Technology

The Supreme Court’s TikTok ruling is an ominous turn for online speech

Published

1 year ago

January 24, 2025

The Supreme Court’s TikTok ruling is an ominous turn for online speech

When the Supreme Court upheld a law that banned TikTok from the US, it seemed well aware that its ruling could resonate far beyond one app. The justices delivered an unsigned opinion with a quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1944: “in considering the application of established legal rules to the ‘totally new problems’ raised by the airplane and radio, we should take care not to ‘embarrass the future.’”

Last Friday, the court tried to accomplish this with a narrow ruling: a decision that upheld the government’s ability to ban one service on a tight timeline, while stressing a limited scope concerning “new technologies with transformative capabilities.” Yet, amid a confounding political circus over TikTok, some legal experts believe the Supreme Court’s ruling could have a broad ripple effect on speech and tech law — they’re just not agreed on what it would be.

“Even though it’s narrowly written, it also seems clear that they want to make a mark on these kinds of questions,” says Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University’s public policy school. University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier put it more bluntly on Bluesky: “The Court tried but failed to make no new law here.”

Lakier’s main concern, echoed by several amicus briefs in the case, is that the Supreme Court is enabling a form of backdoor speech regulation. In oral arguments, the US government insisted that the ban wasn’t a First Amendment issue because it only targeted corporate structure — in this case, TikTok’s foreign ownership. But TikTok argued that lawmakers disliked TikTok and its users’ speech and merely found a pretext for punishing it. At the very least, Lakier and others worry the Supreme Court ruling could let something like that happen to other communications platforms.

“The Court tried but failed to make no new law here.”

“The very worst part of the opinion (I think right now) is that it gives [governments] space to whitewash bad content-based motivations by tacking on plausible-sounding content-neutral ones,” Lakier wrote. The court determined that selling a business isn’t an expressive act, but she argues this conflicts with one of its most widely known rulings: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which found that an act that doesn’t explicitly involve speech (donating to political campaigns) could still count as a form of speech.

Then there’s the ruling’s decision that national security could justify potential speech suppression. The court “has weakened the First Amendment and markedly expanded the government’s power to restrict speech in the name of national security,” said Jameel Jaffer, Knight First Amendment Institute executive director. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project deputy director Patrick Toomey echoed these concerns: “the Supreme Court is giving the executive branch unprecedented power to silence speech it doesn’t like, increasing the danger that sweeping invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”

“American-owned platforms are still covered pretty aggressively under Section 230.”

Kreps thinks the ruling is unlikely to bring a wave of censorship for US-based companies, though. “I think that part of the opinion was indeed narrow, and was very careful that this foreign ownership puts it into a very different category,” she says. “American-owned platforms are still covered pretty aggressively under Section 230.”

But if nothing else, the decision will “make it more difficult for the United States to challenge the increasing number of censorial speech regulations targeting U.S.-based platforms in other countries,” writes Jacob Mchangama, executive director of The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University.

While some fear a future of speech regulations wrapped in national security rhetoric, others make the opposite argument: that it will stop businesses from dodging regulation by hiding behind the First Amendment.

“Corporations may not hide behind flimsy First Amendment arguments in order to avoid regulation carte blanche”

The Open Markets Institute, which advocates for stronger antitrust enforcement, took a positive view of the ruling — despite being unconvinced of the law’s merits. “The Supreme Court reaffirms an important precedent that Congress maintains fundamental legislative authority to regulate corporations,” senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley says in a statement. “In other words, corporations may not hide behind flimsy First Amendment arguments in order to avoid regulation carte blanche.”

University of Colorado Law School professor Blake Reid says the ruling is unlikely to affect some baseline legal questions, like how the court decides whether future tech laws raise First Amendment concerns. He believes TikTok made a weak argument for its own speech interests, particularly because the law’s penalties apply to app stores and hosting services, not TikTok itself. “TikTok had a harder job than it seemed to think it did in establishing how its speech was getting implicated,” says Reid. “When your speech is contingent on the speech of platforms who are not going to show up and fight the government on your behalf, that’s a tough place to be in.”

Other platforms have made similar arguments convincingly, though — Reid pointed, for instance, to the 2024 NetChoice rulings that recognized content moderation as expressive speech.

The TikTok ruling could change how courts across the country address one crucial issue: the level of scrutiny applied to lawsuits that allege First Amendment violations, a decision that dramatically impacts their likelihood of success. The government put forward two separate rationales for its ban: concerns that China was collecting US data and that it could manipulate TikTok’s algorithm for propaganda purposes. The court seemed skeptical of the latter argument, and it decided data collection alone justified upholding the law. “The court was pretty open here to saying, we’re going to look past the justification we might have some more concerns about and look for the one that seems legitimate,” Reid says. Lower courts, he predicts, could decide “maybe we can be a little bit more solicitous” of the claims legislators make about why they’re passing internet regulation.

It’s a balancing act the Supreme Court will have to make again later this year. Last week, the court held arguments in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, which pits First Amendment rights against state legislatures’ concerns about children’s access to pornography. That decision will hinge on what level of scrutiny the court applies — and its ruling could overturn a two-decade-old precedent and age-gate parts of the internet.

Even so, Reid sees the TikTok ruling’s role as “a pretty small change on the margins” in the grand scheme of things. In the end, Reid says, “the biggest thing about this case is just the impact on TikTok itself.”

Technology

Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery

Published

7 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery

Xiaomi has just given a global launch to two of its latest flagship phones, the Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra, along with a Leica-branded Leitzphone edition of the Ultra. There’s no sign, however, of the 17 Pro, which launched in China with an additional display mounted next to the rear cameras.

