Policy – Page 4

Trump and Republicans join Big Oil’s push to shut down climate liability efforts

big oil, climate change, fossil fuel companies, fossil fuels, Oil industry, Policy, syndication / Kelly Newman / October 28, 2025

another shutdown imminent

Republicans are attempting to foreclose the ability of cities and states to seek damages linked to climate change.

An aerial view of a partially collapsed home in St. Johnsbury, Vt., on July 30, 2024, after flash floods hit the area. Vermont, along with New York, passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states. Credit: Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.

From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.

“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.

Pushback to liability initiatives from fossil fuel interests is not new. But the political landscape has shifted dramatically this year as the second Trump administration works to reward loyalists and campaign donors, including fossil fuel interests.

The oil and gas industry spent $445 million during the last election cycle to influence President Donald Trump and Congress, including $96 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, according to the progressive advocacy group Climate Power.

“What has changed is that there is a new administration,” said Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. And the Trump administration, she said, “is continuing to defend the fossil fuel industry and assail anyone who dares try to hold them accountable.”

Over the past eight years, communities across the country have filed tobacco-style lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil and major players in the fossil fuel industry, seeking to recover damages for localized climate impacts or to force companies to cease greenwashing and other misleading behavior.

More than 30 of these lawsuits brought by municipal, tribal, and state governments are working their way through the courts, and several are now closer than ever to reaching trial.

At the same time, some states are enacting or considering so-called climate superfund legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies strictly liable for climate damages and require them to help pay for a portion of climate change costs incurred by state governments. Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states.

In response to these budding accountability efforts, the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress, and GOP attorneys general are mounting what Wiles describes as a “massive orchestrated campaign” to try to stop climate liability laws and lawsuits in their tracks, and to push for legal immunity akin to what gun manufacturers received two decades ago. Trump’s Department of Justice has even filed highly unusual, if not unprecedented, lawsuits against Vermont and New York seeking to overturn their climate superfund statutes.

“It’s just this superbly choreographed effort on the part of the oil industry and its allies to get gun-industry-style legal immunity for all the damage that they’ve caused,” Wiles told Inside Climate News.

Oil industry is lobbying Congress for a liability shield

Among the climate liability lawsuits inching closer to trial: a consumer protection case brought by Massachusetts against ExxonMobil, and suits seeking damages filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and Boulder, Colorado.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year and confirmed by The New York Times last month, industry representatives are lobbying Congress for a liability shield of some kind.

The details remain unclear. But the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, reports lobbying on “draft legislation related to state efforts to impose liability on the oil and gas industry,” while disclosures from ConocoPhillips show that the company has lobbied on the matter of “state superfund legislation,” including draft legislation in Congress addressing it.

Neither API nor ConocoPhillips responded to requests for comment.

Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Inside Climate News that he thinks immunity provisions for the fossil fuel industry are unlikely to pass the Senate.

But the fact that the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for legal protections suggests to Wiles that the industry realizes it could be facing serious legal jeopardy. “Let’s be clear. You don’t seek a [liability] waiver unless you know you’re guilty,” Wiles said.

Over the summer, language emerged in a draft House Appropriations Committee spending bill that specifically would prohibit the District of Columbia from using funds to enforce its consumer protection law “against oil and gas companies for environmental claims.” The bill that included this provision passed the committee but was not brought to the full House for a vote.

But climate accountability advocates say the provision was still alarming because it effectively would have shut down DC’s ongoing consumer protection lawsuit against Big Oil. That suit, filed in 2020, alleges that several major oil companies lied to consumers about the climate risks of their products and that they continue to mislead consumers through greenwashing campaigns. In April, the DC Superior Court rejected the companies’ motions to dismiss the suit.

Anne Havemann, deputy director and general counsel at Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said the appropriations provision “is a threat to this ongoing lawsuit.”

“If [DC] can’t use any money to prosecute these cases and advance these cases, then it effectively can’t work on them,” she said.

Big Oil lawyers seek Supreme Court intervention

A parallel effort to skirt accountability is playing out in the courts. Fossil fuel companies are vigorously defending themselves in climate liability lawsuits, and they have seen some success in recent months getting cases dismissed by state trial courts.

Now Boulder’s lawsuit is back before the nation’s highest court on a fresh petition from the oil company defendants, after Colorado courts, including the state Supreme Court, refused to dismiss the case. The question posed by the companies in their petition is whether federal law precludes such state law claims.

It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up the case this time.

In January, the Supreme Court denied a similar petition from oil companies in a case brought by Honolulu. Courts in Hawaii have rejected the companies’ bids to have the case dismissed, and with the Supreme Court declining to intervene, Honolulu’s case is advancing toward a trial.

Parenteau said the prospect of facing a trial and a potential adverse verdict likely has the oil companies extremely worried. “They’re certainly frightened of a trial just from a reputational standpoint,” he said.

The new petition in the Boulder case now offers the Supreme Court another opportunity to step in. Should the justices decide to intervene, legal experts say that it could essentially shut down all climate liability attempts.

“If they do step in, that’s huge. That changes everything,” Parenteau said. “That is the end game.”

“In one fell swoop it could get rid of all of these cases,” said James May, a law professor at Washburn University.

On October 9, over 100 Republican House members submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court backing oil companies ExxonMobil and Suncor in their petition to block Boulder’s lawsuit from moving forward. It is the first time that Republicans in Congress have called on the Supreme Court to intervene in this litigation and to shut down not just this one lawsuit but all others like it.

“In recent years, multiple state and local governments have launched a courtroom war against the American energy industry,” the brief asserts in its opening. “It must stop now.”

The 103 Republican House members who signed onto the brief argue that the municipal and state lawsuits against oil and gas companies are trying to “dictate national energy policy” and that only the federal government has the authority to regulate transboundary greenhouse gas emissions.

“They are arguing that it’s solely EPA’s role to regulate greenhouse gases, but the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate that role by revoking the Endangerment Finding. If that revocation goes through and survives in the courts, it will greatly weaken the oil companies’ preemption defense,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Inside Climate News.

“This full-court press to block these lawsuits shows that the oil companies and their allies in Congress are really nervous about what would come out if any of these cases actually went to trial,” Gerrard added.

Trump administration on the offensive

The Trump administration, through its Department of Justice, is fully backing the fossil fuel industry in climate liability litigation, filing amicus briefs, for example, in cases now pending before the US Supreme Court and the Maryland Supreme Court.

