Carr fires back at California

Carr wrote in his response to Newsom that the FCC Inspector General report “specifically identified the tens of thousands of people that were enrolled AFTER THEY HAD ALREADY DIED.” The Inspector General report wasn’t quite so certain that the number is in the tens of thousands, however.

The report said that “at least 16,774 (and potentially as many as 39,362) deceased individuals were first enrolled and claimed by a provider after they died.” The Inspector General’s office could not determine “whether the remaining 22,588 deceased subscribers were first claimed before or after their deaths as the opt-out states do not report enrollment date information.”

Carr also wrote in his response to Newsom that “payments to providers for people that died or may have died before enrollment went on for over 50 months in cases and for several months on average.” The Inspector General report did say that “providers sought reimbursement for subscribers enrolled after their deaths for 1 to 54 months, with an average of 3.4 months,” but didn’t specify which state or states hit the 54-month mark.

Carr has continued addressing the topic throughout the week. “For the record, my position is that the government should not be spending your money to provide phone and Internet service to dead people. Governor Newsom is taking the opposite position, apparently,” he wrote yesterday.

When asked if the FCC will penalize California, Carr said at yesterday’s press conference yesterday that “we are looking at California and we’re going to make sure that we hold bad actors accountable, and we’re going to look at all the remedies that are on the table.”

Gomez: FCC plan shuts out eligible subscribers

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s one Democrat, said that Carr’s proposed rulemaking “goes well beyond” what’s needed to protect the integrity of Lifeline. “By proposing to use the same cruel and punitive eligibility standards recently imposed for Medicaid coverage, the Commission risks excluding large numbers of eligible households, including seniors, people with disabilities, rural residents, and Tribal communities, from a proven lifeline that millions rely on to stay connected to work, school, health care, and emergency services,” she said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/fcc-chair-fights-calif-governor-over-alleged-lifeline-benefits-for-dead-people/

Cavanagh said that over the past year, Comcast “made the most significant go-to-market shift in our company’s history. We have simplified our broadband offering by moving away from short-term promotions toward a clear, transparent value proposition.” But more changes are needed, he said.

“Looking ahead, 2026 is about building on the changes we made in 2025… This will be the largest broadband investment year in our history, focused squarely on customer experience and simplification, with the goal of migrating the majority of residential broadband customers to our new simplified pricing and packaging by year-end,” Cavanagh said.

Comcast’s domestic broadband revenue was $6.32 billion, down from $6.38 billion a year ago. Cable TV revenue was $6.36 billion, down from $6.74 billion year over year. Mobile revenue rose from $1.19 billion to $1.40 billion year over year, buoyed by 1.5 million new mobile lines added during the full year of 2025.

Comcast said it now has over 9 million total mobile lines and aims to get more of its broadband customers into bundles of Internet and wireless service. Comcast offers consumer mobile service through an agreement with Verizon and struck a deal with T-Mobile to deliver mobile services to business customers this year.

Peacock boosts revenue

As the owner of NBCUniversal, Comcast has a lot more going on than cable and mobile. Strong results in the Peacock streaming service and Universal Studios theme parks helped Comcast meet analysts’ revenue projections and exceed profit estimates. Peacock paid subscribers increased 22 percent year over year to 44 million, and revenue grew 23 percent to 1.6 billion in the quarter, Comcast said.

Total Q4 2025 revenue was $32.31 billion, up 1.2 percent year over year. Net income was $2.17 billion, a 54.6 percent drop compared to a profit of $4.78 billion in Q4 2024. Comcast indicated the drop isn’t as bad as it sounds because it reflects “an unfavorable comparison to the prior year period, which included a $1.9 billion income tax benefit due to an internal corporate reorganization.” Comcast’s stock price was up about 3 percent today but has fallen about 16 percent in the past 12 months.

Comcast is one of the two biggest cable companies in the US alongside Charter, which is scheduled to announce Q4 2025 earnings tomorrow. In Q3 2025, Charter reported a loss of 109,000 Internet customers, a bit more than Comcast’s 104,000-customer loss in the same quarter. Charter, which is seeking regulatory approval to buy cable company Cox, had 27.76 million residential Internet customers and 2.03 million small business Internet customers.

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/comcast-keeps-losing-customers-despite-price-guarantee-and-unlimited-data/

In a loss, Lynch could owe millions, as each mail order would be considered a violation of the state’s Human Life Protection Act, Paxton alleged, triggering a minimum $100,000 fine per violation. She could also face substantial jail time, the Austin American-Statesman reported, since Texas abortion “providers risk up to 99 years in prison.”

