line—will almost certainly be relitigated in this new context. But the more immediate reality is that the internet Americans and global audiences navigate is increasingly shaped not merely by the preferences of platform owners and advertisers, but by the strategic communication objectives of the U.S. government, implemented through platforms that have every financial and regulatory reason to cooperate.

This is the pattern we’ve watched unfold for years: wrap your power grab in the language of the thing you’re destroying. Call fact-checking “censorship.” Call attempts to expose foreign influence campaigns “the speech police.” Dismantle the institutions that actually did the thing you claim to value, then use the resulting vacuum to do exactly what you falsely accused your opponents of doing — only bigger, more openly, and with military coordination.

The sheer audacity of the sequencing is what makes all of this so infuriating. They spent years pointing at the Disinformation Governance Board and screaming “Ministry of Truth!” They shut down the Global Engagement Center while Rubio called it censorship. They destroyed the research infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that actually helped identify and counter foreign influence operations. And now, having cleared the field of anyone who might push back, they’re running their own influence operations through a platform with no independent oversight, no transparency mechanisms, and no institutional resistance — and they’re doing it openly, through formal diplomatic channels, in coordination with military psychological operations.

Klonick closes with the right question:

The question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution—legal, normative, or structural—retains the capacity to check it.

Given that the people who claimed to care about checking government entanglement with social media are now the ones wielding it most aggressively — and spent years systematically destroying every institution that might have served as a check — don’t hold your breath.

Filed Under: counterspeech, disinformation, disinformation governance board, foreign influence, global engagement center, marco rubio, psyops, state department

Companies: x

As the world held its breath on Tuesday night, news of a ceasefire and the potential reopening of the Strait of Hormuz brought a collective sigh of relief. But with shipments stalled in the strait for over a month, the disruption to global shipping will not resolve immediately.

“Traffic through Hormuz dropped by about 95 percent [during this conflict]. As a result, prices surged, and not just for crude oil but also for refined products like jet fuel, diesel, and gas oil,” says Carsten Ladekjær, CEO at Glander International Bunkering, which specializes in supplying fuel and lubricants to the global shipping industry.

The impact has been uneven across regions. Countries heavily dependent on Middle Eastern energy—particularly in Asia—have been most affected. India sources around 55 percent of its energy imports from the region, China about 50 percent, Japan 93 percent, South Korea 67 percent, and Singapore 70 percent, according to Ladekjær.

While the ceasefire signals a possible reopening, key details remain unclear. “Even with a ceasefire, reopening won’t be immediate,” Ladekjær says. “There’s a backlog, with ships waiting to leave, and likely a controlled process for who gets out first. Iran still appears to be managing that.”

Energy markets reacted quickly. Brent crude fell to around $94 from $110 earlier in the week—a drop of roughly 15 percent.

“Refined products like diesel and jet fuel have dropped even more, because markets are forward-looking—they price in expectations,” says Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst and head of research at Global Risk Management. “But we’re still well above prewar levels, which were around $60 to $70.”

A System Under Backlog

Around 1,000 ships remain in the Gulf, including hundreds of tankers awaiting passage.

As of this writing, more than 800 cargo ships and tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf, with over 1,000 additional vessels waiting on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz.

Under normal conditions, roughly 150 vessels pass through the strait daily. Experts say clearing the backlog will take time, as ships must be sequenced through, refueled, and repositioned.

Ships began passing through the Strait of Hormuz after the ceasefire announcement.

Elif Acar/Getty Images

“That’s a logistical nightmare. We don’t yet know what the current capacity will be, especially from a security standpoint,” says Lohmann Rasmussen. “It’s not something that can be solved overnight. There are logistical issues, security issues, and even communication challenges.”

Though the market has already seen a correction, that doesn’t mean prices at the pump or in storage will drop immediately.

Google is issuing you its periodic reminder that you aren’t tethered to Microsoft’s operating system if you own a PC. In fact, the search giant is making it easier than ever to switch over to ChromeOS Flex.