But its efforts to shield the industry from accountability extend beyond friend-of-the-court briefs.

Following a White House meeting where oil company executives raised concerns about state climate laws and lawsuits, Trump issued an executive order in April directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to try to put a stop to these legal initiatives.

In response, the DOJ then sued four states, including preemptive suits brought against Hawaii and Michigan before either state had filed such a lawsuit (Hawaii sued major oil companies the next day). The DOJ’s other lawsuits targeted Vermont and New York to try to strike down their climate superfund laws, which are based on the “polluter pays” logic of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program aimed at forcing polluting companies to remediate damage from toxic waste sites.

Advances in a field known as climate attribution science have made the “polluter pays” aspect of the superfund laws possible, enabling scientists to quantify the individual contributions of major fossil fuel producers to climate impacts such as sea level rise and heat waves.

The DOJ has now filed motions for summary judgment in both of these lawsuits, asking federal courts to permanently block the states’ climate superfund laws.

“Vermont’s flagrantly unconstitutional statute threatens to throttle energy production, despite this Administration’s efforts to unleash American energy. It’s high time for the courts to put a stop to this crippling state overreach,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement issued by the DOJ on September 16.

Havemann, with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, told Inside Climate News that the current Trump administration seems to be taking a more aggressive approach to protecting the fossil fuel industry and to fighting attempts to hold it accountable.

“The Trump administration has come in and used many different tools in its toolbox to go after these accountability lawsuits and the laws that also seek to hold the biggest polluters accountable for climate damages,” she said. “It’s very much on the radar of the Trump administration in a way that it has not been in the past.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Enter the Dragon”

With US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) holding the gavel, climate litigation came up as the subject of a Republican-led congressional hearing this summer before a Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

The hearing’s provocative title: “Enter the Dragon—China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance.”

Cruz used the hearing to attack climate liability lawsuits and claim that they are a nefarious left-wing plot that is in part funded by, and that benefits, the Chinese Communist Party. “Both China and the Democrats want to bankrupt the American energy industry,” Cruz said during the hearing.

NPR’s Michael Copley reported last month that “Cruz’s office has not offered evidence that China or a China-linked nonprofit that Cruz identified by name has funded climate lawsuits in the United States.”

In response to that reporting, Cruz told Inside Climate News that “NPR deliberately ignored objective facts.”

“The Chinese Communist Party uses cut-outs and ‘nonprofits’ to shape US energy policy, funding propaganda, advocacy, and litigation that harm American workers,” Cruz said in an emailed statement, which was also included in the NPR story after it was published. The “China-linked nonprofit” referenced in the NPR story, Energy Foundation China, does fund some climate initiatives, Cruz said in his statement.

“In January 2024, three House committee chairs opened an investigation into Chinese influence, citing EFC’s ties and funding of groups like [the Natural Resources Defense Council] and RMI,” he added.

A spokesperson for RMI, a nonprofit group working on the global energy transition, said that the organization “does not participate in litigation.” RMI’s “work supported by Energy Foundation China, which is a US-based charitable organization, is focused squarely on the energy transition inside of China,” the spokesperson added.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit group that works to protect public health and the environment, does some “work in China for one reason: there’s not a single global environmental problem that can be fixed unless China is part of the solution,” NRDC spokesperson Josh Mogerman said. He added that the organization “does not fundraise in China” and that “money from China does not fund NRDC litigation in the United States, period.”

Cruz, who represents the country’s biggest oil and gas producing state, did not respond to Inside Climate News’ question about whether he supports immunizing oil companies from liability.

GOP attorneys general enter the fray

During the Cruz-led hearing, the Republican attorney general for the state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, testified as one of the majority witnesses. He referenced the New York and Vermont climate superfund laws, claiming these statutes impose extraterritorial regulation on energy companies, and mentioned that his state and other Republican-led states are suing to try to overturn these state laws.

“We will continue these fights in court as state attorneys general. But we do need some help from Congress,” Kobach said. He suggested that Congress could legislate to expressly preempt state climate laws like the climate superfund laws.

Kobach and 15 other Republican state attorneys general also made this suggestion, along with several other recommendations for congressional action, in a letter addressed to Bondi, the US attorney general.

The June 12 letter references Trump’s executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and protect the fossil fuel industry from “state overreach.” The letter says its purpose is to “suggest additional steps” the Department of Justice could take to effectuate these orders and assist in the “fight against anti-energy interests.”

Specifically, the Republican AGs suggest the DOJ could recommend legislation to reinforce federal preemption of state climate liability laws or lawsuits; restrict federal funding for states seeking to impose liability on energy companies; create a right of removal to federal district court for climate suits; and, among other items, stop “activist-funded climate lawsuits” with a liability shield, similar to the law that granted immunity for gun manufacturers.

Wiles, with the Center for Climate Integrity, said it is especially striking to see Republican attorneys general explicitly recommend a similar liability shield for fossil fuel companies. “The attorneys general actually called for Congress to enact a gun-style liability waiver for the oil industry,” he said. “We saw how that [gun industry immunity] ended up. It certainly was not helpful in curbing gun violence or in serving any public interest objective.”

The coordinated litigation strategies and actions of Republican state attorneys general in defense of fossil fuel and other industries stem from an organization called the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which Graves said was created in the wake of the tobacco industry being held accountable through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.

The organization, which currently lists 29 Republican state attorneys general as members, has been funded through donations from conservative judicial activists like Leonard Leo as well as from corporate interests including those in the fossil fuel industry. The American Petroleum Institute gave over $125,000 to RAGA in 2024, and in the first six months of this year Chevron’s Policy, Government and Public Affairs division donated $25,000 to the organization, for example.

Graves describes RAGA as a “pay-to-play organization.”

“It has a pay sheet listing what kind of access you get to attorneys general based on how much you give,” she told Inside Climate News.

“These attorneys general use the prestige of their office and their power and the resources that their taxpayers are providing to serve the interests of industry, select industries that they are most tied to, and that certainly includes the fossil fuel industry,” Graves added.

The Republican Attorneys General Association did not respond to a request for comment.

“A perilous moment”

The intensifying backlash to climate accountability efforts coming from the fossil fuel industry and its political defenders is happening at a time when some political scholars warn that the US is sliding into some form of authoritarianism, which advocates say magnifies the challenges of holding powerful interests to account writ large.

“It’s a perilous moment for democratic norms and institutions,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Anybody who is pursuing policy change or litigation for accountability or enforcement is counting on the courts to be a real backstop for democratic institutions,” Mulvey told Inside Climate News.

