On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order demanding Lake Ontario be renamed to Lake America. At the signing of the order, he sat next to a big poster board map of the Great Lakes, with a big red arrow labeling Lake Ontario as "Lake America," with the words "Making the Great Lakes Even Greater."
The Canadian province of Ontario borders the north, west, and southwest sides of the lake, with New York State on the south and east.
It was unclear in the days immediately following the order whether Google would respect the name change. MapQuest, the 1996 navigation service that still exists but most people stopped using in the early 2000s as Google Maps took over, went viral last week after posting a screenshot of Lake Ontario on X, saying "We're not changing it." MapQuest also launched a "Rename Lake Ontario" web toy.
Google follows the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), which formally changed the name for 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' in the United States, according to Google's announcement about the change, posted Saturday: "Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see 'Lake America,' those in Canada will continue to see 'Lake Ontario,' and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now."
Apple Maps still shows it as Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning.
When Trump issued an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in early 2025, Google Maps changed it for the same reason — to be consistent with GNIS. People review-bombed the location on Google Maps so aggressively following the change, Google shut down reviews.
Trump has been degrading historically neighborly U.S. and Canadian relations since his first term, and that formerly friendly relationship has devolved into a trade war. Trump announced that the U.S. will start imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods last week; Canada, in turn, responded with tariffs on $20 billion of American goods, including steel, farm equipment, dairy products, and appliances.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she's not calling it that. “I'm speechless. It is so patently absurd,” she said in an interview with NY1. “Shame on them for deflecting from the real needs that Americans are feeling that we have here in New York. The high cost of energy, prescription drugs, utility bills, groceries. And this is what the president spends his time on? Renaming a lake that was named after our Indigenous peoples. Shame on you.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called Trump's insistence on renaming the lake “juvenile.”
I filed a request with McDonald’s earlier this month to access all of the personal data the fast food company collected about me, and I received a stunning 515-page report a few days later that detailed my app interactions in granular detail and predicted I would never stop eating there.
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the legal right to request access to information from large companies that collect personal data. So I was curious what others might have on me, and I spent the next week filing more than 100 requests.
The CCPA went into effect in 2020, and three of its key provisions are the right to opt out of the selling of personal information, the right to delete that info, and the right to request a copy for yourself.
I focused solely on the latter—access requests—to better understand what data is being collected. Most companies must list two ways for you to file. These are often via a web form, phone number, or email address, as designated in their privacy policy. After you submit a request, companies can take 45 days to complete it.
My experience placing these data access requests was incredibly time-consuming, from finding the right filing methods to verifying my identity multiple times. Most exasperating during this process were the companies that either responded to my access requests with messages concerning the deletion of information, which I explicitly said not to do, or refused to process the request through a method listed in their privacy policy.
Consumer advocates I spoke with were upset with how these requests were handled. “That’s crazy,” said Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “That’s not an acceptable status quo.” Winters sees these examples as exhibiting the weaknesses of policy frameworks that rely on companies to act responsibly and in good faith.
In accordance with WIRED’s policies, I am disclosing that I used generative AI to draft bureaucratic emails and update my tracking spreadsheet as part of this report. I wrote the body of this article mainly by hand in my scratch notebook.
One of the first errors came from Crunchbase, known for its database about tech startups. I emailed my access request to its privacy address on August 17. My message laid out the rights I wanted to exercise and included a direct request not to erase anything: “I am not requesting deletion at this time. Please do not treat this as a deletion request.” I received a reply two days later from a Crunchbase support representative.
“Thanks so much for your patience. Your account has been permanently deleted from Crunchbase. Please let me know if you need anything else!” the message read in full.
I followed up via email almost immediately, reiterating that I wanted data access, not data deletion. “Your Crunchbase user account was deleted. Other data located on Crunchbase was not deleted,” read the follow-up support response explaining what happened. If I wanted to have a Crunchbase account, I would have to reregister.
When I reached out to Crunchbase for comment, a spokesperson blamed the mistake on a “processing error” and said that the company would proceed with my original access request as filed. The spokesperson also claimed the misclassified response came from “a person on our customer success team” and not a generative AI tool.
My interactions with BeenVerified, a searchable database that gathers public records, also encapsulate my friction-filled experience placing these access requests.
