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December 5, 2025

Supreme Court Questions Broadband Provider Liability for User Misconduct

Intermediary liability—when a company should be liable for users’ misuse of its product by users—has been a long-standing issue in tech policy. Two years ago, the Supreme Court dismissed a case alleging Twitter aided and abetted terrorism by allowing ISIS to recruit on its platform. This week, the Court weighed in again, hearing argument in…

December 4, 2025

A Huge Retraction, the Usual Playbook, and Reason for Optimism

Some huge news dropped today that will reverberate through climate science and policy. Nature has finally retracted “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz et al. (KLW24), more than 18 months after first learning that the paper was fatally flawed, with the authors acknowledging that its errors are “too substantial” for a correction. It is not just the retraction…

December 4, 2025

Wrestling with Hulk Hogan’s Litigation Legacy for Online Journalism

It’s the season when celebrities-who-died-this-year lists proliferate. Terry Gene Bollea—the wrestler Hulk Hogan—will make most 2025 rolls, but his legacy may be his influence over online journalism. Bollea, who died in July, scored a 2016 courtroom triumph over Gawker Media, Nick Denton (Gawker’s founder and owner), and A.J. Daulerio (Gawker’s editor in chief). The invasion-of-privacy…

December 2, 2025

Tracing Engineered Biothreats with AI Forensics: Five Steps to Improve Attribution

The 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the United States, the 2007 United Kingdom foot-and-mouth outbreak, and the COVID-19 pandemic have something in common: Investigators have struggled to determine their origins despite extensive efforts. This highlights a critical gap in biosecurity capabilities—the limitations of modern forensics in reliably tracing biological threats back to their sources. When a novel pathogen emerges, investigators…

December 2, 2025

Comment to the Environmental Protection Agency: Visibility Protection: Regional Haze State Plan Requirements Rule Revision

Summary: The federal Regional Haze Program should be repealed or at a minimum scaled back dramatically so as to return haze policies to the states as reflected in their respective implementation plans. The clear intent of Congress in the Clean Air Act as amended was to create a system of cooperative federalism for environmental protection,…

December 1, 2025

THB Insider #28 – Thanksgiving Reading

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the US — My favorite holiday. Chez les Pielke we are getting ready to put the turkey in as the sun rises. We will have a big table of family and are looking forward to a fun day with family, football, food, and joy! Last year, on this day…

December 1, 2025

US Hurricanes 2025 in Review

For the first time in a decade, the continental United States experienced no hurricane landfalls.1 Islands in the Caribbean saw multiple landfalls [1], notably Hurricane Melissa’s landfall as a Category 5 storm in western Jamaica, which resulted in more than 100 deaths in the region and about $10 billion in losses. The usual media script was played —…

November 25, 2025

What’s at Stake with the App Store Freedom Act

Americans benefit every day from the world’s most dynamic, secure, and innovative mobile platforms—Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. These ecosystems launched mobile e-commerce and continue to fuel its unprecedented growth, empowering countless entrepreneurs and enabling powerful parental controls to protect children online. But some lawmakers now want to put others in charge—namely, Washington bureaucrats and…

November 24, 2025

The Battle for Climate Science and Policy Past—And Why It Matters

Last week in Belém, Brazil the 30th Conference of Parties to the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded with little accomplished, according to most observers. Perhaps the most significant accomplishment was formalizing a fully Orwellian characterization of the recent history of climate policy — See my post last week for why the UNFCCC characterization of moderating…

November 24, 2025

The Hidden Economy Behind Every Scam Email

Remember the last time you got a text that felt off? Maybe it claimed that your package was delayed or mentioned an unpaid toll, with a link to a website that looks seemingly legitimate. But what if that phishing attempt wasn’t the work of a lone scammer? Cybercrime today is a multitrillion-dollar global industry with…