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Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a seven trillion dollar federal plan to bring the artificial intelligence industry under public ownership and democratic oversight. The proposal would have the government build and operate AI infrastructure as a public utility, rather than leaving it in the hands of a handful of private corporations. Whether or not it gains traction, it signals that AI concentration of power is becoming a mainstream political fault line, not just a Silicon Valley debate.
On a very different front, Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit certificate authority that secures a significant portion of the web's encrypted traffic, reported widespread renewal errors today. For the millions of websites that rely on its automated system to keep their padlocks green, a failure like this can mean expired certificates and broken trust warnings for everyday users. The incident is a reminder of how much critical internet infrastructure quietly depends on a single, volunteer-sustained organization.
And in a story that sits at the intersection of sustainability and clever engineering, computer scientists at the University of California San Diego, working with Google, have stood up a private cloud cluster built from two thousand retired Pixel smartphones. Rather than landfill or resale, those old handsets are now pooling their processors into something genuinely useful, a proof of concept that e-waste might have more computational life left in it than we assume.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