I emailed BeenVerified’s dedicated CCPA compliance address on the morning of August 19. It laid out that I was a California resident placing an access request, not a deletion request. You’ll never guess what happened next.
Two days later, I received a message from a BeenVerified support representative about removing information. “It appears your person report has already been removed from our Person Search results,” read its initial response. “In addition, we have removed the requested phone number and email address from our search results. This change should be reflected within 24 hours.” Not at all what I asked it to do.
When I sent my next email explaining that I had submitted an access request, not a deletion request, the support representative followed up 15 minutes later, denying my claim and saying the company couldn’t verify my identity. That was perplexing, since it located some of my details earlier in the message thread and didn’t even attempt to explain what I might need to share for verification.
At my wit’s end, I sent another email explaining how confused I was feeling by these responses. “Please be assured that we’re able to process your opt-out request and have removed your information from our website,” read the support representative’s response. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have pulled out the rest of my hair at that moment.
I found solace in chatting with an academic researcher who had previously helped place access requests with over 500 data brokers under the same California law and also encountered multiple misclassifications. “Sometimes I would make an access request, and the automatic answer was ‘We will opt you out’ or ‘We will delete your data,’” says Elina van Kempen, a PhD student at UC Irvine and coauthor of Consumer Beware! Exploring Data Brokers’ CCPA Compliance. While some data brokers followed up with corrections, other times the researcher was left without any resolution.
When I reached out to BeenVerified for comment, Greg Hammond, senior counsel and senior director of compliance at its parent company, claimed via email that support agents receive annual privacy training, including how to process CCPA requests. “Unfortunately, despite the training, the agent who handled this matter was mistaken and misunderstood the request type,” he wrote. Hammond says the company now plans to provide refresher training on correct processing and to audit recent work.
My attempts to place an access request with Cash App, a money-sending service offered by Block, were equally frustrating, even without a deletion mistake. The company’s privacy policy, in bold, states that California residents can place access requests through Cash App’s website or by a toll-free phone call. I opted to test out the phone number.
The first time I called and explained that I was a California resident who wanted to place an access request, it was as if I had started speaking in a language from outer space. I was placed on hold multiple times before being told to check the privacy policy and call the number listed there, which I had just done to get to this point. My attempt to process an access request over the phone was being effectively denied.
“OK, sure, I’ll call this number right back,” I said before I hung up, a bit of anger bubbling up in my voice despite my best efforts to remain professional. My interactions with the next customer support agent were similarly burdensome. After being put on hold, I was asked to call back later so the support team would have more time to review their resources and understand how to handle my call.
“Customers can access or delete their personal information directly through Cash App, which allows us to more quickly verify identity before providing access to financial account information or deleting an account,” a Cash App spokesperson wrote over email when I reached out for comment. “Our phone support teams are trained to help customers understand how to submit these requests, and we also provide customers with instructions they can access through our online Help Center.”
The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions asking why the phone number was explicitly listed in Cash App’s privacy policy as a way for consumers to exercise their data rights.
Experts I spoke with questioned whether companies are putting in enough effort to be legally compliant. “It shows how potentially little resources the companies are putting toward compliance and making sure that people can have access to their data,” says Mayu Tobin-Miyaji, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Both Winters and Tobin-Miyaji mentioned a beefed-up approach to “data minimization” as a potential better path forward for consumers. This would essentially mean companies can collect only the data they need to process standard business operations. For example, saving your credit card information in the app for future purchases might be allowed, but collecting personal demographic information to sell to brokers might be blocked.
Data minimization is a more holistic approach that shifts the burden away from consumers, who are currently forced to navigate a bureaucratic obstacle course just to see what companies know about them. Instead, by limiting what companies can collect about you in the first place, consumers can have more peace of mind without going through the headache-inducing process I endured.
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that went interstellar, entombed the sky, hit the gas, and renewed the world.
First, scientists predict that there are thousands of objects from alien star systems lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system. Then: ancient air is hidden in glassy Moon beads, the “worst energy policy in the world,” and a mysterious Mississippian luxury.
Over the past decade, three interstellar objects have been spotted streaking through our solar system. It’s likely that dozens more of these interlopers will be discovered in the coming years. These objects travel so fast that they can escape the gravitational clutches of the Sun, which is why they are only visible for weeks before hurtling back out to speed-run the galaxy.