However, Lynch told the Times on Wednesday that the lawsuit will not stop her from shipping pills into Texas. She’s been anticipating this fight since at least the beginning of last year and remains committed to helping pregnant people in states with strict abortion laws get support from a qualified health provider. She fears that otherwise, they’ll feel driven to take riskier steps that could endanger their lives.

“I don’t fear Ken Paxton,” Lynch told the Statesman last January. “I don’t fear getting arrested or anything like that.”

Nurse plans to defend shield laws

This is the third lawsuit Paxton has filed against an out-of-state abortion pill provider, his press release noted. Legal experts who support abortion ban laws, as well as those supporting abortion shield laws, told the NYT they expect the Supreme Court to eventually weigh the arguments on both sides. If that happened, it could impact law enforcement in about a third of states with “near-total” abortion bans, as well as more than 20 states that enacted abortion shield laws.

To Lynch, abortion ban laws have already proven disastrous, doing more harm than good.

The Statesman cited data from the Society of Family Planning (SFP), showing that after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, medication abortion by telehealth became much more popular in the US. In 2022, this type of service accounted for approximately 1 in 25 abortions; by 2024, the numbers had shot to 1 in 5.

“Nearly half of those prescriptions went to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions on telehealth abortion,” the Statesman reported, and SFP’s data showed that Texas residents, particularly, were turning more to telehealth. In the first half of 2024, 2,800 Texans per month received abortion medication by mail, which was “more than any other abortion-restricted state,” the data showed.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/i-dont-fear-ken-paxton-nurse-vows-to-keep-shipping-abortion-pills-to-texas/

Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.

The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.

The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.

A chilling message

The event galvanized security and law enforcement professionals. Despite the legitimacy of the work and the legal contract that authorized it, DeMercurio and Wynn were arrested on charges of felony third-degree burglary and spent 20 hours in jail, until they were released on $100,000 bail ($50,000 for each). The charges were later reduced to misdemeanor trespassing charges, but even then, Chad Leonard, sheriff of Dallas County, where the courthouse was located, continued to allege publicly that the men had acted illegally and should be prosecuted.

Reputational hits from these sorts of events can be fatal to a security professional’s career. And of course, the prospect of being jailed for performing authorized security assessment is enough to get the attention of any penetration tester, not to mention the customers that hire them.

“This incident didn’t make anyone safer,” Wynn said in a statement. “It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping [a] government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it.”

DeMercurio and Wynn’s engagement at the Dallas County Courthouse on September 11, 2019, had been routine. A little after midnight, after finding a side door to the courthouse unlocked, the men closed it and let it lock. They then slipped a makeshift tool through a crack in the door and tripped the locking mechanism. After gaining entry, the pentesters tripped an alarm alerting authorities.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/county-pays-600000-to-pentesters-it-arrested-for-assessing-courthouse-security/

Rising costs of climate change

Last year, the nonprofit Climate Central launched an online database to track the most costly weather- and climate-related disasters across the country. The effort was led by the same lead scientist who tracked those costs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—until the Trump administration axed the project in May.

In 2025, the US experienced 23 such disasters with costs totaling at least $1 billion, for a total of $115 billion, Climate Central concluded. From 1980 through 2025, the US has experienced 426 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, for a total of more than $3.1 trillion in damages.

Meanwhile, home insurance rates are rising, and insurance companies are increasingly backing out of areas with high risks from hurricanes or wildfires. Researchers have also documented how climate change causes premature deaths and increasing health care costs as it fuels disease and other health problems.

Illinois is struggling with worsening flooding, heat waves, and air pollution—including from Canadian wildfires. All bring heavy costs.

State Sen. Graciela Guzmán, a Chicago Democrat who will introduce the superfund legislation in Illinois’ Senate, said the bill is a practical step to bring funding to local schools, families, and governments already struggling with these consequences.

“This bill is about setting a fairer standard for who pays when climate damage hits our towns and neighborhoods,” Guzmán wrote in an email.

Ramirez’s basement, in her home on the Southeast Side of Chicago, was flooded on and off with sewage water for a week last summer when her sewer line broke during a rainstorm that caused severe flash flooding throughout the city. Her home insurance wouldn’t cover the thousands of dollars it took to repair it, she said. She sees it as an example of what the effort to “make polluters pay” could address.

“This superfund climate bill would create revenue to fix the infrastructure and be able to combat all this bad stuff that’s happening,” she added.

