Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is moving toward imposing new internet restrictions on British citizens, with measures expected within days. Details remain thin, but the move signals a government willing to act quickly on online access — raising serious questions about civil liberties and who decides what's acceptable online.
Shifting to a story where land and data collide, a Texas farmer donated his property back in nineteen ninety nine specifically for use as a public park. The city recently sold that land to a data center developer for ten million dollars, and expects thirty million in tax revenue over the next decade. It's a case study in how infrastructure hunger reshapes even the most well-intentioned public gifts.
And on the more playful end of the spectrum, a developer has ported the open-source first-person shooter Xonotic to WebAssembly, meaning you can now run the full game directly in a browser with no installation required. It's a quiet but meaningful demonstration of how far browser-based computing has come — and how much heavier the web can carry than we once imagined.
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