Laterstack

Pima County Board Chair Jen Allen has gone on the record asking Governor Katie Hobbs to veto HB 2873, a retroactive Arizona bill that would void citizen referendum petitions already filed against data-center developments. The bill targets the Marana data-center referendum that Pima County residents are organizing as a check on local zoning decisions. Allen's veto ask is the highest-ranking county-level Democratic response to a state preemption fight that mirrors the federal preemption pattern Laterstack has been tracking on Arizona AI laws and data-infrastructure policy. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/gZC-Ej83 #TechPolicy #DataCenters #StatePreemption

Scottsdale's HR investigation into Chief of Staff Rial Whitmer produced a 388-page transcript. Fifteen refusals. A self-confessed slur. Two-word admissions on the recall-interference questions. The transcript is the witness. Records request 26-006729 made it public. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/d24WZVsM #Scottsdale #LocalGov

Six states have now beaten the DOJ in court on voter rolls. Arizona made it official Tuesday. The procedural sequence Arizona ran before any judge saw the case is what other states should copy: secretary of state refusal, attorney general opinion, joint letter to all fifteen county recorders, court confirms. Same template works against any administration. Full piece: https://lnkd.in/dQ8A9x9C #Federalism #StateAuthority

Blue Energy raised $380 million on April 21 to build shipyard-assembled small modular reactors and deploy them onsite at AI data centers. The round was led by VXI Capital with Engine Ventures and Tamarack Global participating. The bet: if public grid fights against hyperscaler expansion are being lost town by town, build your own reactor and skip the grid. The first Texas plant is aimed at 1.5 gigawatts, Q3 construction start, 48-month deployment. Whether a commercial SMR has ever actually landed a first-of-a-kind deployment on that timeline is the question the funding has to answer. Laterstack looks at what the shipyard model gets right, what it still has to prove, and how it lands in the specific political geography that just rejected grid-scale expansion across Arizona. Read: https://lnkd.in/d8Q5AdkU #Nuclear #SMR #AIInfrastructure #DataCenters

A self-propagating worm called CanisterSprawl was flagged by Socket.dev on April 22. Unlike conventional supply chain attacks, its command-and-control infrastructure runs on Internet Computer Protocol canisters, which means traditional takedown playbooks do not work against it. Laterstack writes this one for the reader who has never heard of npm but whose apps, accounts, and data all depend on it. What is actually happening inside the warehouse that almost every app is built from. Who is defending it. Who is making it worse. What everyday readers should expect in the next twelve months as a result. Read: https://lnkd.in/dbcG8aRY #Cybersecurity #SupplyChain #OpenSource #AppSecurity

DeepSeek released a preview of V4 on April 24. The notable detail is not the benchmark. It is that the model was trained and optimized for Huawei Ascend chips, adapted in response to US export controls. DeepSeek's own technical report says V4 trails GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro by roughly three to six months. Achieved without access to top-tier Nvidia hardware. Laterstack examines what that means for US chip export control policy going forward. Read: https://lnkd.in/dxaeXAbm #AI #ChinaAI #ExportControls #TechPolicy #Huawei

An investigation by Laterstack into the firing of Scottsdale Mayor Lisa Borowsky's former Chief of Staff, R. Lamar Whitmer. Before joining the Mayor's administration last October, Whitmer personally funded an advertising campaign targeting three sitting Scottsdale City Council members. The ads ran in the Scottsdale Progress. The political nonprofit behind them, Alliance for Scottsdale's Future, was the basis for one of the substantiated conflict-of-interest findings in the 65-day HR investigation that ended in his firing on March 20. Seven of nine allegations were substantiated. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/dmxX4Uy6 #Scottsdale #LocalGovernance #Accountability

Data centers now drive half of U.S. electricity demand growth, per the IEA. In Arizona, the towns being asked to host them are pushing back. Tucson rejected Project Blue. Marana residents submitted signatures for the first data center referendum in Arizona. Chandler rejected a separate proposal last year. The opposition cuts across partisan lines because the concerns do. Water. Electricity prices. Noise. Property values. Opacity in deal terms. Laterstack examines what the Tucson, Marana, and Chandler votes actually tell us about the AI buildout, and why Arizona is quietly becoming its front line. Read: https://lnkd.in/d6_FTDdW #DataCenters #Arizona #AI #Infrastructure #LocalGovernment

Co-founder Paul McCarty sat down with Lamar Rice, who wanted to talk about the Trivy attack, and how was it that an informal network of researchers broke the story. Of course they talked about Trivy, but they also fell down some interesting rabbit holes that explain (in part) why the industry is struggling with malicious open source: - EDR was built to catch binary malware. Open source malware is 99% interpreted JavaScript and Python. - Git trusts user identity implicitly. Paul can still push a commit to GitHub as Linus Torvalds. - The post-SolarWinds billions went to tools, not to people. Many AppSec teams are a team of one. - AI skills are already the next attack surface. Paul found a malicious one in his sandbox last week. Full interview>>> https://lnkd.in/db4TYeqG

A cross-company research group caught the Trivy compromise before CrowdStrike, Wiz, and Socket published a word on it. New Laterstack Q&A with Paul McCarty, one of the researchers, on why EDR platforms keep missing software supply chain attacks, why git was never built for security, and where the post-SolarWinds billions actually went. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/db4TYeqG #Cybersecurity #SupplyChain #AppSec