But while some interstellar objects (ISOs) leave in a hurry, others may be here to stay, lurking in the outermost reaches of the solar system, known as the Oort cloud, reports a new study.
Over the course of its 4.6-billion year lifespan, the Sun has wandered close enough to other stars to collect thousands of non-native objects from the fringes of those passing systems. It may have also sent off many of its homegrown objects to join alien star systems during these encounters, like some kind of stellar gift exchange.
Concept art showing the scale and spherical shape of the Oort Cloud. Image: NASA
“The Solar System has long been suspected to contain captured, non-native material,” said researchers led by Sean Raymond of the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory. “The recent ISO discoveries have now confirmed directly that extraterrestrial material regularly passes through the Solar System.”
Drawing on these discoveries, Raymond and his colleagues ran models to predict how many ISOs might be exchanged between stars during close encounters, called stellar flybys. The Sun is estimated to have had at least one or two of these meetups during its life so far, which could be “responsible for a large fraction of the captured ISOs currently residing in the Solar System.”
“Given that flybys are unavoidable in the Galactic field, most stars should host sparse Oort clouds populated with ISOs captured during stellar flybys,” the team said.
The Oort cloud — composed of frozen comet-like objects — extends for about three light years away from the Sun, so it’s not currently possible to send a spacecraft to go out to sift for ISOs in these distant wilds. Still, it’s neat to know there are so many interstellar hitchhikers riding in the Sun’s backseat.
A memory of an ancient ephemeral sky on the Moon may be locked inside glass beads scattered across the lunar surface, according to a new study.
The Moon is airless, but there’s evidence that it was surrounded by a transient atmosphere billions of years ago, which was fed by volcanic eruptions in its early history. Rocks crashing into the surface may have also vaporized material and created brief, gassy skies over time.
Scientists have now examined glass beads that were scooped up from the far side of the Moon by China’s Chang’e 6 sample-return mission, and delivered back to Earth in the summer of 2024 (that’s so Brat). The lunar glass, which was forged by rocks crashing into the surface, captured the chemical signatures of the vapor plume created by those impacts, capturing a whiff of a long-lost transient atmosphere.
The scoop left by Chang’e-6 sample collection on the Moon, which included the glass beads. Image: Chunlai Li, Hao Hu, Meng-Fei Yang
“Chang’e 6 (CE6) mission has returned the first lunar samples from the farside of the Moon,” said researchers led by Ziyan Han of Nanjing University. “The returned CE6 lunar regolith contains impact glass beads that could have recorded impact-induced vaporization on the Moon's farside and may serve as barometers, providing critical constraints on the global distribution of the Moon's transient atmosphere.”
The team noted that these fleeting impact-induced atmospheres might exist on other airless bodies in the solar system, and beyond it. For this reason, the researchers warned that atmospheres detected around exoplanets “may not always solely represent stable, long-lived atmospheres” which could “complicate the interpretation of atmospheric data as evidence of long-term planetary habitability on the rocky exoplanets.”
There you have it—just some ancient glass beads that contain the breath of past lunar skies. Carry on.
How bad does an energy policy have to be for experts to declare it the worst in the world? Buckle up because we are hitting the gas.
In an editorial published in Science this week, a pair of researchers lament the widespread rollout of consumer fossil fuel subsidies in response to the spike in gas and oil prices caused by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. While it’s understandable for governments to want to ease financial hardships, the team stressed that these subsidies are a major setback to confronting the climate crisis and they fumble the chance to present the Iran war as a clear example of why we need to reduce global reliance on fossil fuels.
“Consumer fuel subsidies are the worst kind of energy policy: they boost the most polluting kind of energy—fossil fuels—with a policy that is wasteful and deceptively hard to reverse,” said authors Paasha Mahdavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Michael L. Ross of the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The Iran war represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels,” the team continued. “But short-term measures that governments are taking—to help their citizens cope with unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices—will have long-term effects. Making fossil fuels cheaper now will have catastrophic consequences in the future.”
To channel the old joke from The Simpsons: “It’s the worst energy policy in the world…so far.”
Let’s close with a finely-aged dessert. And I mean, really aged—this decadent treat is 1,000-years-old.
Humans have been consuming the delectable fruits of the cacao tree for many thousands of years in Central and South America, and the plant made its way into parts of North America, such as the American Southwest. Now, archaeologists have discovered cacao was also consumed as far east as the Etowah Site in Georgia, an ancient city built by the Mississippian culture, revealing the unexpected spread of the delicacy deep into the Southeast.