Should the fossil fuel industry somehow succeed in securing legal immunity, Wiles said it “would be consistent with the erosion of the rule of law that we’re seeing.”

“No industry should be above the law,” he added.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Trump and Republicans join Big Oil’s push to shut down climate liability efforts Read More »

10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him. Bad idea.

Features, lawsuit, lock picking, locks, McNally, Policy, Prove Locks / Beth Washington / October 27, 2025

It’s still legal to pick locks, even when you swing your legs.

“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.

This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.

On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.

Naturally, the lock hangs tough.

An Instagram user brought the lock to McNally’s attention by commenting, “Let’s introduce it to the @mcnallyofficial poke.” Someone from Proven responded, saying that McNally only likes “the cheap locks lol because they are easy and fast.” Proven locks were said to be made of sterner stuff.

But on April 3, McNally posted a saucy little video to social media platforms. In it, he watches the Proven promo video while swinging his legs and drinking a Juicy Juice. He then hops down from his seat, goes over to a Proven trailer hitch lock, and opens it in a matter of seconds using nothing but a shim cut from a can of Liquid Death. He says nothing during the entire video, which has been viewed nearly 10 million times on YouTube alone.

Despite practically begging people to attempt this, Proven Industries owner Ron Lee contacted McNally on Instagram. “Just wanted to say thanks and be prepared!” he wrote. McNally took this as a threat.

(Oddly enough, Proven’s own homepage features a video in which the company trashes competing locks and shows just how easy it is to defeat them. And its news pages contain articles and videos on “The Hidden Flaws of Master Locks” and other brands. Why it got so upset about McNally’s video is unclear.)

The next day, Lee texted McNally’s wife. The message itself was apparently Lee’s attempt to de-escalate things; he says he thought the number belonged to McNally, and the message itself was unobjectionable. But after the “be prepared!” notice of the day before, and given the fact that Lee already knew how to contact him on Instagram, McNally saw the text as a way “to intimidate me and my family.” That feeling was cemented when McNally found out that Lee was a triple felon—and that in one case, Lee had hired someone “to throw a brick through the window of his ex-wife.”

Concerned about losing business, Lee kept trying to shut McNally down. Proven posted a “response video” on April 6 and engaged with numerous social media commenters, telling them that things were “going to get really personal” for McNally. Proven employees alleged publicly that McNally was deceiving people about all the prep work he had done to make a “perfectly cut out” shim. Without extensive experience, long prep work, and precise measurements, it was said, Proven’s locks were in little danger of being opened by rogue actors trying to steal your RV.

“Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” one Proven employee wrote. “Sounds like a bunch of liberals lol.”

Proven also had its lawyers file “multiple” DMCA takedown notices against the McNally video, claiming that its use of Proven’s promo video was copyright infringement.

McNally didn’t bow to the pressure, though, instead uploading several more videos showing him opening Proven locks. In one of them, he takes aim at Proven’s claims about his prep work by retrieving a new lock from an Amazon delivery kiosk, taking it outside—and popping it in seconds using a shim he cuts right on camera, with no measurements, from an aluminum can.

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On May 1, Proven filed a federal lawsuit against McNally in the Middle District of Florida, charging him with a huge array of offenses: (1) copyright infringement, (2) defamation by implication, (3) false advertising, (4) violating the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, (5) tortious interference with business relationships, (6) unjust enrichment, (7) civil conspiracy, and (8) trade libel. Remarkably, the claims stemmed from a video that all sides admit was accurate and in which McNally himself said nothing.

Screenshot of a social media exchange. — In retrospect, this was probably not a great idea.

Don’t mock me, bro

How can you defame someone without even speaking? Proven claimed “defamation by implication,” arguing that the whole setup of McNally’s videos was unfair to the company and its product. McNally does not show his prep work, which (Proven argued) conveys to the public the false idea that Proven’s locks are easy to bypass. While the shimming does work, Proven argued that it would be difficult for an untrained user to perform.

But what Proven really, really didn’t like was being mocked. McNally’s decision to drink—and shake!—a juice box on video comes up in court papers a mind-boggling number of times. Here’s a sample:

McNally appears swinging his legs and sipping from an apple juice box, conveying to the purchasing public that bypassing Plaintiff’s lock is simple, trivial, and even comical…

…showing McNally drinking from, and shaking, a juice box, all while swinging his legs, and displaying the Proven Video on a mobile device…

The tone, posture, and use of the juice box prop and childish leg swinging that McNally orchestrated in the McNally Video was intentional to diminish the perceived seriousness of Proven Industries…

The use of juvenile imagery, such as sipping from a juice box while casually applying the shim, reinforces the misleading impression that the lock is inherently insecure and marketed deceptively…

The video then abruptly shifts to Defendant in a childlike persona, sipping from a juice box and casually applying a shim to the lock…

In the end, Proven argued that the McNally video was “for commercial entertainment and mockery,” produced for the purpose of “humiliating Plaintiff.” McNally, it was said, “will not stop until he destroys Proven’s reputation.” Justice was needed. Expensive, litigious justice.

But the proverbially level-headed horde of Internet users does not always love it when companies file thermonuclear lawsuits against critics. Sometimes, in fact, the level-headed horde disregards everything taught by that fount of judicial knowledge, The People’s Court, and they take the law into their own hands.

Proven was soon the target of McNally fans. The company says it was “forced to disable comments on posts and product videos due to an influx of mocking and misleading replies furthering the false narrative that McNally conveyed to the viewers.” The company’s customer service department received such an “influx of bogus customer service tickets… that it is experiencing difficulty responding to legitimate tickets.”

Screenshot of a social media post from Proven Industries. — Proven was quite proud of its lawsuit… at first.

Someone posted Lee’s personal phone number to the comment section of a McNally video, which soon led to “a continuous stream of harassing phone calls and text messages from unknown numbers at all hours of the day and night,” which included “profanity, threats, and racially charged language.”

Lest this seem like mere high spirits and hijinks, Lee’s partner and his mother both “received harassing messages through Facebook Messenger,” while other messages targeted Lee’s son, saying things like “I would kill your f—ing n—– child” and calling him a “racemixing pussy.”

This is clearly terrible behavior; it also has no obvious connection to McNally, who did not direct or condone the harassment. As for Lee’s phone number, McNally said that he had nothing to do with posting it and wrote that “it is my understanding that the phone number at issue is publicly available on the Better Business Bureau website and can be obtained through a simple Google search.”

