President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social's "Truth API" that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said.

Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to posts that can have immediate impacts on financial markets. The first customers are mostly high-frequency trading firms that could benefit financially from getting official government news milliseconds before others.

"This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company," the lawsuit said.

Truth Social also intends to impose restrictions on web scraping tools and make its API the only way to access archived posts that have been deleted or edited, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit was filed by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which argue that Trump is violating the US Constitution by preventing equal access to government announcements.

“A president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago,” said Seth Stern, the Freedom of the Press Foundation's chief of advocacy.

Trump "privatizing government information"

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It asks the court to declare that posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social while charging for fast access through the API is unconstitutional and unlawful. It seeks an injunction prohibiting the president and aides from posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social as long as the platform maintains the paid API.

“Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell,” said Ben Muessig, The Intercept's editor-in-chief. “We won’t let it stand.”

Trump frequently posts official government announcements exclusively on Truth Social, including military attacks and ceasefires, the hiring and firing of agency heads, and major domestic policies, the lawsuit said.

“Trump’s crooked scheme is particularly outrageous because, as documented by our Trump Anti-Press Social Media Tracker, he frequently uses his Truth Social account to berate journalists and even to announce his plans to sue them and criminally investigate them," Stern said. "Then, he makes them wait in line behind paying customers to find out about it unless they’re willing to subsidize the platform he uses to attack them. This brazen grift targets not only the markets but the First Amendment."

Truth Social seeks more customers

Besides Trump, defendants include Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp and Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino. Both Harp and Scavino have access to Trump's Truth Social account and publish posts on his behalf, the lawsuit said. The other named defendants are the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office.

Trump Media & Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social, reported $1.7 million in revenue and a net loss of $238.1 million in the second quarter. The net loss included $190.4 million in "non-cash losses including unrealized losses on digital assets, digital assets pledged, and equity securities," the company said.

Trump Media expects that Truth API will help generate more cash. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in an earnings call that the firm signed up over 10 customers, mostly high-frequency trading firms that are paying $60,000 to $100,000 a month.

McGurn said Truth Social is in conversations to sign up cloud computing companies, large news organizations, and developers of large language models. The company plans to eventually offer the Truth API to retail investors, he said.

The company's press release that announced Truth API said that "markets already move on Truth Social posts" and that the service will become a significant, ongoing source of revenue. "Truth API is designed for organizations most impacted by the cost of a delay in information. This includes high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms that require a low-latency, machine-readable feed rather than manual tracking," the company said.

Lawsuit alleges violation of 1st and 5th Amendments

The lawsuit argues that Truth API imposes an impermissible burden on access to Trump's public announcements.

"The First Amendment guarantees equal access to the President’s public announcements, and even content-neutral burdens on that access must be narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest," the lawsuit said. "There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information. Similarly, the Fifth Amendment prohibits charging unreasonable sums that cannot be justified to offset the cost of the government benefit, and granting preferential access to crucial government information for arbitrary and irrational reasons, as is the case here."

The lawsuit said Truth Social appears set on making archived posts impossible to access without an API subscription. It pointed to a McGurn quote in which he said, “We’re going to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly.” This shows that Trump Media plans to disrupt web-scraping tools and ensure that users must subscribe to Truth API to access deleted or edited posts that are no longer available to the public, the lawsuit said.

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation are both nonprofits and said they will be harmed by the Truth Social scheme. "Both face indefinitely delayed access to the President’s latest posts, and face permanent bars to the President’s archived posts, making it harder for both organizations to do their jobs," the lawsuit said.

We contacted the White House today and will update this article if it provides any comment.

This article was updated to correct the amount of Trump Media & Technology Group's net loss.

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When you submit a pull request, there are two places you can use to help explain what you are doing and why you are doing it. One is the pull request description, and another is the code you are modifying. And it’s important to understand the difference between them.

The pull request is where you justify why your change should be accepted. In the title, you spell out the problem you are fixing or the feature you are adding.

