Comment on Pardon the Intrusion #19: Paying for Privacy

(NEW YORK) — Rooting for Donald Trump to fail has rarely been this profitable. Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate’s latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Truth Social itself. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Several of these investors interviewed by The Associated Press say their bearish gambles using “put” options and other trading tools are driven less by their personal feelings about the former president (most don’t like him) than their faith in the woeful underlying financials of a company that made less money last year than the average Wendy’s hamburger franchise. “This company makes no money.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Creativeye99) A federal appeals court today reversed a ruling that prevented New York from enforcing a law requiring Internet service providers to sell $15 broadband plans to low-income consumers. The ruling is a loss for six trade groups that represent ISPs, although it isn't clear right now whether the law will be enforced. New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) was blocked in June 2021 by a US District Court judge who ruled that the state law is rate regulation and preempted by federal law.

Enlarge (credit: Google) Google says it has patched a nasty loophole in the Android TV account security system, which would grant attackers with physical access to your device access to your entire Google account just by sideloading some apps. As 404 Media reports, the issue was originally brought to Google's attention by US Sen.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers are assailing websites using a prominent WordPress plugin with millions of attempts to exploit a high-severity vulnerability that allows complete takeover, researchers said. The vulnerability resides in WordPress Automatic, a plugin with more than 38,000 paying customers. Websites running the WordPress content management system use it to incorporate content from other sites.

Enlarge (credit: US EIA) On Thursday, the US Department of Energy released its preliminary estimate for the nation's carbon emissions in the previous year. Any drop in emissions puts us on a path that would avoid some of the catastrophic warming scenarios that were still on the table at the turn of the century.

Enlarge (credit: Discord) Spy Pet, a service that sold access to a rich database of allegedly more than 3 billion Discord messages and details on more than 600 million users, has seemingly been shut down. 404 Media, which broke the story of Spy Pet's offerings, reports that Spy Pet seems mostly shut down.