Trump’s DOJ filed a 20-page brief in Sept. 2026 backing OpenAI in the New York Times lawsuit, arguing copyright limits on LLM training would harm U.S. competitiveness and “thwart” progress if fair use is misunderstood. In SDNY, the question is whether training on copyrighted books and articles is “transformative.”
On Sep 2, 2026, X shifted U.S. creator payouts from Stripe to X Money for Original Content Rewards and subscriptions: instant access, no $30 minimum (previously every two weeks). X Money accounts auto-receive; Sept 7 retires the Creator Revenue Sharing Program.
On Sept. 2, 2026, Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to make Google sell ad-tech units, opting for behavioral remedies over breakup. The DOJ proved tying Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) to AdX, but Brinkema found it failed to show monopoly of advertiser-side tools.
X says it’s investigating a wave of unsolicited password reset emails tied to the September 2026 launch of X Money, which includes a bank card. On Sept. 1, product engineer Mridul Singhai said there’s no evidence of any breaches and apologized for the multiple emails; Grok is telling users to enable two-factor authentication, and counsel James Burnham vowed to hold attackers accountable.
September 2026 saw Florida and Texas move to drop Flock license-plate readers over privacy and misuse. Florida DOT ordered removal from state highways within 30 days after Ron DeSantis called it “out of control”; Texas halted funding after a Lufkin officer was indicted on 100 felony counts over alleged unauthorized database tracking in the ~130,000-camera network.
Microsoft traced the multi-day Microsoft 365/Outlook disruption to a misconfigured “core authentication configuration” that prevented authentication components from deploying as expected. By 10 p.m. ET Monday mail flow was improving, search remained degraded until about 3 a.m. ET Tuesday, and a later X update said mitigation actions are continuing with telemetry positive and extended monitoring underway.
Microsoft confirmed a multi-hour Outlook/Exchange Online outage on Aug. 31, 2026, traced to a failed “authentication component.” Downdetector saw reports from ~11:30 AM ET, topping 5,000 by 2:00 PM, while users faced auth errors, message send/receive failures, and mailbox search issues.
VideoLAN says VLC has topped 7B downloads on all platforms as of Aug 2026, about 18 months after hitting 6B in Jan 2025. President/lead dev Jean-Baptiste Kempf cites a port to Amazon’s Vega OS for TVs and ongoing work on VLC 4, plus last year’s local-model translation/subtitle tease.
Phil Schiller, one of Apple’s longest-serving executives, is stepping down from his roles overseeing the App Store and Apple events, according to a report from Bloomberg published August 31, 2026….
Google Maps began displaying “Lake America” in place of Lake Ontario for US users in late August 2026, making it the first major online maps provider to reflect President Donald Trump’s executive…
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on Aug. 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Claude training used “brazen” illegal torrenting, scraping, and downloading of thousands of copyrighted books and sheet music. The complaint builds on Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge said AI training can be legal but piracy isn’t, ordering $1.5B.
Google began automatically expanding its AI search summaries for some queries in 2026, pushing traditional link results further down the page, according to a report first noted by Search Engine…