Add support for polarity reversal

Fix crash when polarity changes

In a large code base, you may need to be a little more specific.

Add support for widget polarity reversal

Fix widget crash when polarity changes twice in a short time

When somebody is chasing down a regression, they are going to be looking over all of the PRs that went into the branch recently, and having a good title will make it easier for them to identify which changes are likely to be a source of the problem.

For example, if somebody is investigating a doodad crash, they may look into “Add support for widget polarity reversal” because their doodad uses widgets, and maybe the problem is caused by a reverse-polarity widget that their doodad isn’t handling. On the other hand, they can pay less attention to the fix for the crash when widget polarity changes because that’s unlikely to be the reason the doodad is crashing. And if their doodad doesn’t use widgets at all, they may just skip over both of them.

If the PR had used the original titles of “Add support for polarity reversal”, without any mention of widgets, then a team investigating a regression in gadgets would have to dig into the PR (because gadgets also have polarity), only to realize that it’s about widget polarity, not gadget polarity.

The description of the PR talks about the source of the problem and how you fixed and validated it. This is point-in-time information where you justify to your reviewer why the change is needed and why your particular implementation of the change is correct. Discuss alternative designs and why they were rejected (e.g. because they were too risky). Show before-and-after screen shots showing that the problem is fixed. Confirm that associated paperwork has been completed, like unit tests. There might be standard paperwork for this, such as a “checkin template”. (It is often the case that the closer a project comes to release, the more stringent the paperwork. For example, late in the product cycle, you may need to demonstrate that the release management team has deemed that the bug meets the bug bar.)

In other words, the PR description is a point in time statement, providing information that is relevant to the code review itself. It is an exercise in persuasive writing: You are trying to convince the approver that your change should be accepted.

Comments in the code are for talking about the code itself. What is the correct way to call this function? Does it have specific prerequisites? This information is durable: It is information that remains useful even after the pull request completes.

Okay, so let’s do an exercise: I’m going to provide some text, and you tell me where it goes. These are all actual comments (suitably redacted) from PRs I have reviewed.

I have checked all calls to the function, and this was the only one that passed the wrong flag.

This goes into the pull request description. It is justifying why your change is correct, and in particular, it’s answering a question that a reviewer is likely to ask: “It’s great that you’re fixing this one caller of the function, but are there other callers that make the same mistake?” Putting this comment in the code itself would be wrong because the claim is valid only at the time the pull request is made. After the pull request, somebody might add a new call to the function that passes the wrong flag, and it is not true that you validated that new caller.

The JSON schema accepted by this function is documented 〈here〉.

This goes into the code. It is explaining how to use the function correctly. This information is important not just at the time you submit the pull request but also for an indefinite period of time in the future. (At least, until you change the function or the schema.)

The Doodad component will take advantage of polarity reversal.

This goes into the pull request description. It is justifying why you need to implement polarity reversal today. If you put this in the code, the future tense suggests that we are still waiting for Doodad. And future changes to the Doodad might cause them to stop relying on polarity reversal; when they do that, they are unlikely to come and update this comment in somebody else’s component. The comment also suggests that if you confirm with the Doodad team that they don’t need polarity reversal any more, it is safe to remove support for polarity reversal, which might not be the case if other components started using the feature as well.

Still, knowing that Doodad is the intended audience for the feature is worth noting for posterity.

// Polarity reversal was initially added for the benefit of
// the Doodad component.

Bonus chatter: Another thing to consider when making code comments is that the code comment needs to make sense even without the PR description. Suppose you are writing a function with the intention of deprecating an older function that it is replacing. Don’t add this comment to the new function:

// When all clients have migrated to the new function, keep this.

This makes no sense to someone who is seeing the comment without having also seen (and remembered) the PR that introduced it. It sounds like the comment is saying, “When X happens, take no action.”

What you should do is put a comment on the old function:

// When all clients have migrated to the new function, delete this function.

The post The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Officers allegedly abused databases that can draw from sources like license plate readers and facial recognition.

Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported.

These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely.

Since Elon Musk’s xAI controversially began relying on gas turbines last spring to power its biggest AI data center, Colossus, there has been public backlash to off-the-grid data centers like the one Amazon is building.

Notably, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi sued xAI to get Musk’s gas turbines turned off in June. That spurred the Trump administration to join the fight, backing xAI and arguing that citizens have no power to enforce the Clean Air Act.

However, as xAI and Trump pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, reports show that other AI giants have largely ignored mounting public criticism since it was filed. They’ve increasingly invested in various ways to avoid permitting discussions and supply their own power—including Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle. Together with Amazon’s investments, these alternative power plant projects swiftly securing approvals have become a harbinger that, unlike other data center fights that have successfully blocked $130 billion in projects so far this year, resistance against gas-burning plants may be futile. A potential loss in the xAI fight could devastate momentum in communities hoping to keep up the fight for more transparency.

Dozens of firms have begun sourcing their own power supplies in the past year, but the Texas project is reportedly Amazon’s first big investment in an off-the-grid data center.

After Amazon confirmed that it’s investing in the power plant to supply the energy needed for a massive planned data center project in Pecos County, the company boasted this ensured its project avoided straining the grid or raising electricity costs for neighbors. But the company did not respond to Ars' questions about the power plant backlash, making it seem clear that the discussion it’s willing to have is over the cost of utilities, not the potentially mass-polluting impacts from its center's reliance on gas turbines.

Amazon power plant clashes with climate pledge

In a statement provided to Ars, Amazon said that it “believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations,” and it plans to do so by relying on “new on-site generation that won't raise electricity costs for Texas families and is designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.” Over time, Amazon expects its power plant will possibly add energy supply for local customers, which could eventually make the grid more reliable and affordable. That’s the vision for the future that Amazon and likely other AI firms want the public to focus on.

However, it’s unclear if neighbors would ever see those future benefits. And any spike in emissions once the Texas power plant comes online seems to clash with Amazon’s voluntary commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, critics suggested.

Amazon told Ars that it remains committed to its Climate Pledge. But under Amazon’s current plan, the Texas power plant would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which the NYT flagged as “more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.”

Amazon knows that its data center plans could obstruct its climate goals at a time when its emissions have already been steadily rising, the NYT reported.

But Amazon’s bottom line might take precedence over that 2040 deadline. For companies like Amazon, gas-burning plants offer a fast lane to avoid years of delays associated with connecting to the grid and launching data centers quickly to meet ever-rising demand, just as AI becomes more mainstream. Any delay at all is viewed as money left on the table, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on a July 30 earnings call that demand is particularly exploding for its AI and chips businesses amid the AI boom. Looking forward, Amazon expects supply may lag behind demand well into 2027.

Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, suggested that the 2040 deadline remains a priority but also noted that “the world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” the NYT reported.

Amazon to burn gas while exploring renewables

Amazon’s Pecos County plan was first exposed by Cleanview, a company closely tracking environmental concerns with off-the-grid data center developments.

At the start of August, Cleanview discovered that the tech giant had filed three construction permits in Texas near the power plant that were “beginning immediately” and wondered if the projects were linked.

Thoroughly documenting the paper trail and taking satellite images, Cleanview got Amazon to confirm its suspicions, then released a report Friday warning that “Amazon is backing what could be the largest natural gas power plant ever built in the United States.”

Specifically, one permit showed the power plant “would use 35 turbines to generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power,” Cleanview reported.

Although it’s rare for any facility to emit as much as its permits allow, Cleanview is concerned that Amazon’s rush to fulfill Amazon Web Services cloud orders will tempt the company to blast more and more emissions into more areas each year without adequately weighing public harms. On top of the Texas power plant, Amazon is also “in talks with the developers of a 4.5 GW gas power plant in Homer City, Pennsylvania,” Cleanview reported.

