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Prominent Republicans and gun rights advocates helped elicit a White House turnabout this week after bristling over the administration’s characterization of Alex Pretti, the second person killed this month by a federal officer in Minneapolis, as responsible for his own death because he lawfully possessed a weapon.The death produced no clear shifts in U.S. gun politics or policies, even as President Donald Trump shuffles the lieutenants in charge of his militarized immigration crackdown. But important voices in Trump’s coalition have called for a thorough investigation of Pretti’s death while also criticizing inconsistencies in some Republicans’ Second Amendment stances.If the dynamic persists, it could give Republicans problems as Trump heads into a midterm election year with voters already growing skeptical of his overall immigration approach. The concern is acute enough that Trump’s top spokeswoman sought Monday to reassert his brand as a staunch gun rights supporter.“The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens, absolutely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.Leavitt qualified that “when you are bearing arms and confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the risk of force being used against you.” Videos contradict early statements from administration That still marked a retreat from the administration’s previous messages about the shooting of Pretti. It came the same day the president dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, seemingly elevating him over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who had been in charge in Minneapolis.Within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Bovino suggested Pretti “wanted to massacre law enforcement,” and Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and acted “violently” toward officers.“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said.White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort, went further on X, declaring Pretti “an assassin.”Bystander videos contradicted each claim, instead showing Pretti holding a cellphone and helping a woman who had been pepper sprayed by a federal officer. Within seconds, Pretti was sprayed, too, and taken to the ground by multiple officers. No video disclosed thus far has shown him unholstering his concealed weapon - which he had a Minnesota permit to carry. It appeared that one officer took Pretti’s gun and walked away with it just before shots began.As multiple videos went viral online and on television, Vice President JD Vance reposted Miller’s assessment, while Trump shared an alleged photo of “the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!).” Swift reactions from gun rights advocates The National Rifle Association, which has backed Trump three times, released a statement that began by casting blame on Minnesota Democrats it accused of stoking protests. But the group lashed out after a federal prosecutor in California said on X that, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”That analysis, the NRA said, is “dangerous and wrong.”FBI Director Kash Patel magnified the blowback Sunday on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.” No one, Patel said, can “bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”Erich Pratt, vice president of Gun Owners of America, was incredulous.“I have attended protest rallies while armed, and no one got injured,” he said on CNN.Conservative officials around the country made the same connection between the First and Second amendments.“Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American,” state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who leads the GOP caucus in Tennessee, said on X.Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called for “full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting.” A different response from the past Liberals, conservatives and nonpartisan experts noted how the administration’s response differed from past conservative positions involving protests and weapons.Multiple Trump supporters were found to have weapons during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump issued blanket pardons to all of them.Republicans were critical in 2020 when Mark and Patricia McCloskey had to pay fines after pointing guns at protesters who marched through their St. Louis neighborhood after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And then there’s Kyle Rittenhouse, a counter-protester acquitted after fatally shooting two men and injuring another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the post-Floyd protests.“You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right,” Trey Gowdy, a Republican former congressman and attorney for Trump during one of his first-term impeachments. “Alex Pretti’s firearm was being lawfully carried. He never brandished it.”Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the history of the gun debate, said the fallout “shows how tribal we’ve become.” Republicans spent years talking about the Second Amendment as a means to fight government tyranny, he said.