“There is very little material evidence of connections between people living in Mississippian places like Etowah and those living in Central America,” said researchers led by Adam King of the University of South Carolina. “As a result, the possibility that the Mississippian world had access to cacao has always seemed remote.”
Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site. Image: Archaeo-Geophysical Associates
But one should never underestimate the power of chocolate, and this study bears that wisdom out. When the team analyzed ancient DNA sequences of residue found on Etowah pottery, they detected notes of cacao.
“Despite the fact that Etowah is separated from potential sources of cacao by great distances, ancient DNA confirms the site’s inhabitants consumed cacao,” the team said. The researchers speculated that Etowah may have sourced its cacao from trade routes to Mexico or the American Southwest, but noted that no “direct connections to Mexico nor the American Southwest are supported by archaeological evidence for now.”
“These results ask us to reopen lines of research long closed, especially regarding contacts between the impressive civilizations of Central and South America and the great Mississippian civilization of the Eastern Woodlands,” King and his colleagues said in the study.
As to the cultural role of cacao, the study suggested that “at Etowah and possibly across the Mississippian world, cacao consumption played a role in world renewal rites of intensification.”
Given the previous story about fossil fuels subsidies, we need all the world renewal rites we can get, so eat dessert first.
We’ve been detailing the trademark bullying ways of Buc-ee’s, famous gas station and convenience store chain in the American south and infamous IP bully, for over a year now. Buc-ee’s seems to think that any semi-related business that has branding that involves a cartoon animal or in any way references beavers somehow violates its trademark rights, no matter how absurd a claim of potential public confusion might be. I’ve likened them to the Monster Energy of convenience stores and it’s all gotten bad enough that John Oliver has dedicated multiple segments of his show to both highlight how shitty this company behaves and to dare them to sue him and his crew.
Now, the proper response to what is becoming a full on PR nightmare for the company would be to do some serious introspection, realize that its behavior is antagonistic and ultimately counter-productive, and then promise the public to do things better and differently in the future. Or, if you’re the Buc-ee’s brass, you instead publicly state that the only real problem here is all them damned libs.
Gas station and travel center chain Buc-ee’s said it will seek out “conservative, business friendly” states for new locations after receiving pushback over its decision to go after small business owners with allegedly similar logos.
“We have a lot of opportunities. We’re growing. We’re building in a lot of places, but when you find a conservative, business-friendly state with a phenomenal workforce, it makes a difference,” CEO Arch Aplin III said in a video clip posted by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R).
“And I’m starting to realize life’s too short to try to build in places that people don’t appreciate what you’re bringing versus a place like this, where people do appreciate what you’re building,” Aplin continued.
This response is so absurd as to be nearly a non-sequitur. Buc-ee’s has received public pushback for its trademark bullying ways in Missouri, Texas, South Carolina, and most recently Ohio. These are not bastions of left-wing government, folks. Hell, some of the most direct pushback in Ohio has come from its governor, Mike DeWine, who is a tried and true Republican.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has argued the company’s decision to sue a local business operator in Beavercreek, Ohio, for alleged trademark infringement was “ridiculous.”
I realize that the way we’re supposed to operate in 2026 is to reduce any and all conflict and conversation into some kind of red team, blue team partisanship, but that’s stupid and I won’t participate. And neither should you, in case that weren’t obvious. The pushback Buc-ee’s has received isn’t another spoke in the fabricated culture wars some craven politicians are attempting to push on everyone. It’s a result of a big company bullying tons of local small businesses for no reason that is actually justified by trademark law.
But if Buc-ee’s wants to take it’s beaver-ball and go home, fine. Whatever limits the spread of its trademark bullying is just fine with me.
Google is now automatically expanding its AI search summaries at the top of the results page for some searches, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The change, when it kicks in, pushes the typical list of links from a search much farther down Google's results page; instead of seeing part of an AI Overview with a "Show more" button you can click, you'll Google will show a full AI Overview at the top of your search, an "Ask anything" box under that, and then the list of links. It can lead to a lot of scrolling.
It's unclear exactly what Google's criteria is for the auto-expanding AI Overviews. Before writing this story, I was seeing them …
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