Policy

404 Media is fighting a subpoena from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to seize confidential reporting material:

In order to do our job well, journalists need to be independent from the government and from outside corporate interests. ... Our sources—many of whom are particularly vulnerable—share information with us specifically because we are independent from the state.

As we’ve said before: tell your Senator to pass the PRESS Act.

It’s been two years since Apple dropped its plan to detect child abuse imagery using client-side iCloud scanning.

Now, the New York Times reports on a class-action lawsuit filed in California saying it harmed a group of 2,680 victims by failing to "implement those designs or take any measures to detect and limit" CSAM, like using Microsoft's PhotoDNA.

Under law, victims of child sexual abuse are entitled to a minimum of $150,000 in damages, which means the total award...could exceed $1.2 billion

Trump mentioned his dinner with the billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner during his interview with Kristen Welker for Meet the Press today, according to NBC News.

He’s heard from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post: “We’re having dinner,” he said.

Bezos, who didn’t get along with the President-elect before, recently said he feels “optimistic” about his second term.

Whimsical flags for made-up organizations are a common protest prop in South Korea, originating as a satirical response to accusations of astroturfing. This Star Wars flag made a showing at Saturday’s protests, as the Korean legislature failed to impeach Yoon over his attempted coup on Tuesday night.

While investigating apps that let livestream viewers pay to watch child abuse, The New York Times reports that it found “more than 80 apps that advertised children” on the Apple and Google app stores.

The livestream apps downloaded from Apple and Google illustrate an even darker aspect of the social media technology boom, particularly for children living in poverty in developing countries. There, with the ease of a smartphone, parents and other adults can connect with pedophiles in the United States and elsewhere who pay to watch — and direct — criminal behavior.

Trigger warning: This Times story includes descriptions of child sexual abuse.

TikTok is running out of time and legal recourse to avoid a US ban unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells it. Here’s the tl;dr on why a three-judge panel unanimously ruled to uphold the law that could expel TikTok, and what comes next.

The satellite internet company received a Pentagon contract that will give 2,500 Starlink terminals access to Starshield, its secure satellite service for governments, according to Bloomberg. With this contract, Ukraine will have a total of 3,000 terminals connected to Starshield.

The US Postal Service is supposed to add 66,000 electric trucks to its fleet by 2028 using $3 billion from Biden’s climate legislation. But Reuters is now saying that Donald Trump is likely to kill the effort by cancelling the contracts with supplying automakers Oshkosh and Ford. It’s yet another example of Trump’s eagerness to unspool his predecessor’s efforts to promote EVs.

A federal court overturned an injunction on Thursday that would have forced Apple to allow alternative payment systems and enable sideloading on iOS for Brazilian users within 20 days.

Brazil’s antitrust regulator can appeal the ruling and investigations are still ongoing, which means Apple may still need to introduce similar changes to those it rolled out in the EU.

The people suing Minnesota over its law reining in political deepfakes have submitted a filing (PDF) asking the judge to withdraw a declaration supporting the law.

Why? Because, as Stanford misinformation expert Jeff Hancock recently admitted, it was written with help from ChatGPT, which generated incorrect citations in the document.

Frank Bednarz, the lawyer for the defendants, tells The Verge:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s decision not to retract a report they’ve acknowledged contains fabrications seems problematic given the professional ethical obligation attorneys have to the court.

Here at the The New York Times DealBook Summit, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was just asked if he has talked about the US government’s ongoing case to break up the company. He said his convos with the President-elect have had “nothing to do with ongoing litigation.”

“He is very focused on American competitiveness,” Pichai said of Trump when asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin. “There are real areas where I think he’s thinking about making a difference. Hopefully, we can make progress there.”

The con man used the name of a real FBI agent to scam victims attached to an “@usa.com” email instead of the real @fbi.gov.

In April, the FTC announced a new rule that could allow it to help people scammed via government and business impersonations. Seniors are often targeted, but so are others, like The Cut’s financial columnist, who lost $50,000 to a man impersonating a CIA agent.

President Yoon Suk Yeol just announced that he’s declaring martial law in Korea, following months of rumors that he’d pull the move — and repeated denials. The AP says he’s “accusing the country’s opposition of controlling the parliament, sympathizing with North Korea and paralyzing the government with anti-state activities.”

Huge South Korean chaebols like Samsung and LG are deeply wrapped up in the workings of the government — it’s going to be an unsettling period of geopolitical weirdness as giant tech companies try to moderate governments around the world.

That includes some “extremely violent misogyny,” director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Isabelle Frances-Wright, tells the Associated Press.

The use of the phrases “Your body, my choice,” “repeal the 19th,” and calls for women to “back to the kitchen” spiked online after Election Day in the US, according to ISD.