“The moment someone who’s thought to be from the left, they abandon that principled stance,” Winkler said.Meanwhile, Democrats who have criticized open and concealed carry laws for years, Winkler added, are not amplifying that position after Pretti’s death. Uncertain effects in an election year The blowback against the administration from core Trump supporters comes as Republicans are trying to protect their threadbare majority in the U.S. House and face several competitive Senate races.Perhaps reflecting the stakes, GOP staff and campaign aides were reticent Monday to talk about the issue at all.The House Republican campaign chairman, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, is sponsoring the GOP’s most significant gun legislation of this congressional term, a proposal to make state concealed-carry permits reciprocal across all states.The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee last fall. Asked Monday whether Pretti’s death and the Minneapolis protests might affect debate, an aide to Speaker Mike Johnson did not offer any update on the bill’s prospects.Gun rights advocates have notched many legislative victories in Republican-controlled statehouses in recent decades, from rolling back gun-free zones around schools and churches to expanding gun possession rights in schools, on university campuses and in other public spaces.William Sack, legal director of the Second Amendment Foundation, said he was surprised and disapointed by the administration’s initial statements following the Pretti shooting. Trump’s vacillating, he said, is “very likely to cost them dearly with the core of a constituency they count on.” Associated Press writer Kimberlee Kruesi in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report. Bill Barrow and Nicholas Riccardi, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Yahoo may not be the most headlined company in tech anymore, but its reach cant be denied. With nearly 250 million monthly users across the country and 700 million globally, its still the second most popular email client in the world, and the third most popular search engine in the U.S. (even though that search engine has technically been powered by either Bing or Google since 2009). As a privately owned company since 2021 (once worth $125 billion, but purchased for a mere $5 billion at the time), its CEO Jim Lanzone says that the last few years have been about getting the house in order. But now, he promises, this is one of the biggest turnarounds people have tried in internet history. Lanzone says that turnaround begins with Yahoo Scout, which launches today in beta. In short, Yahoo Scout is a new, free AI search engine (its also an omnipresent button across Yahoo verticals like Finance, Sports, and Mail) that’s there to summarize the performance of a business or break down the key moments of a game. In one mode, it’s essentially Yahoo’s version of Claude or ChatGPT. (Yahoo Answers for the AI era!) In the other, it’s an AI-translate button accompanying Yahoo’s editorial content, boiling down articles into takeaways. It will even summarize the sentiment of the comments on stories you read across Yahoo. We [arent] the first to market here, but in evaluating whether we should keep outsourcing or build the AI layer ourselves, it just became clear that we could do this best for our users, says Lanzone. We had a lot of unique assets to do that. And so in that context, timing is almost irrelevant, right? Because this is about Yahoo users on Yahoo, searching on Yahoo, versus what they were getting before. [Image: Yahoo] Led by Eric Feng, SVP & general manager of the Yahoo Research Groupwho is best known for recruiting and leading the technical team that created Huluits powered by a combination of Yahoos knowledge graph, Anthropics Claude, and Bings open web APIs. (Yahoo says that user data is kept internally and does not train Claude or Bing.) Yes, that means Yahoo is still relying on external partners, but the team says that search will feel like Yahoo because its so based within the Yahoo ecosystem. Specifically, Yahoo Scout can answer a question with everything Claude knows within its LLM (and gosh, does Yahoo Scout love to build a table breaking down information!) And it can also search the web itself as well as Bing. But the team insists that Yahoos own knowledge graph provides a lot more on top of Claude and Bing today, and it promises even more into the future. Specifically, Yahoo publishes 30,000 pieces of licensed stories and other content each day that are at its fingertips, and users create 18 trillion events across its services each year. Every event you get just makes the overall totality of the experience smarter, says Feng. Even if its something as simple as searching for the score of your favorite team, thats actionable data for Yahoo in the short term, but even more so in the medium to long term as it shifts Scout from a generalized AI search engine or summarizer to more of a personal AI. Just to be direct about it, you will see the roadmap include personalization [of AI], says Lanzone. Thats certainly where the category is headed, and it is a unique asset to Yahoo to be able to already have that built in. You know, we’re not trying to acquire an audience to start to build that up from scratch. We actually have all that knowledge and that relationship to dip into then layer this on top of. The experience of Yahoo Scout, and what that means for publishers Yahoo Scout lives as a responsive website and also as a standalone app. As a search engine, Scouts white search bar is accompanied by an ever-changing rotation of animated clipart (yeehaw, its quite a cute cowboy hat), bringing back some of the brands original quirk. The rest of the experience will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used an LLM, as every query is less a collection of blue links than an explanation of an idea. From a demo I watched, it really does have a bias to break searches down into comparative tables (which may be useful or cloying, depending how often that approach is taken). But its also less text heavy than many LLMs, because it makes liberal use of thumbnails listing news stories and products to buy. That penchant for prominent, colorful linking isnt coincidence. Publishers are amidst a 30-year mass extinction event, spurred on most recently by AI search tools that mine their reporting