And this, with both sides palpably angry at each other, is how things stood on June 13 at 9: 09 am, when the case got a hearing in front of the Honorable Mary Scriven, an extremely feisty federal judge in Tampa. Proven had demanded a preliminary injunction that would stop McNally from sharing his videos while the case progressed, but Proven had issues right from the opening gavel:

LAWYER 1: Austin Nowacki on behalf of Proven industries.

THE COURT: I’m sorry. What is your name?

LAWYER 1: Austin Nowacki.

THE COURT: I thought you said Austin No Idea.

LAWYER 2: That’s Austin Nowacki.

THE COURT: All right.

When Proven’s lead lawyer introduced a colleague who would lead that morning’s arguments, the judge snapped, “Okay. Then you have a seat and let her speak.”

Things went on this way for some time, as the judge wondered, “Did the plaintiff bring a lock and a beer can?” (The plaintiff did not.) She appeared to be quite disappointed when it was clear there would be no live shimming demonstration in the courtroom.

Then it was on to the actual arguments. Proven argued that the 15 seconds of its 90-second promo video used by McNally were not fair use, that McNally had defamed the company by implication, and that shimming its locks was actually quite difficult. Under questioning, however, one of Proven’s employees admitted that he had been able to duplicate McNally’s technique, leading to the question from McNally’s lawyer: “When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]?”

At the end of several hours of wrangling, the judge stepped in, saying that she “declines to grant the preliminary injunction motion.” For her to do so, Proven would have to show that it was likely to win at trial, among other things; it had not.

As for the big copyright infringement claim, of which Proven had made so much hay, the judge reached a pretty obvious finding: You’re allowed to quote snippets of copyrighted videos in order to critique them.

“The purpose and character of the use to which Mr. McNally put the alleged infringed work is transformative, artistic, and a critique,” said the judge. “He is in his own way challenging and critiquing Proven’s video by the use of his own video.”

As for the amount used, it was “substantial enough but no more than is necessary to make the point that he is trying to critique Proven’s video, and I think that’s fair game and a nominative fair use circumstance.”

While Proven might convince her otherwise after a full trial, “the copyright claim fails as a basis for a demand for preliminary injunctive relief.”

As for “tortious interference” and “defamation by implication,” the judge was similarly unimpressed.

“The fact that you might have a repeat customer who is dissuaded to buy your product due to a criticism of the product is not the type of business relationship the tortious interference with business relationship concept is intended to apply,” she said.

In the end, the judge said she would see the case through to its end, if that was really what everyone wanted, but “I will pray that you all come to a resolution of the case that doesn’t require all of this. This is a capitalist market and people say what they say. As long as it’s not false, they say what they say.”

She gave Proven until July 7 to amend its complaint if it wished.

On July 7, the company dismissed the lawsuit against McNally instead.

Proven also made a highly unusual request: Would the judge please seal almost the entire court record—including the request to seal?

Court records are presumptively public, but Proven complained about a “pattern of intimidation and harassment by individuals influenced by Defendant McNally’s content.” According to the company, a key witness had already backed out of the case, saying, “Is there a way to leave my name and my companies name out of this due to concerns of potential BLOW BACK from McNally or others like him?” Another witness, who did submit a declaration, wondered, “Is this going to be public? My concern is that there may be some backlash from the other side towards my company.”

McNally’s lawyer laid into this seal request, pointing out that the company had shown no concern over these issues until it lost its bid for a preliminary injunction. Indeed, “Proven boasted to its social media followers about how it sued McNally and about how confident it was that it would prevail. Proven even encouraged people to search for the lawsuit.” Now, however, the company “suddenly discover[ed] a need for secrecy.”

The judge has not yet ruled on the request to seal.

Another way

The strange thing about the whole situation is that Proven actually knew how to respond constructively to the first McNally video. Its own response video opened with a bit of humor (the presenter drinks a can of Liquid Death), acknowledged the issue (“we’ve had a little bit of controversy in the last couple days”), and made clear that Proven could handle criticism (“we aren’t afraid of a little bit of feedback”).

The video went on to show how their locks work and provided some context on shimming attacks and their likelihood of real-world use. It ended by showing how users concerned about shimming attacks could choose more expensive but more secure lock cores that should resist the technique.

Quick, professional, non-defensive—a great way to handle controversy.

But it was all blown apart by the company’s angry social media statements, which were unprofessional and defensive, and the litigation, which was spectacularly ill-conceived as a matter of both law and policy. In the end, the case became a classic example of the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to censor information can instead call attention to it.

Judging from the number of times the lawsuit talks about 1) ridicule and 2) harassment, it seems like the case quickly became a personal one for Proven’s owner and employees, who felt either mocked or threatened. That’s understandable, but being mocked is not illegal and should never have led to a lawsuit or a copyright claim. As for online harassment, it remains a serious and unresolved issue, but launching a personal vendetta—and on pretty flimsy legal grounds—against McNally himself was patently unwise. (Doubly so given that McNally had a huge following and had already responded to DMCA takedowns by creating further videos on the subject; this wasn’t someone who would simply be intimidated by a lawsuit.)

In the end, Proven’s lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash—and generated little but bad publicity.

10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him. Bad idea. Read More »

Clinical trial of a technique that could give everyone the best antibodies

antibodies, Biology, DNA, electroporation, medicine, plasmid, Policy, Science / DJ Henderson / October 25, 2025

If we ID the DNA for a great antibody, anyone can now make it.

One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.

There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.

The best antibodies

Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.

Once an antibody latches on to a pathogen, broadly neutralizing antibodies inactivate it (as their name implies). This is typically because these antibodies bind to a site that’s necessary for a protein’s function. For example, broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV bind to the proteins that help this virus enter immune cells.

Unfortunately, not everyone develops broadly neutralizing antibodies, and certainly doesn’t do so in time to prevent infections. And we haven’t figured out a way of designing vaccinations that ensure their generation. So we’re often found ourselves stuck with knowing what antibodies we’d like to see people making while having no way of ensuring that they do.

One of the options we’ve developed is to just mass-produce broadly neutralizing antibodies and inject them into people. This has been approved for use against Ebola and provided an early treatment during the COVID pandemic. This approach has some practical limitations, though. For starters, the antibodies have a finite life span in the bloodstream, so injections may need to be repeated. In addition, making and purifying enough antibodies in bulk isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and they generally need to be kept refrigerated during the distribution, limiting the areas where they can be used.