As part of a new partnership with Back Market, a refurbished electronics company, Google is now offering ChromeOS Flex USB Kits to make installing its signature OS a breeze on PCs and Macs alike.

Whether you’ve been purposefully avoiding a Windows 11 update or you’re one of the more than 500 million computer owners with a PC that is too old for an operating system upgrade, your Windows 10 PC hasn’t received an update since last October when Microsoft ended its support for it. (Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates program will keep pushing critical updates your way until this coming October for $30, a fee I doubt many people clinging to an old PC are willing to pay.)

When your operating system stops getting updates, you’re facing down the barrel of a security nightmare — no more exploits will get fixed, leaving your system (and potentially sensitive data) vulnerable to bad actors. Google’s ChromeOS Flex continually supports older devices than Windows 11, which could make it a good alternative until you upgrade to another PC.

The new Back Market USB kit is available now for $3, or you can download ChromeOS Flex for free by following the simple instructions included at the end of this article.

A quick ChromeOS Flex history lesson

Google’s ChromeOS isn’t available to install on a laptop or desktop like Windows or Linux, but the next best thing is Google’s ChromeOS Flex. Formerly known as Neverware CloudReady, the OS is primarily built for businesses and education. But ChromeOS Flex is free for personal use, and it’s so lightweight that it’s great for breathing new life into a computer that’s struggling from the demands of Windows, MacOS or Linux. 

Google acquired Neverware in December 2020, and the result was ChromeOS Flex. While CloudReady was good, Flex is much closer to the experience you’d get with a Chromebook or other ChromeOS device. That includes the official Chrome browser, support for Family Link (or school-issued) accounts, and Phone Hub, which lets you connect to an Android phone to view notifications and share files between the phone and laptop. The one thing you don’t get is access to the Google Play Store and Android apps.

ChromeOS Flex runs well even on old hardware. That’s why it’s such a good option for repurposing a laptop that can no longer run current versions of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Google guarantees Flex to work, however, only on a growing list of certified models. If your model isn’t certified, that doesn’t mean it won’t work, though. It just means that full functionality and performance aren’t a given.  

You choose: Trial run or full install

One of the best features of ChromeOS Flex is that you can run it off a USB flash drive or SD card to test it out first without completely overwriting your current OS. For best performance, it’s not recommended to run Flex full-time from a flash drive, but it will let you see if it works for your needs. 

Installing ChromeOS Flex is quick and painless. The first step is to gather everything you need:

• A USB thumb drive or SD card 8GB or larger

• A Windows, Mac or Linux computer to install ChromeOS Flex on

Note that installing ChromeOS Flex will completely erase your entire hard drive. Any important files should be backed up first. You’ll also need a ChromeOS, Windows PC or Mac device with the current version of the Chrome browser installed. This will be used to create the ChromeOS Flex USB installer, and it doesn’t need to be the same device you plan to install it on. The thumb drive will also be completely erased when creating the installer.

To run ChromeOS Flex, the target laptop (or desktop) will need to be Intel or AMD x86-64-bit compatible (newer than 2010 for the best experience), have 4GB RAM or more, have at least 16GB of storage and you’ll need full administrator access to the BIOS. Once you have everything you need, it’s time to create the USB installer. 

• Open a Chrome browser window on a ChromeOS, Windows PC or Mac device and add the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension via the Chrome web store. This is what you’ll use to build the USB/SD card installer. 
• Go to the Chrome browser’s extensions menu located at the top right of the Chrome browser window (it looks like a tiny puzzle piece). Click on it, and a drop-down list of extensions will appear. Find the Chromebook Recovery Utility on the list and click on it to launch. The utility might need to be toggled on, too, which can be done by clicking on Manage Extensions at the bottom of the drop-down list of extensions. 

• When the Chromebook Recovery Utility launches, you’ll be asked to identify what model Chromebook you’ll be recovering. However, there will be a link labeled Select a model from a list in the dialog box. Click that link, and from the Select a manufacturer drop-down list that appears, select Google Chrome OS Flex. Below that drop-down is another labeled Select a product from which you’ll choose Chrome OS Flex.  
• Next, insert your flash drive or SD card into the device you’re using to create the installer, select it as your target drive and then click Create now. The creation process takes up to 20 minutes but mine was done in half that time. Once the installer is finished, the drive can be ejected and is ready to use. 