and present it to a public that no longer needs to click through to the actual story. Lanzone argues that prominent linking is key to protecting the health of the publishing industrypublishers that Yahoo relies upon for its core media aggregation business. Our No. 1 job is to bridge the gap for publishers . . . [with] a beautiful UI that’s very rich and intuitive but still leans into linking out without cluttering the page, he says. Well see if this is the exact version of where we wind up, but from day one, that’s a priority for us. And then [priority] two is, can we bring search advertising along as well? Speaking from two decades in digital publishing, I know that what Yahoo has shown thus far is certainly not enough to protect publishersand I challenged Lanzone on this point. Yahoos design may improve clickthrough rates a hair, but not nearly enough to support the publishing industry. Cloudflare research on search engine referrals demonstrates just how dire this moment is: For every 70,900 times Anthropic bots scraped information off a website, users clicked through only once. Much like McDonalds couldnt survive if Uber Eats began distributing its hamburgers for free, reported news cant live on if search engines are snatching their insights without meaningful compensation. “It’s not in version one, but we are also passionate about the idea that search advertising was really effective for both publishers, search engines, and advertisers. And there should be a way to cross the chasm, and to bring that model along with generative AI search engines says Lanzone. I don’t know. It won’t wind up exactly where it was, but it can be a lot closer to it than we’ve seen to date. And we are actually working on versions of that. It’s just going to be very hard to scale nine-step agentic processes where you get paid downstream, and it’s just a very difficult model to really scale up. And make no mistake, Yahoo is advertising with Yahoo Scout. While Anthropic has yet to introduce ads and OpenAI is only starting to, Yahoo is including ads in Scout searches from day one. Those ads appear in traditional paid links in the feed (think Google Adwords). Its also monetizing its shopping referrals (thanks to an AI shopping platform Vetted it acquired late last year). These are just the beginning of Yahoos extensive advertising roadmap, which will be realized with more intricacy later this year. Outside search, though, Yahoo believes that Scout living across Yahoo services will offer indirect benefit to monetization. If you are on Mail, Finance, or Sports, we want the technology that we’re providing to make that experience better, and then we get more engagement, says Feng. We get those users sticking around longer, and then those properties are able to better monetize. For now, Yahoo believes that monetization will be significant enough that it justifies keeping Scout free. That said, even Yahoo cannot resist the allure of subscription service revenue, and suggests that a premium paid version of Scout could live somewhere in the future. Look, we have subscription products of finance and sports and places, and you can definitely see a version of that coming here, says Lanzone. But 100% of our effort [for launch] has been the evolution of Yahoo search into Yahoo Scout. And we have the luxury of doing that because we have a really good business search already.
Category:
E-Commerce
A privacy-centric cellphone carrier called Cape is now officially available across the United States, offering a unique set of features to protect users from surveillance and identity theft. Many cellphone users already use virtual private networks, encrypted messaging apps, and secure password managers to help keep their data safe. But those tools cant always protect against security issues with the underlying cell network itself, and other phone companies dont typically compete on privacy, says Cape CEO John Doyle. Before we built Cape, there was not an obvious differentiated choice in the network space, Doyle says. [Photo: Cape] But Cape, founded in 2022, is designed to protect customers from privacy risks like SIM swapping, where a cellphone number is transferred to a new phone without the owners permission to intercept sensitive messages like authentication codes, and IMSI catchers, which snoop on phone users by impersonating legitimate cell towers and monitoring the unique international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) codes they transmit. That enables their operators, whether spy agencies or other mysterious parties, to track how people move about and potentially intercept calls and texts. (Cape also assisted the Electronic Frontier Foundation in developing technology to spot such devices, which led to evidence of one being found near the 2024 Democratic National Convention.) The company also doesnt collect subscriber names, addresses, or Social Security numbers, and automatically encrypts voicemails its customers receive so that the company cannot access them. Cape has raised $61 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Costanoa Ventures, Forward Deployed VC, and Karman Ventures. Doyle says he launched the company after learning about various vulnerabilities in cellular networks, with an early focus on people involved in security-sensitive work. It then expanded to offering service to users like survivors of domestic violence, investigative journalists, and people working in other high-risk fields, says Doyle, who previously ran the national security business at Palantir and served in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Cape launched an open beta program in March 2025 and has now officially emerged into general availability. Doyle says he believes new consumers will