So, a number of companies have been looking at an alternative: getting people to make their own. This could potentially lead to longer-lived protection, even ensuring the antibodies are present to block future infections if the DNA survives long enough.

Genes and volts

Once you identify cells that produce broadly neutralizing antibodies, it’s relatively simple to clone those genes and put them into a chunk of DNA that will ensure that they’ll be produced by any human cell. If we could get that DNA into a person’s cells, broadly neutralizing antibodies are the result. And a number of approaches have been tried to handle that “if.” Most of them have inserted the genes needed to make the antibodies into a harmless, non-infectious virus, and then injected that virus into volunteers. Unfortunately, these viruses have tended to set off a separate immune response, which causes more significant side effects and may limit how often this approach can be used.

This brings us to the technique being used here. In this case, the researchers placed the antibody genes in a circular loop of DNA called a plasmid. This is enough to ensure that the DNA doesn’t get digested immediately and to get the antibody genes made into proteins. But it does nothing to help get the DNA inside of cells.

The research team, a mixture of people from a biotech company and academic labs, used a commercial injection setup that mixes the injection of the DNA with short pulses of electricity. The electricity disrupts the cell membrane, allowing the plasmid DNA to make it inside cells. Based on animal testing, doing this in muscle cells is enough to turn the muscles into factories producing lots of broadly neutralizing antibodies.

The new study was meant to test the safety of doing that in humans. The team recruited 44 participants, testing various doses of two antibody-producing plasmids and injection schedules. All but four of the subjects completed the study; three of those who dropped out had all been testing a routine with the electric pulses happening very quickly, which turned out to be unpleasant. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to make any difference to the production of antibodies.

While there were a lot of adverse reactions, most of these were associated with the injection itself: muscle pain at the site, a scab forming afterward, and a reddening of the skin. The worst problem appeared to be a single case of moderate muscle pain that persisted for a couple of days.

In all but one volunteer, the injection resulted in stable production of the two antibodies for at least 72 weeks following the injection; the single exception only made one of the two. That’s “at least” 72 weeks because that’s when they stopped testing—there was no indication that levels were dropping at this point. Injecting more DNA led to more variability in the amount of antibody produced, but that amount quickly maxed out. More total injections also boosted the level of antibody production. But even the minimal procedure—two injections of the lowest concentration tested—resulted in significant and stable antibodies.

And, as expected, these antibodies blocked the virus they were directed against: SARS-CoV-2.

The caveats

This approach seems to work—we can seemingly get anybody to make broadly neutralizing antibodies for months at a time. What’s the hitch? For starters, this isn’t necessarily great for a rapidly emerging pandemic. It takes a while to identify broadly neutralizing antibodies after a pathogen is identified. And, while it’s simple to ship DNA around the world to where it will be needed, injection setups that also produce the small electric pulses are not exactly standard equipment even in industrialized countries, much less the Global South.

Then there’s the issue of whether this really is a longer-term fix. Widespread use of broadly neutralizing antibodies will create a strong selective pressure for the evolution of variants that the antibody can no longer bind to. That may not always be a problem—broadly neutralizing antibodies generally bind to parts of proteins that are absolutely essential for the proteins’ function, and so it may not be possible to change those while maintaining the function. But that’s unlikely to always be the case.

In the end, however, social acceptance may end up being the biggest problem. People had an utter freakout over unfounded conspiracies that the RNA of COVID vaccines would somehow lead to permanent genetic changes. Presumably, having DNA that’s stable for months would be even harder for some segments of the public to swallow.

Nature Medicine, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-025-03969-0 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Clinical trial of a technique that could give everyone the best antibodies Read More »

Tech billionaires are now shaping the militarization of American cities

benioff, Policy, Politics, Trump / Mike M. / October 25, 2025

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced on social media that he had been planning to “surge” troops into San Francisco this weekend—but was dissuaded from doing so by several tech billionaires.

“Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge,” Trump wrote.

Who are these “friends”? Trump named “great people like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff, and others” who told him that “the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”

Ludicrously wealthy tech execs have exerted unparalleled sway over Trump in the last year. Not content with obsequious flattery—at one recent White House dinner, Sam Altman called Trump “a pro-business, pro-innovation president” who was “a very refreshing change,” while Tim Cook praised the legendarily mercurial Trump’s “focus and your leadership”—tech leaders have also given Trump shiny awards, built him a bulletproof ballroom, and donated massive sums to help him get elected.

Most of these execs also have major business before the federal government and have specific “asks” around AI regulation, crypto, tariffs, regulations, and government contracts.

Now, tech execs are even helping to shape the militarization of American cities.

Consider Benioff, for instance. On October 10, he gave an interview to The New York Times in which he spoke to a reporter “by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco.” (Benioff lives in Hawaii most of the time now.)

His big annual “Dreamforce” conference was about to take place in San Francisco, and Benioff lamented the fact that he had to hire so much security to make attendees feel safe. (Over the last decade, several Ars staffers have witnessed various unpleasant incidents involving urine, sidewalk feces, and drug use during visits around downtown San Francisco, so concerns about the city are not illusory, though critics say they are overblown.)

Tech billionaires are now shaping the militarization of American cities Read More »

EU accuses Meta of violating content rules in move that could anger Trump

Digital Services Act, European Union, facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, tiktok / Mike M. / October 25, 2025

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently warned Meta and a dozen social media and technology companies that “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws, demands, or expected demands” may violate US law. Ferguson’s letters said the EU’s Digital Services Act and other laws “incentivize tech companies to censor worldwide speech.”

Meta told media outlets that “we disagree with any suggestion that we have breached the DSA, and we continue to negotiate with the European Commission on these matters.” Meta also said it made changes to comply with the DSA.

“In the European Union, we have introduced changes to our content reporting options, appeals process, and data access tools since the DSA came into force and are confident that these solutions match what is required under the law in the EU,” Meta said.

TikTok, Meta accused of restricting data access

The EC also said it preliminarily found that both Meta and TikTok violated their DSA obligation to grant researchers adequate access to public data.

“The Commission’s preliminary findings show that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok may have put in place burdensome procedures and tools for researchers to request access to public data. This often leaves them with partial or unreliable data, impacting their ability to conduct research, such as whether users, including minors, are exposed to illegal or harmful content,” the announcement said.

The data-access requirement “is an essential transparency obligation under the DSA, as it provides public scrutiny into the potential impact of platforms on our physical and mental health,” the EC said.