That Pennsylvania power plant, Cleanview noted, was supposed to be the largest in the US, but clearly that bragging right wouldn’t have stuck for long. Spiraling demand for AI is now rapidly escalating the size of the power plants, Amazon’s plans suggest. And although one survey of data center developers earlier this year suggested that the majority think the "ideal energy mix" should predominantly rely on renewables and battery storage that are only complemented by natural gas, nuclear power, and other low-carbon sources, Donald Trump has predictably panned renewable energy while insisting that “rapidly building more fossil-fuel-burning power plants was essential to America’s AI race with China,” the NYT reported. At least one electric company, El Paso Electric, suggests Trump is right at least in the short-term, telling the NYT that “renewable generation alone cannot provide the continuous power required at this time” by the biggest data centers.

Stoking additional backlash, the president also recently rolled back environmental protections to make it even easier for AI firms to build their own power plants at a time when his Environmental Protection Agency head, Lee Zeldin, has declined to set nationwide standards, Politico reported.

Amazon told Ars that it’s exploring the use of solar energy and battery storage at the Texas data center but plans to rely on gas turbines in the meantime.

xAI's head start on gas-powered data centers

In a recent report, Cleanview flagged 59 data centers “with a combined capacity of ~90 GW that plan to build their own power ‘behind-the-meter.’” That represents about 25 percent of all planned data center projects in the US and suggests that xAI’s Colossus strategy “has gone from niche to mainstream,” Cleanview said.

“Speed to power is all that developers care about,” Cleanview reported, since “bringing a data center online even a few years early could result in tens of billions in revenue that would otherwise be forgone.”

The communities most likely to be impacted by the rush to build off-the-grid data centers tend to be located near “major natural gas production regions,” in typically red states where regulatory frameworks “favor rapid development,” Cleanview reported. Currently, Texas is attracting the most projects, trailed by a large margin by Utah, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Florida.

On top of using “mobile gas generators strapped to semitrucks”—as xAI did in Memphis—firms are also scouring for other quick-fix solutions. Popular alternatives include “aeroderivative turbines originally designed for aircraft and warships,” “reciprocating engines that ramp fast, but are less efficient,” and “refurbished turbines acquired from industrial operations,” Cleanview found. Perhaps most problematic are some gas turbines with simpler designs, the NYT reported, which pollute more than standard turbines.

For communities monitoring off-the-grid data centers, it can be hard to determine how big the pollution threat really is.

The NAACP has argued that xAI’s reliance on gas turbines has only grown the longer the facility has operated, “growing from 18 to 27 to 33 to, now, 60 unpermitted gas turbines,” while “Memphis area communities were left to piece together the pollution threat for themselves.”

So far, despite being the supposedly fast and easy solution, gas turbines aren't widely used yet. According to Cleanview, xAI accounts for most of the 2 GW behind-the-meter generation capacity running as of mid-2026.

Some of these projects can be approved in days, without any public notice, the NYT reported. One nonpartisan research group, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), recently estimated that “at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed” to power US data centers—most within the last 18 months.

But not every project gets a rubber stamp. Permitting delays have set back other attempts to move forward with off-the-grid data centers from OpenAI and Oracle, as well as Microsoft, Cleanview reported. And if nothing changes to end those delays by 2027, out of 13 GW in possible projects that could be online, only 5 GW of power may be added, the company forecasted.

AI firms are doing their best to ensure there’s as much power as possible, avoiding delays by breaking up larger power projects into smaller phases that require less rigorous rules, the NYT reported. To stop that, the EIP is planning a lawsuit that could force US data center developers to adhere to stricter pollution rules.

As Amazon's data center plans expand, Jen Duggan, the EIP’s executive director, told the NYT that Texas remains a hotspot to watch for fast-tracked projects from the biggest tech companies.

That’s troubling Texans, she said, who seem unlikely to simmer down since gas-burning plants “carry significant environmental footprints,” and “weak air pollution control permits that don’t protect public health are a systemic problem” already in that state.