You’re almost done. It’s time to grab the laptop you want to convert to a Chromebook. Make sure the laptop is turned off and insert your ChromeOS Flex installer thumb drive or SD card. 

The next step is to boot the laptop from the thumb drive instead of the internal storage drive. This requires you to press a boot key while the laptop is booting. Boot keys vary by manufacturer. For instance, on a MacBook Air, the boot key is the Option key. Google has a list of boot keys for major manufacturers if you’re not sure what yours is.   

Turn on the laptop and, as it boots, press the boot key to interrupt the boot process. You may need to press and hold the key, or press it repeatedly, to enter the boot menu. If done correctly, the laptop should give you the option to select which drive you’d like to boot from: the laptop’s internal drive or your USB drive. Select the USB drive and press Enter. 

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If you’ve done everything correctly, you’ll see the ChromeOS Flex splash screen followed by a Welcome to ChromeOS Flex screen. (If not, retrace your steps using Google’s installation guide.) From there, you can choose to test the OS and run it directly from the flash drive or install ChromeOS Flex on the internal storage. Doing the latter gives you the best performance; however, it also erases all content from the internal drive, and the native OS can’t be recovered. If you aren’t 100% certain you want to use ChromeOS Flex, try running it from the USB drive first. 

The full OS installation can take up to 20 minutes (my MacBook Air took less than 5 minutes, though). Regardless of how you run it, the setup process is the same. Select a Wi-Fi network, agree to Google’s terms of service, choose whether the Chromebook is for yourself or a child, and then sign in with your Google account information. 

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Ta-da, Chromebook! At least, close enough for most needs. Performance will depend on what your laptop has. My install was on an early 2015 MacBook Air, and it’s much faster than it was with MacOS on it. The only downside for my particular model is that the built-in webcam is not supported, but an external USB webcam worked just fine. 

If you’ve got a USB flash drive and an old laptop, it’s certainly worth the minimal effort to test out and, again, it’s free. 

from the more-of-that-famous-prosecutorial-discretion dept

Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved.

In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn’t simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at a “No Kings” protest. Here’s how this started, as detailed by Liliana Segura for The Intercept:

In the body camera footage, a police officer parks his black SUV on the grass, a rosary swinging from the rearview mirror. He exits his car, moves briskly past a pair of protesters, and points an accusatory finger at the suspect: a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis holding an American flag.

The alleged crime? Unclear. There’s no sound at first, only the silent spectacle of a person in a penis suit turning toward a cop with a stance that says, “Who, me?” A handmade sign comes into view in the person’s right hand. It reads “No Dick Tator.”

You can see the whole thing for yourself here:

It’s really an amazing recording. It includes several high points, including cops trying to stuff a person who’s inside an inflatable penis into the back of a cop car before deciding it might be easier to separate the person and the costume… before struggling to fit the costume itself into the trunk of a cop car. It also includes superbly stupid things like this:

Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was less amused.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” he tells Gamble when the audio begins to play on the 14-minute body camera video. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

He demands to know how she could possibly justify such an obscene display: “I would like to hear how you would explain to my children what you’re supposed to be.”

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Every easily-offended, would-be censor has the same go-to for complaining about stuff they don’t like: “how would I explain that to my children?” I don’t know, man. They’re your kids. Take any approach you want, including ignoring the question. It’s not on the rest of the world to make sure you never have to have an uncomfortable conversation with your kids. If you can’t figure it out, maybe you shouldn’t be in the business of raising kids, much less in the business of enforcing laws.

There are also plenty of far less funny moments, like the fact that three cops decided to get involved in pinning 62-year-old Renea Gamble to the ground for the crime of… well, that was all pretty much undecided at the point the officers decided to enforce their will with their power.

Corporal Andrew Babb obviously didn’t know the law, but that wasn’t going to stop him.