In a statement provided to Ars, TikTok said it is committed to transparency and has made data available to nearly 1,000 research teams. TikTok said it may be impossible to comply with both the DSA and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“We are reviewing the European Commission’s findings, but requirements to ease data safeguards place the DSA and GDPR in direct tension. If it is not possible to fully comply with both, we urge regulators to provide clarity on how these obligations should be reconciled,” TikTok said.

EU accuses Meta of violating content rules in move that could anger Trump Read More »

Lawsuit: Reddit caught Perplexity “red-handed” stealing data from Google results

AI, ai scraping, Google, google search, Perplexity, Perplexity.ai, Policy, reddit, Web Scraping / Beth Washington / October 24, 2025

Scraper accused of stealing Reddit content “shocked” by lawsuit.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, Reddit accused an AI search engine, Perplexity, of conspiring with several companies to illegally scrape Reddit content from Google search results, allegedly dodging anti-scraping methods that require substantial investments from both Google and Reddit.

Reddit alleged that Perplexity feeds off Reddit and Google, claiming to be “the world’s first answer engine” but really doing “nothing groundbreaking.”

“Its answer engine simply uses a different company’s” large language model “to parse through a massive number of Google search results to see if it can answer a user’s question based on those results,” the lawsuit said. “But Perplexity can only run its ‘answer engine’ by wrongfully accessing and scraping Reddit content appearing in Google’s own search results from Google’s own search engine.”

Likening companies involved in the alleged conspiracy to “bank robbers,” Reddit claimed it caught Perplexity “red-handed” stealing content that its “answer engine” should not have had access to.

Baiting Perplexity with “the digital equivalent of marked bills,” Reddit tested out posting content that could only be found in Google search engine results pages (SERPs) and “within hours, queries to Perplexity’s ‘answer engine’ produced the contents of that test post.”

“The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer engine’ is if it and/or its Co-Defendants scraped Google SERPs for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data into its answer engine,” Reddit’s lawsuit said.

In a Reddit post, Perplexity denied any wrongdoing, describing its answer engine as summarizing Reddit discussions and citing Reddit threads in answers, just like anyone who shares links or posts on Reddit might do. Perplexity suggested that Reddit was attacking the open Internet by trying to extort licensing fees for Reddit content, despite knowing that Perplexity doesn’t train foundational models. Reddit’s endgame, Perplexity alleged, was to use the Perplexity lawsuit as a “show of force in Reddit’s training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI.”

“We won’t be extorted, and we won’t help Reddit extort Google, even if they’re our (huge) competitor,” Perplexity wrote. “Perplexity will play fair, but we won’t cave. And we won’t let bigger companies use us in shell games. ”

Reddit likely anticipated Perplexity’s defense of the “open Internet,” noting in its complaint that “Reddit’s current Robots Exclusion Protocol file (‘robots.txt’) says, ‘Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content.’”

Google reveals how scrapers steal from search results

To block scraping, Reddit uses various measures, such as “registered user-identification limits, IP-rate limits, captcha bot protection, and anomaly-detection tools,” the complaint said.

Similarly, Google relies on “anti-scraping systems and teams dedicated to preventing unauthorized access to its products and services,” Reddit said, noting Google prohibits “unauthorized automated access” to its SERPs.

To back its claims, Reddit subpoenaed Google to find out more about how the search giant blocks AI scrapers from accessing content on SERPs. Google confirmed it relies on “a technological access control system called ‘SearchGuard,’ which is designed to prevent automated systems from accessing and obtaining wholesale search results and indexed data while allowing individual users—i.e., humans—access to Google’s search results, including results that feature Reddit data.”

“SearchGuard prevents unauthorized access to Google’s search data by imposing a barrier challenge that cannot be solved in the ordinary course by automated systems unless they take affirmative actions to circumvent the SearchGuard system,” Reddit’s complaint explained.

Bypassing these anti-scraping systems violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Reddit alleged, as well as laws against unfair trade and unjust enrichment. Seemingly, Google’s SearchGuard may currently be the easiest to bypass for alleged conspirators who supposedly pivoted to looting Google SERPs after realizing they couldn’t access Reddit content directly on the platform.

Scrapers shocked by Reddit lawsuit

Reddit accused three companies of conspiring with Perplexity—”a Lithuanian data scraper” called Oxylabs UAB, “a former Russian botnet” known as AWMProxy, and SerpApi, a Texas company that sells services for scraping search engines.

Oxylabs “is explicit that its scraping service is meant to circumvent Google’s technological measures,” Reddit alleged, pointing to an Oxylabs’ website called “How to Scrape Google Search Results.”

SerpApi touts the same service, including some options to scrape SERPs at “ludicrous speeds.” To trick browsers, SerpApi’s fastest option uses “a server-swarm to hide from, avoid, or simply overwhelm by brute force effective measures Google has put in place to ward off automated access to search engine results,” Reddit alleged. SerpApi also allegedly provides users “with tips to reduce the chance of being blocked while web scraping, such as by sending ‘fake user-agent string[s],’ shifting IP addresses to avoid multiple requests from the same address, and using proxies ‘to make traffic look like regular user traffic’ and thereby ‘impersonate’ user traffic.”

According to Reddit, the three companies disguise “their web scrapers as regular people (among other techniques) to circumvent or bypass the security restrictions meant to stop them.” During a two-week span in July, they scraped “almost three billion” SERPs containing Reddit text, URLs, images, and videos, a subpoena requesting information from Google revealed.

Ars could not immediately reach AWMProxy for comment. However, the other companies were surprised by Reddit’s lawsuit, while vowing to defend their business models.

SerpApi’s spokesperson told Ars that Reddit did not notify the company before filing the lawsuit.

“We strongly disagree with Reddit’s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court,” SerpApi’s spokesperson said. “In the eight years we’ve been in business, SerpApi has always operated on the right side of the law. As stated on our website, ‘The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We value freedom of speech tremendously.’”

Additionally, SerpAPI works “closely with our attorneys to ensure that our services comply with all applicable laws and fair use principles. SerpApi stands firmly behind its business model and conduct, and we will continue to defend our rights to the fullest extent,” the spokesperson said.

Oxylabs’ chief governance strategy officer, Denas Grybauskas, told Ars that Reddit’s complaint seemed baffling since the other companies involved in the litigation are “unrelated and unaffiliated.”

