This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags
During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day.
Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.
One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it.
Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companiesTreasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch)+ Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios)+ Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World)+ China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yetAI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $)+ Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI)
3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sightAnd Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT)+ This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review)4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been droppedThere are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $)5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ dataAs soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media)+ States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $)
6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impactAs the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge)+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fixThat’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $)
8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI useThe token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica)9 Why does lettuce keep making Americans sick? It’s pretty simple: a lot of people eat it, and it doesn’t get cooked. (Wired $)
10 Pokemon Go is the perfect game to play this summerIt’s fun, collaborative, and it gets you outdoors. (Guardian)
Quote of the day
“It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”
—Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, tells NPR why the OpenAI hack on Hugging Face is so alarming.
One More Thing
KAGAN MACLEOD
Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream
Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps.
But is he responsible for what it’s used for? It’s a question that matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by an admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. It’s also been used by North Korean hackers to move $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum.
Thorbjornsen explains this all away as a function of THORChain’s decentralized and permissionless nature. Read our story exploring whether we should believe him or not.
—Jessica Klein
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ A musician developed an ingenious way to strum a guitar with an electric fan.+ Ukraine’s tunnel of love is a leafy green corridor of romance that’s straight out of a fairy tale.+ The driver of a giant banana has been pulled over 100s of times, but still won’t ditch his treasured ride.+ Ever wonder which albums and songs truly stand the test of time? The Greatest Music tries to answer that via an algorithm that analyses hundreds of “best of” lists.