In the past two years, Americans experienced a slew of devastating disasters, from Hurricanes Helene and Milton to the Los Angeles wildfires and Texas floods. Hundreds of thousands are reportedly still without power after a punishing winter storm made worse by global warming.

All of that contributes to growing momentum to make polluters pay, said DiPaola, of Fossil Free Media.

“People were looking at their insurance bills, they were looking at their utility bills, they were seeing the costs of climate damage and also everyday climate costs just really rising,” DiPaola said. “They wanted some accountability.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/states-want-to-charge-fossil-fuel-companies-for-climate-change-superfunds/

While the Biden administration designed the program to prioritize fiber deployments, the Trump administration threw out the previous plans. Under Trump, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) deemed the Biden-era plan too costly and changed the rules to make it easier for satellite services to obtain grant funding. The overhaul cut projected spending to about $21 billion, and it’s still unclear what will happen to the other $21 billion.

Starlink sought billions in grants after the new rules were put in place, but states didn’t want to provide that much. So far, SpaceX is slated to receive $733.5 million to offer broadband at 472,600 locations. Amazon’s Leo satellite service (formerly Kuiper) is set to receive $311 million for 415,000 locations.

While not every state plan is final, it looks like satellite networks will get about 5 percent of the grant money and serve over 22 percent of the locations funded by grants. Satellite companies are getting smaller payments on a per-location basis because, unlike fiber providers, they don’t have to install infrastructure at each customer’s location.

The concessions sought by SpaceX “would limit Starlink’s performance obligations, payment schedules, non-compliance penalties, reporting expectations, and labor and insurance standards,” wrote Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute. Garner argued that SpaceX’s demands illustrate problems in how the Trump NTIA rewrote program rules to increase reliance on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers.

“BEAD was designed primarily to deploy terrestrial networks, which are physically located in communities, built with traditional construction methods, and are relatively easy to monitor and inspect,” Garner wrote. “But, on June 6, 2025, NTIA restructured BEAD in ways that greatly increased participation by LEO providers, exacerbating the challenge of applying BEAD’s terrestrial-focused rules to LEO’s extraterrestrial networks.”

SpaceX: Labor rules shouldn’t apply to us

Among other things, SpaceX is trying to “minimize states’ ability to penalize LEO grantees for defaulting or failing to comply with contract requirements,” and avoid having “to report on the use of BEAD funds or other financial information related to the grant,” Garner wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/starlink-demands-grant-money-from-states-even-when-residents-dont-buy-service/

In his Thursday ruling, Judge Davis referenced the family tree of modern surveillance case-law, noting that a 1983 Supreme Court case (Knotts v. United States) found that there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when traveling on a public road.

That 1983 case, which centered on a radio transmitter that enabled law enforcement to follow the movements of alleged drug traffickers driving between Minnesota and Wisconsin, has provided the legal underpinning for the use of ALPR technology in the United States over the last few decades.

“Modern-day license plate reader systems, like Norfolk’s, are nothing like [the technology of the early 1980s],” Michael Soyfer, one of the Institute of Justice attorneys, told Ars by email. “They track the movements of virtually every driver within a city for weeks at a time. That can reveal a host of insights not captured in any single trip.”

For its part, Flock Safety celebrated the ruling and wrote on its website that its clients may continue to use the cameras.

“Here, the court emphasized that LPR technology, as deployed in Norfolk, is meaningfully different from systems that enable persistent, comprehensive tracking of individuals’ movements,” the company wrote.

“When used with appropriate limitations and safeguards, LPRs do not provide an intimate portrait of a person’s life and therefore do not trigger the constitutional concerns raised by continuous surveillance,” it added.

But some legal scholars disagree with both the judge’s and Flock’s conclusions.

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of the forthcoming book Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, told Ars by email that the judge’s ruling here is “understandably conservative and dangerous.”

“The danger is that the same reasoning that there is no expectation of privacy in public would justify having ALPR cameras on every single street corner,” he continued.

“Further,” he said, “looking at the technology as a mere tool, rather than a system of surveillance, misses the mark on its erosion of privacy. Think how revealing ALPRs would be outside religious institutions, gun ranges, medical clinics, addiction treatment centers, or protests.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/angry-norfolk-residents-lose-lawsuit-to-stop-flock-license-plate-scanners/

Alarming critics, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Madhu Gottumukkala, accidentally uploaded sensitive information to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, Politico reported.