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Backlash to Trump's vaccine order on Monday has been swift and sharp, with various public health and medical organizations and independent experts calling it "dangerous," "unscientific," "false and misleading," "so wrong," and saying it is "putting children's health at risk."

The responses are unsurprising; the medical and health communities have consistently fought against the anti-vaccine, anti-science agendas pushed by Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no background in science, medicine, or public health. The American Academy of Pediatrics—which called the order "not only disheartening but dangerous"—is leading a lawsuit against previous changes to federal childhood vaccine recommendations under Trump and Kennedy. In March, the organization, along with other medical groups, won a temporary injunction reversing most of the changes.

However, less expected among the scorn for Trump's order is the immediate pushback from the pharmaceutical industry.

Trump's executive order for his so-called "gold standard" vaccine policy focuses on reducing the number of vaccines children get. But contrary to that goal, it also called for splitting the combination measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three separate shots. The MMR vaccine is given in two doses, so the change would mean six shots for children instead of two.

More impractical, individual vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella do not exist in the US. For Trump's order to be realized, pharmaceutical companies would need to make hefty investments in developing, testing, and bringing to market entirely new vaccines—and they would have to do all of that based on no scientific reasoning whatsoever. The current MMR combination vaccine has proven extremely safe, effective, and convenient based on data from decades of use.

Within hours of Trump signing the order, PhRMA—the leading pharmaceutical industry group representing big players, such as GSK, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Novo Nordisk—put out a statement saying the order debases America's vaccine policy.

Industry pushback

PhRMA's Chief Medical Officer Michael Ybarra said that previous federal vaccine recommendations were "built on decades of rigorous scientific research and public health expertise," and any changes should be based on "the same high standard of evidence."

"Simply imposing a narrower schedule by importing recommendations from foreign countries wouldn’t reflect gold standard science—it would mean accepting a lower bar of protection against diseases that remain serious and, in some cases, life-threatening for children in the United States," Ybarra said.

Merck and GSK, which make MMR vaccines used in the US, also pushed back on the order, pointing out that it is nonsensical. Merck provided a statement to Stat News saying it supports vaccine policy "rooted in rigorous, evidence-based science" and that "There has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots."

A GSK spokesperson told Stat that its MMR vaccine is "backed by decades of global use and robust scientific evidence." The spokesperson similarly noted that "There is no scientific evidence that separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots improve safety or efficacy compared to combined MMR."

While seemingly tame, the statements reflect the industry's immediate public resistance to an order from a US president, which is not the norm. Other organizations, meanwhile, were more direct with their criticism.

Robyn Blumner, president and CEO of the nonprofit scientific advocacy organization Center for Inquiry, blasted the order in a statement:

“There are very few people less qualified than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be making decisions about vaccine policy. Donald Trump is at the top of that very short list. This new executive order is just the latest example of the administration’s complete disregard [for]—and overt hostility toward—evidence-based science. Public health policy should be based on rigorous science backed by data, not the personal beliefs and suspicions of one highly unqualified individual.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer's disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S. [...] Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs. The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer's was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn't seem to experience a similar advantage. Researchers believe the association between navigation-heavy work and lower Alzheimer's risk centers on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that governs memory and spatial navigation. It's one of the first brain regions that Alzheimer's damages: Problems with spatial navigation and orientation are among the earliest signs of the disease, sometimes surfacing before obvious memory loss. In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Their findings provided the first evidence via structural imaging that regions of the adult brain can measurably change under sustained navigational demand. To earn a license, London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as "The Knowledge" that takes three to four years. The researchers found that London taxi drivers had measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, a brain area tied to storing large-scale spatial maps. That volume tracked with experience: The longer someone had driven, the larger that part of the brain. The change was built through practice, not inherited. While people who are good at navigation might gravitate to this kind of job, the job itself does have an impact on the brain. Together, these two studies make a coherent case: Work that intensively exercises the hippocampus may reshape it, and that reshaping may protect against one of the most feared diseases of aging.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.