appreciate the companys privacy features enough to pay Capes monthly fee of $99 per month before discounts. Thats pricier than many plans from carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon, which offer base plans at $75 or less before their own discounts, not to mention discount providers like Mint Mobile, though Doyle points out that Capes cost includes all taxes and feesnot to mention the added privacy features. And with most people essentially required to carry cellular phones for business and personal reasons, and growing concerns about data privacy and security, he believes theres a market for a service that makes everyday people harder to hack and track. We find there’s just a wide swath of citizens who are really attracted to the idea of having some choice and taking that little bit of control over how their data is presented to and shared on mobile networks, Doyle says. [Photo: Cape] Though Cape doesnt own its own cell towersits whats called a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), paying for radio spectrum and other services from carriers with their own physical networkthe company operates its own mobile core network, meaning its able to offer a level of customization and security beyond what other carriers offer. In other words, its partner carriers handle radio connectivity, but Capes cloud-based system then takes over the logic of verifying that phones have access to the network, routing calls and messages, and maintaining and securing its own logs. The company disallows less secure 2G and 3G connections, and regularly changes IMSI numbers to discourage tracking, similar to how iPhones randomize Wi-Fi network addresses. And when users travel overseas, Cape verifies their phones locations using its app before routing connections through foreign networks, reducing the risk of impersonation attacks. The company also offers a partnership with Proton, a Switzerland-based provider of secure email, VPN, and other digital services, enabling a discount for new customers. Proton offers email features like encrypted message storage and filtration of trackers embedded in messages and a VPN that can filter out ads, trackers, and malware. And Cape explicitly supports GapheneOS, an Android app-compatible mobile operating system optimized for security and lack of dependence on Google and Apple. The company doesnt have an explicit partnership with the nonprofit behind Graphene, but it does make a donation to the organization for each new Graphene user that signs up, and even offers phones preloaded with the OS, unusual among mobile carriers. It’s a somewhat technical process to install Graphene, says Doyle, so we do that for people if they want. [Photo: Cape] Customers with modern iPhone or Android devices that support eSIMessentially, purely digital SIM cardsdont have to buy phones through Cape and can activate an existing device and port existing numbers. If you do purchase a phone through Cape, which currently offers a range of Google Pixel devices, Cape offers a $500 phone bill discount spread over six months to help defray the device cost (and pledges to delete customer shipping and billing info after 180 days). Users are also entitled to three numbers per line as a privacy measure, so they can provide one to friends and family and use others to receive authentication codes from businesses, for online dating, or any other privacy-centric purpose they wish. The numbers show up as ordinary numbers, so theyre not barred from services that ban purely internet-based numbers like Google Voice assigns, Doyle says. While the carrier cant entirely protect peoples privacy when they interact with other appsride-hailing apps will still know peoples locations, and users may still elect to share photos or other potentially sensitive data with apps and websitesit can help people keep their primary phone numbers safe. If subscribers wish to port their numbers to another phone or out of the Cape network, they need to provide a predetermined 25-word passphrase. That may seem daunting, but its designed to prevent number hijacking accounts that can be a serious risk to privacy. In general, though, Capes privacy measures are designed to be relatively unobtrusive. Some may even save users time and complexity: Requiring less personal information from account holders makes the sign-up process quicker, Doyle says. For potential customers wanting more detail about Capes privacy policies, the company offers a set of privacy principles along with information about how it will handle law enforcement requests for customer information. Cape pledges to notify customers of such requests whenever its legally allowed to do so (and says so far it has not received any requests for subscriber data that contained a nondisclosure obligation) and to challenge any secret request that is not narrowly tailored or otherwise lawful. In addition, Cape says it doesnt log phone GPS coordinates, deletes more general location data, and purges call logs after 60 days, except in situations like resolving fraud cases. And if the company is ever acquired, Doyle says, it will require the buyer to agree not to monetize user data. Of course, its possible some security-conscious users will be wary that Cape will keep its promises, perhaps especially given Doyles background in the military and at Palantir. But Doyle says he hopes the companys record of transparency will help it continue to establish trust among potential customers. We do everything we can, basically, to be transparent and to do what we said we would do, and say what we’re going to do, he says. And I think that over time, that will just build more and more trust in the market.
Category:
E-Commerce
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