According to “four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident,” Gottumukkala’s uploads of sensitive CISA contracting documents triggered multiple internal cybersecurity warnings designed to “stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks.”

Gottumukkala’s uploads happened soon after he joined the agency and sought special permission to use OpenAI’s popular chatbot, which most DHS staffers are blocked from accessing, DHS confirmed to Ars. Instead, DHS staffers use approved AI-powered tools, like the agency’s DHSChat, which “are configured to prevent queries or documents input into them from leaving federal networks,” Politico reported.

It remains unclear why Gottumukkala needed to use ChatGPT. One official told Politico that, to staffers, it seemed like Gottumukkala “forced CISA’s hand into making them give him ChatGPT, and then he abused it.”

The information Gottumukkala reportedly leaked was not confidential but marked “for official use only.” That designation, a DHS document explained, is “used within DHS to identify unclassified information of a sensitive nature” that, if shared without authorization, “could adversely impact a person’s privacy or welfare” or impede how federal and other programs “essential to the national interest” operate.

There’s now a concern that the sensitive information could be used to answer prompts from any of ChatGPT’s 700 million active users.

OpenAI did not respond to Ars’ request to comment, but Cyber News reported that experts have warned “that using public AI tools poses real risks because uploaded data can be retained, breached, or used to inform responses to other users.”

Sources told Politico that DHS investigated the incident for potentially harming government security—which could result in administrative or disciplinary actions, DHS officials told Politico. Possible consequences could range from a formal warning or mandatory retraining to “suspension or revocation of a security clearance,” officials said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/us-cyber-defense-chief-accidentally-uploaded-secret-government-info-to-chatgpt/

The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user’s viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law’s definition of the word “consumer.”

Salazar filed a class action against Paramount in 2022, alleging that it “violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent,” Salazar’s petition to the Supreme Court said. Salazar had signed up for an online newsletter through 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount, and had to provide his email address in the process. Salazar then used 247Sports.com to view videos while logged in to his Facebook account.

“As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information—including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook,” the petition said. “The disclosures occurred automatically because of the Facebook Pixel Paramount installed on its website. Facebook and Paramount then used this information to create and display targeted advertising, which increased their revenues.”

The 1988 law defines consumer as “any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” The phrase “video tape service provider” is defined to include providers of “prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials,” and thus arguably applies to more than just sellers of tapes.

The legal question for the Supreme Court “is whether the phrase ‘goods or services from a video tape service provider,’ as used in the VPPA’s definition of ‘consumer,’ refers to all of a video tape service provider’s goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services,” Salazar’s petition said. The Supreme Court granted his petition to hear the case in a list of orders released yesterday.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/supreme-court-to-decide-how-1988-videotape-privacy-law-applies-to-online-video/

However, Kuhl ruled that platforms will have the opportunity to counter experts’ opinions at trial, while reminding social media companies that “ultimately, the critical question of causation is one that must be determined by the jury.” Only one expert’s testimony was excluded, Social Media Victims Law Center noted, a licensed clinical psychologist deemed unqualified.

“Testimony by Bagot as to design features that were employed on TikTok as well as on other social media platforms is directly relevant to the question of whether those design features cause the type of harms allegedly suffered by K.G.M. here,” Kuhl wrote.

That means that a jury will get a chance to weigh Bagot’s opinion that “social media overuse and addiction causes or plays a substantial role in causing or exacerbating psychopathological harms in children and youth, including depression, anxiety and eating disorders, as well as internalizing and externalizing psychopathological symptoms.”

The jury will also consider the insights and information Bejar (a fact witness and former consultant for the company) will share about Meta’s internal safety studies. That includes hearing about “his personal knowledge and experience related to how design defects on Meta’s platforms can cause harm to minors (e.g., age verification, reporting processes, beauty filters, public like counts, infinite scroll, default settings, private messages, reels, ephemeral content, and connecting children with adult strangers),” as well as “harms associated with Meta’s platforms including addiction/problematic use, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, suicidality, self-harm, and sexualization.” 

If K.G.M. can convince the jury that she was not harmed by platforms’ failure to remove content but by companies “designing their platforms to addict kids” and “developing algorithms that show kids not what they want to see but what they cannot look away from,” Bergman thinks her case could become a “data point” for “settling similar cases en masse,” he told Barrons.

“She is very typical of so many children in the United States—the harms that they’ve sustained and the way their lives have been altered by the deliberate design decisions of the social media companies,” Bergman told the Post.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-hours-before-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-starts/