Is this the tiny “kei” car everyone is talking about? Not exactly. Jeep maker Stellantis announced plans to bring the tiny Fiat Topolino EV, which sells for under $12,000 in Europe, to the US.

A man in Atlanta has been arrested and charged for allegedly deleting data from a Google Pixel phone before a member of a secretive Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit was able to search it, according to court records and social media posts reviewed by 404 Media. The man, Samuel Tunick, is described as a local Atlanta activist in Instagram and other posts discussing the case.

The exact circumstances around the search—such as why CBP wanted to search the phone in the first place—are not known. But it is uncommon to see someone charged specifically for wiping a phone, a feature that is easily accessible in some privacy and security-focused devices.

The indictment says on January 24, Tunick “did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control.” The indictment itself was filed in mid-November.

Tunick was arrested earlier this month, according to a post on a crowd-funding site and court records. “Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta-based activist, Oberlin graduate, and beloved musician, was arrested by the DHS and FBI yesterday around 6pm EST. Tunick's friends describe him as an approachable, empathetic person who is always finding ways to improve the lives of the people around him,” the site says. Various activists have since shared news of Tunick’s arrest on social media.

The indictment says the phone search was supposed to be performed by a supervisory officer from a CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in 2023 these are “highly secretive units deployed at U.S. ports of entry, which target, detain, search, and interrogate innocent travelers.” 

“These units, which may target travelers on the basis of officer ‘instincts.’ raise the risk that CBP is engaging in unlawful profiling or interfering with the First Amendment-protected activity of travelers,” the ACLU added. The Intercept previously covered the case of a sculptor and installation artist who was detained at San Francisco International Airport and had his phone searched. The report said Gach did not know why, even years later. 

Court records show authorities have since released Tunick, and that he is restricted from leaving the Northern District of Georgia as the case continues.

The prosecutor listed on the docket did not respond to a request for comment. The docket did not list a lawyer representing Tunick.

Weingart Center CEO Kevin Murray has resigned his seat on the board of the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency amid a federal investigation into one of Weingart's real estate dealings.

From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview:

Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and attachments like photos, contacts, locations, links, and emoji. Messages sync across all devices, enabling seamless conversations. Apple doesn’t store message content or attachments, which are all secured with end-to-end encryption so that no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple canʼt decrypt the data.

This thread on Mastodon, prompted by my wondering why Russia is blocking FaceTime but not iMessage, suggests that because iMessage messages are sent via APNs, a network (or entire nation) seeking to block iMessage can only do by blocking all push notifications for iOS. That’s why on airplanes with “free messaging” on in-flight Wi-Fi, you usually also get all incoming push notifications, even for services that aren’t available on the free Wi-Fi.

Here’s a support document from GFI Software, which makes network appliances for enterprises and schools:

The Exinda appliance gives administrators multiple options to stop or throttle applications that can use a lot of bandwidth in the network. An application that many would consider discardable or able to be easily limited in bandwidth is iMessage. When blocking or discarding iMessage traffic, users may experience an issue where all push notifications on iOS devices that have traffic going through the Exinda, i.e., on WiFi, will stop displaying.

Root Cause: Apple uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) to allow application creators to push out information to iOS devices. This includes mail servers being able to push out notifications of calendar and email, or app creators to be able to push text-based messages straight to the device.

Apple might have architected iMessage this way to make iMessage veto-proof with cellular carriers, who, at the time of iMessage’s announcement in June 2011, were already promoting iPhone push notifications as a reason to upgrade from a dumb phone to an iPhone with a more expensive plan. The carriers might have been tempted to block iMessage over cell networks to keep people using SMS, but they couldn’t without blocking all push notifications, which wouldn’t be tenable. But this architecture also makes iMessage hard to block in authoritarian countries where iPhones are even vaguely popular. (Maybe this helps explain why iMessage isn’t blocked in China, too?)

Draw your own conclusions about cellular carriers and enterprise network administrators being similar to authoritarian governments.

A measles outbreak that began in South Carolina at the start of October is showing no signs of slowing as officials on Tuesday reported 27 new cases since Friday. Those cases bring the outbreak total to 111.

The southern state’s outbreak now rivals outbreaks ongoing in Utah and Arizona, which have tallied 115 and 176 cases, respectively. The outbreaks are threatening to cost the country its measles elimination status, which was earned in 2020 after vaccination efforts stopped the virus from spreading continuously. If the current transmission of the virus isn’t halted by January, the virus will have circulated for 12 consecutive months, marking it once again as an endemic disease in the US.

In an update on Tuesday, South Carolina’s health department suggested the spread is far from over. Of the state’s 27 new cases, 16 were linked to exposure at a church, the Way of Truth Church in Inman. And amid the new cases, new exposures were identified at Inman Intermediate School. That’s on top of exposures announced Friday at four other schools in the region, which led to well over 100 students being quarantined.

Currently, 254 unvaccinated and exposed people are in quarantine, including 43 students at Inman Intermediate School.

The quarantine period for measles is 21 days from the exposure, which is the maximum incubation period before the tell-tale rash appears. Measles is highly infectious, with up to 90 percent of unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable people contracting the virus upon exposure. People infected with measles are infectious from four days before the rash appears to four days after its onset.

The outbreak is occurring in the northern region of South Carolina, with many cases identified in Spartanburg County, which contains Inman, as well as Greenville County. Both counties have low vaccination rates. For the 2024–2025 school year, only 90 percent of Spartanburg students were vaccinated, while Greenville’s vaccination rate was 92.4 percent. Those numbers are well below the 95 percent target needed to halt community transmission.

The two counties’ low vaccination rates are coupled with high rates of religious exemptions. Spartanburg has the state’s highest rate, with 8.2 percent of students exempt from the school vaccination requirement based on religious beliefs. Neighboring Greenville has a religious vaccination exemption rate of 5.3 percent.

Of the 111 outbreak cases, 105 were unvaccinated, three were partially vaccinated, two had an unknown status, and one case was fully vaccinated.

On a national scale, vaccination rates have declined overall amid misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists, including current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As such, measles cases are at a 33-year high, with nearly 2,000 cases this year and 46 outbreaks.

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Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty, wrote about this last week:

I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit. That structure increases trust, encourages adoption, and creates the conditions for Ghostty to grow into a widely used and impactful piece of open-source infrastructure.

You love to see it.