“Stealth Crawlers” Are Not a Threat to the Open Web. Bills Targeting Them Would Be.
News publishers—and their allies in government—say that unmasking crawlers is necessary to protect news organizations from technological strain caused by AI-related crawling, and fears that AI could reduce news sites’ traffic and ad revenue. These are legitimate concerns.
R2 is now Generally Available
R2 gives developers object storage, without the egress fees. Before R2, cloud providers taught us to expect a data transfer tax every time we actually used the data we stored with them. Who stores data with the goal of never reading it? No one. Yet, every time you read data, the egress tax is applied. R2 gives developers the ability to access data freely, breaking the ecosystem lock-in that has long tied the hands of application builders.
Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”
Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.
Moonshot is Chinese But Its AI Models Are From Another Planet
Moonshot’s Kimi K3 is the first Chinese open-source model to reach the level of the best American frontier models. In some areas, it’s on par with Anthropic’s Mythos/Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6. For those of you who remember DeepSeek’s ascent to notoriety in January 2025, this is Moonshot’s “DeepSeek moment,” except more serious: Experts used to calculate that China was only six to nine months behind the top Western AI models.
Google Releases Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Developers building production agents need higher token efficiency, lower latency, and more reliable performance. Today, Google has released three new Gemini models. The lineup is Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber. All three sit in the Flash tier, which Google tunes for speed, cost, and high-volume agentic work rather than maximum reasoning depth.
An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion
A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034.