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The European Commission is watching closely after a significant legal decision involving Anthropic. A spokesperson confirmed Brussels is examining the practical consequences of the ruling, a signal that AI companies operating across the Atlantic may face growing regulatory scrutiny as Europe works to understand how American court decisions ripple into its own jurisdiction.
Shifting gears to an older kind of conflict between technology and government, Amazon is defending its water usage by pointing out that its data centers consume just a fraction of what Americans spend irrigating their lawns. The company uses two point five billion gallons annually for cooling — a large number in isolation, but Amazon frames it against three point three trillion gallons used for residential landscaping nationwide. Whether that comparison holds up as a genuine defense or reads as clever deflection is a question worth sitting with.
And from the archives of computing history, the Computer History Museum has recovered what it calls an astonishing haul from an abandoned warehouse in Castrop-Rauxel, Germany — more than two thousand artifacts spanning the nineteen thirties through the nineteen eighties, requiring seven tractor-trailers to transport after the recovery was briefly complicated by a World War Two bomb scare. A remarkable reminder that computing history can still surprise us.
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