“I said, ‘That’s not freedom of speech,’” Babb continues. “‘This is a family town and being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated.’”

A. It actually is freedom of speech.

B. Every town is a “family town,” unless you happen to live in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Everything about the arrest is a non-starter. And yet, local prosecutors — propelled forward by supportive local government officials — are still trying to pin criminal charges on Renea Gamble. Mayor Sherry Sullivan claimed the costume was an “obscene display” which would “not be tolerated in Fairhope.” City Council president Jack Burrell claimed the costume “violated community standards” Neither assertion is true, which means neither statement can support an arrest, much less the bringing of criminal charges.

Some of the initial enthusiasm for punishing Gamble was stifled when her arrest went viral, resulting in a nationwide discussion of this ridiculous situation. But apparently the town thinks it’s now safe to proceed with saddling Gamble with a criminal record.

Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15.

The “peace” wasn’t disturbed until Officer Babb decided he was going to take Gamble’s costume personally. And “giving a false name to law enforcement” is really stretching things when all Gamble did was sarcastically respond “Auntie Fa” when officers demanded her name after stripping her of her inflatable penis.

So, the case continues, which is only going to bring more embarrassment to town leaders and law enforcement officials. The backlash that greeted the arrest will return, which means the arresting officer may want to consider employment elsewhere. Hopefully, this will all end with the town cutting a check to Gamble for violating her rights.

Until then, Gamble is going to keep on doing what she does:

Gamble has tried to keep a low profile since her arrest. At the No Kings protest last week, though, the “No Dick Tator” sign appeared in the hands of a masked woman who wore dark sunglasses and a bandana over her face.

It was Gamble, again wearing an inflatable costume.

She was dressed as an eggplant.

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People who view dissent as a threat, if not inherently unlawful, cannot ever hope to win. Acts like this only embolden those already involved in dissent and attract others to join the cause. They may have the power, but the people have the inflatable genitals and the will to use them.

Filed Under: alabama, andrew babb, david gespass, fairhope pd, free speech, jack burrell, no kings, penis, renea gamble, sherry sullivan, trump administration

The death of a duck in the Austin, Texas enclave of Mueller Lake has neighbors raising concerns about autonomous vehicles and whether they belong there.

While humans are responsible for killing animals with their cars all the time, this incident has brought negative attention to the new technology. Local media picked up on the duck incident after a resident posted in a Mueller neighborhood Facebook group that an Avride autonomous vehicle (with a human safety operator behind the wheel) ran over and killed a duck, and did not stop afterwards. “It didn’t slow down or hesitate at all, just steamrolled through,” the post, which KXAN reported on, reads.

Residents’ familiarity with this particular duck, which was nesting in a pot located outside of a local Italian eatery, has added to the outrage and mistrust of the autonomous vehicle technology. For those concerned about the future of the duck’s eggs, local residents have them in an incubator, Axios’ Austin reports.

An Avride spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch that the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time. Avride hasn’t paused testing on public roads altogether. However, the company has adjusted its area of operations by excluding certain streets around the lake in Mueller neighborhood where the incident with the duck occurred, according to spokesperson Yulia Shveyko.

The resident also claimed in their post that the vehicle failed to stop at a stop sign. Avride told TechCrunch it did not find evidence to support that claim. The vehicle came to complete and appropriate stops at all relevant stop signs.

Shveyko said the team has reviewed vehicle data and behavior, including replaying the scene multiple times in simulation. Avride is now evaluating potential improvements to the technology to help avoid similar situations in the future, she said. Notably, this includes running a series of controlled experiments in simulation to ensure that any changes do not negatively impact the vehicle’s safety performance in other scenarios.

Avride isn’t the only company testing or commercial deploying autonomous vehicles in the city. Zoox has been testing in the city. Tesla and Waymo, in partnership with Uber, also operate a commercial robotaxi service in parts of Austin.

Motorola is gearing up to launch the successor to last year’s Razr 60 Ultra. Early CAD renders recently offered a first look at the device, suggesting that the upcoming Razr 70 Ultra won’t change much in terms of design. However, a new leak now hints that Motorola could focus on unique colors and finishes to help it stand out.

