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Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tech Drop, a roundup of the week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Know when to fold ’em
Popular card game company Cards Against Humanity claimed partial victory this week in its lawsuit against Elon Musk and SpaceX, reaching a settlement over its claims that SpaceX employees had trespassed on the land it bought to prevent the construction of a border wall along the Rio Grande.
Texas Public Radio reports:
Court records show the lawsuit was dropped last month. In an email to fans sent Monday, the game company did not disclose the terms of settlement but said SpaceX ‘admitted on the record’ to dumping trash on land it bought near Musk’s rocket launch site in South Texas.
‘Soon, the land will be returned to its natural state: no space garbage, and still completely free of pointless [expletive] border walls,’ the email read.
Cards Against Humanity’s spokesperson Maria Ranahan told The Texas Newsroom a trial would have cost more than what the company was likely to win from SpaceX.
Texas Public Radio and technology news website Ars Technica reported that SpaceX did not immediately return their requests for comment.
Read more at Texas Public Radio and Ars Technica.
Lewd AI lawsuit
Lawyers in New Jersey have filed a lawsuit on behalf of a teenager who says the app ClothOff, which allows users to generate deepfake images of people in the nude, made it too easy to generate and distribute naked images of her. (The owners of ClothOff didn’t immediately respond The Wall Street Journal’s request for comment.)
Read more at Ars Technica.
Dems seek to defend whistleblowers
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have launched a website that contains resources for government whistleblowers after the Trump administration decided — in an act unrelated to the ongoing government shutdown — to withhold funds from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.
Read more at Government Executive.
Trump administration’s AI erasure
The Trump administration has quietly deleted blog posts published to the Federal Trade Commission website by its former head Lina Khan, in which she warned about the risks of artificial intelligence and promoted the need for open source coding.
Read more at Wired.
ICE targets rideshare app area
As President Donald Trump pursues his anti-immigrant deportation agenda in Chicago — which he has openly portrayed as a “war” on the city — Mayor Brandon Johnson says he is taking steps to protect drivers who use rideshare apps after federal immigration officials arrested nearly a dozen people at a parking lot at O’Hare International Airport.
Read more at CBS News.
Mythical MAGA medical device
A dubious new health product appears to be gaining traction among the MAGA faithful: so-called Light Systems, sold by a company called Unifyd, and its purportedly miraculous results.
Per The Bulwark’s Will Sommer:
The devices have been compared to a real-life version of medbeds, the mythical medical tanning beds some conspiracy theorists believe will fix anything that’s wrong with you (which recently got a boost from President Trump). The system includes a screen, identical to a computer monitor, running on what looks like a form of the BASIC programming language and flashing symbols of different colors. Those symbols, proponents say, are sending out waves of healing power to anyone who sits in front of one of the screens.
Read more at The Bulwark.
Salesforce-quit
After Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff faced furious backlash from what he described on X as his “fellow San Franciscans and our local officials,” the Silicon Valley tech bro walked back his earlier support for Trump’s threat to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco.
Read more at CNN.
Chains of fools
Several influencers in the MAGA movement have recently offered outspoken endorsements of slavery. On Monday, I wrote a piece on the trend and why we should take conservatives’ praise of the Confederacy seriously.
Read more at MSNBC.
Nazi in the chat
Two bombshell reports from Politico over the past week have exposed Republican operatives who’ve been documented praising or identifying with Nazis.
Last week, the outlet unearthed a sea of disturbing group chats between a dozen leaders of Young Republicans groups, in which members shared racist messages and said things like “I love Hitler.” And this week, Politico reported on Trump administration official Paul Ingrassia’s alleged texts with fellow Republicans, in which the nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel claimed to have a “Nazi streak.”
Ingrassia’s lawyer appears to be going with the “these texts could be fake, but even if they aren’t, they’re not that bad” defense:
Looks like these texts could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted. However, arguendo, even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call MAGA supporters ‘Nazis.’
Read more at MSNBC.