“We are shocked and disappointed by this news, as Reddit has made no attempt to speak with us directly or communicate any potential concerns,” Grybauskas said. “Oxylabs has always been and will continue to be a pioneer and an industry leader in public data collection, and it will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations. Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them. It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”

Grybauskas defended Oxylabs’ business as creating “real-world value for thousands of businesses and researchers, such as those driving open-source investigations, disinformation tackling, or environmental monitoring.”

“We strongly believe that our core business principles make the Internet a better place and serve the public good,” Grybauskas said. “Oxylabs provides infrastructure for compliant access to publicly available information, and we demand every customer to use our services lawfully. ”

Reddit cited threats to licensing deals

Apparently, Reddit caught on to the alleged scheme after sending cease-and-desist letters to Perplexity to stop scraping Reddit content that its answer engine was citing. Rather than ending the scraping, Reddit claimed Perplexity’s citations increased “forty-fold.” Since Perplexity is a customer listed on SerpApi’s website, Reddit hypothesized the two were conspiring to skirt Google’s anti-circumvention tools, the complaint said, along with the other companies.

In a statement provided to Ars, Ben Lee, chief legal officer at Reddit, said that Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi were “textbook examples” of scrapers that “bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material.”

“Unable to scrape Reddit directly, they mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search,” Lee said. “Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers, choosing to buy stolen data rather than enter into a lawful agreement with Reddit itself.”

On Reddit, Perplexity pushed back on Reddit’s claims that Perplexity ignored requests to license Reddit content.

“Untrue. Whenever anyone asks us about content licensing, we explain that Perplexity, as an application-layer company, does not train AI models on content,” Perplexity said. “Never has. So, it is impossible for us to sign a license agreement to do so.”

Reddit supposedly “insisted we pay anyway, despite lawfully accessing Reddit data,” Perplexity said. “Bowing to strong arm tactics just isn’t how we do business.”

Perplexity’s spokesperson, Jesse Dwyer, told Ars the company chose to post its statement on Reddit “to illustrate a simple point.”

“It is a public Reddit link accessible to anyone, yet by the logic of Reddit’s lawsuit, if you mention it or cite it in any way (which is your job as a reporter), they might just sue you,” Dwyer said.

But Reddit claimed that its business and reputation have been “damaged” by “misappropriation of Reddit data and circumvention of technological control measures.” Without a licensing deal ensuring that Perplexity and others are respecting Reddit policies, Reddit cannot control who has access to data, how they’re using data, and if data use conflicts with Reddit’s privacy policy and user agreement, the complaint said.

Further, Reddit’s worried that Perplexity’s workaround could catch on, potentially messing up Reddit’s other licensing deals. All the while, Reddit noted, it has to invest “significant resources” in anti-scraping technology, with Reddit ultimately suffering damages, including “lost profits and business opportunities, reputational harm, and loss of user trust.”

Reddit’s hoping the court will grant an injunction barring companies from scraping Reddit content from Google SERPs. It also wants companies blocked from both selling Reddit data and “developing or distributing any technology or product that is used for the unauthorized circumvention of technological control measures and scraping of Reddit data.”

If Reddit wins, companies could be required to pay substantial damages or to disgorge profits from the sale of Reddit content.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Lawsuit: Reddit caught Perplexity “red-handed” stealing data from Google results Read More »

Trump eyes government control of quantum computing firms with Intel-like deals

chips funding, Policy, quantum computing, trump administration / DJ Henderson / October 23, 2025

Donald Trump is eyeing taking equity stakes in quantum computing firms in exchange for federal funding, The Wall Street Journal reported.

At least five companies are weighing whether allowing the government to become a shareholder would be worth it to snag funding that the Trump administration has “earmarked for promising technology companies,” sources familiar with the potential deals told the WSJ.

IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are currently in talks with the government over potential funding agreements, with minimum awards of $10 million each, some sources said. Quantum Computing Inc. and Atom Computing are reportedly “considering similar arrangements,” as are other companies in the sector, which is viewed as critical for scientific advancements and next-generation technologies.

No deals have been completed yet, sources said, and terms could change as quantum-computing firms weigh the potential risks of government influence over their operations.

Quantum-computing exec called deals “exciting”

In August, Intel agreed to give the US a 10 percent stake in the company, then admitted to shareholders that “it is difficult to foresee all the potential consequences” of the unusual arrangement. If the deal goes through, the US would become Intel’s largest shareholder, the WSJ noted, potentially influencing major decisions that could prompt layoffs or restrict business in certain foreign markets.

“Among other things, there could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments, or competitors,” Intel wrote in a securities filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”

But quantum computing companies that are closest to entering deals appear optimistic about possible government involvement.

Quantum Computing Inc. chief executive Yuping Huang told the WSJ that “the government’s potential equity stakes in companies in the industry are exciting.” The funding could be one of “the first significant signs of support for the sector from Washington,” the WSJ noted, potentially paving the way for breakthroughs such as Google’s recent demonstration of a quantum algorithm running 13,000 times faster than a supercomputer.

Trump eyes government control of quantum computing firms with Intel-like deals Read More »

Amazon’s DNS problem knocked out half the web, likely costing billions

Amazon, amazon outage, Amazon Web Services, AWS, aws outage, Policy / Mike M. / October 21, 2025

On Monday afternoon, Amazon confirmed that an outage affecting Amazon Web Services’ cloud hosting, which had impacted millions across the Internet, had been resolved.

Considered the worst outage since last year’s CrowdStrike chaos, Amazon’s outage caused “global turmoil,” Reuters reported. AWS is the world’s largest cloud provider and, therefore, the “backbone of much of the Internet,” ZDNet noted. Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN.

Popular apps like Snapchat, Signal, and Reddit went dark. Flights got delayed. Banks and financial services went down. Massive games like Fortnite could not be accessed. Some of Amazon’s own services were hit, too, including its e-commerce platform, Alexa, and Prime Video. Ultimately, millions of businesses simply stopped operating, unable to log employees into their systems or accept payments for their goods.

“The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the Internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the Internet to work,” Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of an Internet performance monitoring firm called Catchpoint, told CNN. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed—from airlines to factories.”

Amazon’s problems originated at a US site that is its “oldest and largest for web services” and often “the default region for many AWS services,” Reuters noted. The same site has experienced two outages before in 2020 and 2021, but while the tech giant had confirmed that those prior issues had been “fully mitigated,” apparently the fixes did not ensure stability into 2025.