What are the new color options?

Reliable tipster OnLeaks has shared press renders (via Android Headlines) of the Razr 70 Ultra in two standout finishes: Orient Blue Alcantara and Pantone Cocoa Wood. The Orient Blue variant is expected to feature a faux leather back with a diamond stitch pattern, giving it a premium look and feel. The Cocoa option, on the other hand, could feature a wood-like texture with visible grain.

Instead of just offering the device in different shades like most smartphone makers, Motorola appears to be giving each color a distinct finish, adding a tactile element that goes beyond standard glossy or matte coatings. With the overall design expected to remain unchanged, the finishes should help the company differentiate the new model from its predecessor.

Motorola has already taken this approach with previous Razr models, offering vegan leather backs and Pantone-inspired colors. The Razr 70 Ultra seems to be taking that a step further by pairing bold colors with more noticeable textures. It’s a subtle shift, but one that could make the device feel more unique.

What else do we know about the Razr 70 Ultra?

Although Motorola hasn’t officially shared any details yet, the device is expected to pack Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The images also suggest that Motorola may stick with a dual-camera setup, though it’s unclear if there will be any sensor upgrades.

More details should surface in the coming weeks ahead of the official launch, which could take place later this month. Motorola unveiled the Razr 60 Ultra in April last year, so it’s likely the successor will arrive around the same time.

Verne, the autonomous mobility company spun out of Croatian hypercar maker Rimac, launched commercial robotaxi rides in Zagreb on 8 April alongside Pony.ai and Uber. The vehicles operate with safety operators onboard for now. Waymo is targeting London for Q4 2026.

Verne, the autonomous mobility company spun out of Croatian electric hypercar maker Rimac Group, has launched what it is calling Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia. From 8 April, members of the public can book and pay for autonomous rides through the Verne app.

The service will shortly also be available through the Uber platform, following a three-way partnership announced on 26 March between Verne, Pony.ai, and Uber.

The vehicles in service are Arcfox Alpha T5 robotaxis equipped with Pony.ai’s seventh-generation autonomous driving system. They operate autonomously, but trained safety operators are onboard during this early phase of the rollout.

The three companies have said they aim to transition to fully driverless operations as soon as regulatory approvals and safety performance benchmarks allow.

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Under the partnership structure, Pony.ai provides the autonomous driving technology; Verne owns the fleet and manages operations on the ground, including regulatory approvals; and Uber integrates the service into its ride-hailing platform.

Uber is also investing in Verne as a strategic partner.

The result is surprising in geographic terms. Zagreb is a city of under a million people, and Europe’s most prominent autonomous mobility efforts have been concentrated in larger western markets, Waymo has announced plans for a fully driverless service in London in the fourth quarter of 2026, and Germany has hosted multiple competing programmes for years.

Verne’s Croatian origins explain part of the answer. The company has spent years in close discussion with Zagreb’s regulators and local authorities, a process made easier by its ties to Rimac, which is headquartered in the city and is one of Croatia’s highest-profile technology companies.

Marko Pejković, Verne’s co-founder and CEO, said the launch delivered on a commitment the company had made publicly: “We said we would launch in Zagreb in 2026. Today, we did. This is just the start.”

Verne’s current service uses Pony.ai’s technology rather than its own platform, which is still in development. The company originally planned to use Mobileye’s autonomous driving system before switching to Pony.ai ahead of the launch.

Verne has a factory near Zagreb that is expected to begin producing its own purpose-built robotaxi this year, a compact two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, designed from the ground up for driverless ride-hailing.

The Arcfox Alpha T5 deployment is understood to be a bridging arrangement while that vehicle reaches production readiness. Beyond Zagreb, Verne has begun permitting discussions with 11 cities across the EU, UK, and the Middle East, with more than 30 additional cities under active consideration.

For Pony.ai, which listed on Nasdaq in late 2024, the Zagreb launch is the first deployment of its technology in commercial service outside China, where it recently reached unit economics breakeven in two tier-one cities.