The Chronic Dispatch — August 19, 2026

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Google Bids $10 Million for Failed Spirit Airlines’ Data: 100 Million Emails, 500 Million Teams Items and 30 Million Calls

A Spirit Airlines Airbus A320 in flight; contextual image

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May and entered liquidation. A court filing says Google won an auction, pending judicial approval, for a deidentified trove that also includes 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items and more than 15 million customer-service chats. Google said the material would improve its AI services. The airline ceased operations; its corpus did not.

Read original ↗ The Register

GOVERNMENT

Catholic Schools Chief Factory-Resets Work Phone and iPad After Giving Evidence to Corruption Inquiry; Denies Wiping Evidence

A smartphone lying on a table; contextual image

Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney told the state’s anti-corruption inquiry that he knowingly erased the devices over the weekend, after appearing before the commission and after being asked to provide messages. He said a bank warning about a compromised account prompted the resets and argued that, had he intended malfeasance, he had known about the inquiry for seven or eight weeks.

Read original ↗ The Guardian

POLITICS

Sitting U.S. Senator Running for Full Term Says National Security Is “Not My Thing”; Adds That She Supports the Military

The west front of the United States Capitol; contextual image

Sen. Darline Graham, appointed last month to fill her late brother Lindsey Graham’s seat, was asked in a Republican runoff debate whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are U.S. national-security issues. “I’m not that informed on national security,” she answered, before noting her family’s military service and her support for the military.

Read original ↗ Associated Press

HOUSING

San Francisco’s “Historic Laundromat” Housing Project Finally Starts Construction 12 Years After It Was Proposed

The interior of a laundromat; contextual image

A 75-unit Mission District apartment project proposed in 2014 is under construction after a process that included a $23,000, 137-page historic study finding the laundromat had no historic significance and demands for another shadow study over concerns that the building could affect children’s growth. The apartments are scheduled to open in 2028.

Read original ↗ Reason

CIVIL LIBERTIES

Appeals Court Affirms Right to Film Police, Grants Immunity to Officers Who Arrested Man for Filming Police

The Second Circuit ruled that Keith Massimino had a First Amendment right to record publicly visible areas of a Connecticut police station from a public sidewalk. It also held that the officers who arrested him in 2018 cannot be sued because that right was not yet clearly established in the circuit. His criminal charge was dismissed after roughly two and a half years.

Read original ↗ Bloomberg Law

IMMIGRATION

ICE Says It Investigated a Critic Over Protected Speech, Then Closed the Case Without Interviewing Him

In a court filing, ICE acknowledged that an email criticizing the agency triggered an investigation even though the message was constitutionally protected. Agents left a notice saying the conduct “may violate federal law” while citing all of Title 18, attempted to intercept the critic at an airport, and ultimately closed the case after exhausting leads without interviewing him.

Read original ↗ Reason

MEDIA

ABC Sues FCC After Regulator Orders Rare Early License Reviews Following Speech That Angered the President

ABC, Disney and eight owned stations asked a federal court to stop early broadcast-license proceedings that the FCC opened years before the licenses expire. The agency cited diversity practices, but the move followed a Jimmy Kimmel joke that angered President Trump, who called for Kimmel’s firing. ABC says the reviews are government retaliation for protected speech.

Read original ↗ Associated Press

PAYMENTS

Researchers Revive Expired Contactless Cards by Changing the Expiration Date Between Card and Terminal

UMass Amherst researchers demonstrated that some expired Visa contactless cards could make unauthorized purchases because the expiration date read by the terminal was not cryptographically bound to the date sent for authorization. Two phones acting as NFC relays were enough to alter the field. The tested Mastercard, American Express and Discover configurations resisted the attack.

Read original ↗ UMass Amherst / Khwarizmi Lab

SOFTWARE

GitHub’s Autoscaling Watched the Wrong Limit; VS Code Retries Multiplied Traffic Tenfold During Nearly Eight-Hour Outage

GitHub’s incident report says a misconfigured policy monitored the host service but not an Istio sidecar’s concurrency limit, saturating load balancers on August 17. Delayed replies then triggered a latent VS Code retry bug that drove Copilot token traffic from 7,000–9,000 requests per second to 70,000–100,000. Recovery required reducing retries and blocking some token requests with HTTP 403 responses.

Read original ↗ GitHub Status

CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY

$1,000 Indoor Laser Mosquito Zapper Takes Preorders While Safety Certifications Remain Pending

Photon Matrix Lab says its LiDAR-guided device will track and shoot insects with a visible or infrared laser at ranges up to six meters, including in bedrooms and nurseries. The project raised more than $2.8 million, but mandatory safety certifications are still in progress; its terms say customers are responsible for determining whether the device is legal to import.

Read original ↗ The Register

Because reality already writes the best headlines.