Amazon’s DNS problem knocked out half the web, likely costing billions Read More »

Big Tech may fall short of green energy targets due to proposed rule changes

big tech, carbon credits, data centers, green energy, Policy, pollution, syndication / Kelly Newman / October 21, 2025

“There’s going to be one price trend: that is you will see higher costs for certificates at low producing times of day and seasons,” said Daniel Arnesson, of the energy analytics company Veyt. Across a global portfolio, this may make it “fundamentally more expensive” to buy credits.

Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google have all previously been among the Protocol’s disclosed financial backers, while its ongoing reform of all its accounting standards has been the subject of intense corporate lobbying.

Only a handful of companies including Google and AstraZeneca have backed the more expensive “24/7” hourly-matching and localized approach to clean energy investments that has been proposed for consultation.

A coalition that includes Meta, Amazon, and General Motors had instead argued for more flexibility in clean energy purchases, which it said could channel funds to developing countries more in need of these investments. It has also suggested a technique to account for emissions “avoided” by clean energy, which the Protocol is separately considering.

A group of attorneys-general in the US accused Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon last month of using “environmental accounting gimmicks” to make claims that “appear deceptive,” while destabilizing their local grids through “skyrocketing” demand for power.

Amazon declined to comment. Microsoft, Meta, and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

The way greenhouse gas emissions are counted has been less scrutinized than traditional financial accounting. But it underpins how much the world’s largest companies pay in carbon levies in the EU, China, and elsewhere, how easily they can hit climate goals outlined to investors, and how they market themselves.

A coalition of companies including BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and energy groups ExxonMobil and Adnoc said this week it wanted to work on an improved carbon accounting framework.

Big Tech may fall short of green energy targets due to proposed rule changes Read More »

NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware

Biz & IT, espionage, NSO, pegasus, Policy, Security / Kelly Newman / October 21, 2025

A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp.

The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of the US District Court of the District of Northern California, grants a permanent injunction sought by WhatsApp owner Meta in a case it brought against NSO in 2019. The lawsuit alleged that Meta caught NSO trying to surreptitiously infect about 1,400 mobile phones—many belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials—with Pegasus. As part of the campaign, NSO created fake WhatsApp accounts and targeted Meta infrastructure. The suit sought monetary awards and an injunction against the practice.

Setting a precedent

Friday’s ruling ordered NSO to permanently cease targeting WhatsApp users, attempting to infect their devices, or intercepting WhatsApp messages, which are end-to-end encrypted using the open source Signal Protocol. Hamilton also ruled that NSO must delete any data it obtained when targeting the WhatsApp users.

NSO had argued that such a ruling would “force NSO out of business,” as Pegasus is its “flagship product.” Hamilton ruled that the harm Pegasus posed to Meta outweighed any such considerations.

“In the court’s view, any business that deals with users’ personal information, and that invests resources into ways to encrypt that personal information, is harmed by the unauthorized access of that personal information—and it is more than just a reputational harm, it’s a business harm,” Hamilton wrote. “Essentially, part of what companies such as Whatsapp are ‘selling’ is informational privacy, and any unauthorized access is an interference with that sale. Defendants’ conduct serves to defeat one of the purposes of the service being offered by plaintiffs, which constitutes direct harm.”

NSO permanently barred from targeting WhatsApp users with Pegasus spyware Read More »

Big Tech sues Texas, says age-verification law is “broad censorship regime”

1st Amendment, First Amendment, free speech, Policy, texas / DJ Henderson / October 18, 2025

Texas minors also challenge law

The Texas App Store Accountability Act is similar to laws enacted by Utah and Louisiana. The Texas law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2026, while the Utah and Louisiana laws are set to be enforced starting in May and July, respectively.

The Texas law is also being challenged in a different lawsuit filed by a student advocacy group and two Texas minors.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity,” attorney Ambika Kumar of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said in an announcement of the lawsuit. “The Constitution also forbids restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said the law “extends far beyond social media to mainstream educational, news, and creative applications, including Wikipedia, search apps, and internet browsers; messaging services like WhatsApp and Slack; content libraries like Audible, Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube; educational platforms like Coursera, Codecademy, and Duolingo; news apps from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and The Atlantic; and publishing tools like Substack, Medium, and CapCut.”

Both lawsuits against Texas argue that the law is preempted by the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which struck down a California law restricting the sale of violent video games to children. The Supreme Court said in Brown that a state’s power to protect children from harm “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”

The tech industry has sued Texas over multiple laws related to content moderation. In 2022, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law that prohibits large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user’s viewpoint. Litigation in that case is ongoing. In a separate case decided in June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites.

Big Tech sues Texas, says age-verification law is “broad censorship regime” Read More »

Teen sues to destroy the nudify app that left her in constant fear

AI, AI-generated images, csam, fake nudes, ncii, nudify apps, Policy / Beth Washington / October 18, 2025

A spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that “nonconsensual pornography and the tools to create it are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and are removed whenever discovered.”

For the teen suing, the prime target remains ClothOff itself. Her lawyers think it’s possible that she can get the app and its affiliated sites blocked in the US, the WSJ reported, if ClothOff fails to respond and the court awards her default judgment.

But no matter the outcome of the litigation, the teen expects to be forever “haunted” by the fake nudes that a high school boy generated without facing any charges.

According to the WSJ, the teen girl sued the boy who she said made her want to drop out of school. Her complaint noted that she was informed that “the individuals responsible and other potential witnesses failed to cooperate with, speak to, or provide access to their electronic devices to law enforcement.”

The teen has felt “mortified and emotionally distraught, and she has experienced lasting consequences ever since,” her complaint said. She has no idea if ClothOff can continue to distribute the harmful images, and she has no clue how many teens may have posted them online. Because of these unknowns, she’s certain she’ll spend “the remainder of her life” monitoring “for the resurfacing of these images.”

“Knowing that the CSAM images of her will almost inevitably make their way onto the Internet and be retransmitted to others, such as pedophiles and traffickers, has produced a sense of hopelessness” and “a perpetual fear that her images can reappear at any time and be viewed by countless others, possibly even friends, family members, future partners, colleges, and employers, or the public at large,” her complaint said.

The teen’s lawsuit is the newest front in a wider attempt to crack down on AI-generated CSAM and NCII. It follows prior litigation filed by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu last year that targeted ClothOff, among 16 popular apps used to “nudify” photos of mostly women and young girls.

About 45 states have criminalized fake nudes, the WSJ reported, and earlier this year, Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, which requires platforms to remove both real and AI-generated NCII within 48 hours of victims’ reports.

Teen sues to destroy the nudify app that left her in constant fear Read More »