The 17 and 17 Ultra will apparently be available soon in the UK, Europe, and select other markets. The 17 — pitched as a rival to the likes of the iPhone 17 and Samsung Galaxy S26 — will cost £899 / €999 (about $1,200), while the larger and more capable Ultra starts from £1,299 / €1,499 ($1,750). The limited-edition Leitzphone will be substantially more expensive at £1,699 / €1,999 ($2,300), though it includes 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, along with a few extra accessories.

I like the simple, sleek aesthetic of the phone.

Photo of Xiaomi 17 homescreen on a wooden table outdoors

The 6.3-inch display isn’t tiny, but it does make the phone small by modern standards.

All three of the phone’s rear cameras are 50-megapixel.

The 17 is an extremely capable small-ish flagship, with a 6.3-inch OLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and large 6,330mAh silicon-carbon battery (though sadly smaller than the 7,000mAh version launched in China). I won’t be writing a full review of the 17, but did spend a week using it as my main phone, and found that the battery cruised past the full-day mark, though wasn’t quite enough for two full days of my typical usage. That’s far better battery life than you’d find in similarly sized phones from Apple, Samsung, or Google.

The cameras impress too, with 50-megapixel sensors behind each of the four lenses, selfie included. Pound for pound, you won’t find many better camera systems in any phone this size.

1/10

I’ve been largely impressed by the Xiaomi 17’s cameras.

The Ultra, unsurprisingly, takes things to another level. It’s much larger, with a 6.9-inch display, and weighs a hefty 218g. Despite that, the 6,000mAh is actually smaller, though I found it delivered pretty similar longevity.

Photo of Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra on a table, closeup on the cameras

The 17 Ultra is larger in just about every respect, but strangely has a smaller battery.

The enormous camera is, as ever for Xiaomi’s Ultra phones, the highlight. There are 50-megapixel sensors for each of the main, ultrawide, and selfie cameras, with a large 1-inch-type sensor behind the primary lens. The periscope telephoto is even more impressive: 200-megapixel resolution, a large 1/1.4-inch sensor, and continuous optical zoom from 3.2x to 4.3x, the equivalent of 75-100mm. Xiaomi isn’t the first to pull off a true zoom phone — Sony’s Xperia 1 IV got there first in 2022 — but the telephoto camera here is far more capable than that phone’s, with natural bokeh and impressive performance even in low light.

Photo of Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leitzphone outdoors

This is the Leica-branded Leitzphone version of the 17 Ultra.

The camera capabilities are supported by Xiaomi’s ongoing photography partner Leica, but it’s the pair’s Leitzphone that really emphasizes that. Slightly redesigned from the 17 Ultra Leica Edition that was released in China last December, this includes Leica branding across the hardware and software, a range of Leica filters and shooting styles, and a rotatable rear camera ring that can be used to control the zoom. It’s the first Leica Leitzphone produced by Xiaomi — after a trio of Japan-only Sharp models — and comes with additional branded accessories, including a case with a lens cap and a microfiber cleaning cloth.

Xiaomi has plenty of other announcements alongside the 17 series phones at MWC this year, including a super-slim magnetic power bank, the Pad 8 and Pad 8 Pro tablets, and a smart tag that supports both Google and Apple’s tech-tracking networks.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge

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Dominic Preston

Technology

Google dismantles 9M-device Android hijack network

Published

8 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Google dismantles 9M-device Android hijack network

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Free apps are supposed to cost you nothing but storage space. But in this case, they may have cost millions of people control over their own internet connections.

Google says it has disrupted what it believes was the world’s largest residential proxy network, one that secretly hijacked around 9 million Android devices, along with computers and smart home gadgets. Most people had no idea their devices were being used since the apps worked normally, and nothing looked broken.

But behind the scenes, those devices were quietly routing traffic for strangers, including cybercriminals.

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STOP GOOGLE FROM FOLLOWING YOUR EVERY MOVE

Google says it disrupted a massive residential proxy network that secretly hijacked about 9 million Android and smart devices. (AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

How your device became part of a proxy network

According to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, the network was tied to a company known as IPIDEA. Instead of spreading through obvious malware, it relied on hidden software development kits, or SDKs, that were embedded inside more than 600 apps. These apps ranged from simple utilities to VPN tools and other free downloads. When you installed one, the app performed its advertised function. But it also enrolled your device into a residential proxy network.

That means your phone, computer or smart device could be used as a relay point for someone else’s internet traffic. That traffic might include scraping websites, launching automated login attempts or masking the identity of someone conducting shady online activity. From the outside, it looked like that activity came from your home IP address. You wouldn’t see it happening, and in many cases, you wouldn’t notice any major performance issues.

Google says in a single seven-day period earlier this year, more than 550 separate threat groups were observed using IP addresses linked to this infrastructure. That includes cybercrime operations and state-linked actors. Residential proxy networks are attractive because they make malicious traffic look like normal consumer activity. Instead of coming from a suspicious data center, it appears to come from someone’s living room.

What Google did to shut it down

Google says it took legal action in a U.S. federal court to seize domains used to control the infected devices and route proxy traffic. It also worked with companies like Cloudflare and other security firms to disrupt the network’s command-and-control systems. Google claims it also updated Play Protect, the built-in Android security system, so that certified devices would automatically detect and remove apps known to include the malicious SDKs.

However, Google also warned that many of these apps were distributed outside the official Play Store. That matters because Play Protect can only scan and block threats tied to apps installed through Google Play. Third-party app stores, unofficial downloads and uncertified Android devices carry far greater risk.

IPIDEA has claimed its service was meant for legitimate business use, such as web research and data collection. But Google’s research suggests the network was heavily abused by criminals. Even if some users knowingly installed bandwidth-sharing apps in exchange for rewards, many did not receive clear disclosure about how their devices were being used.

Google’s investigation also found significant overlap between different proxy brands and SDK names. What looked like separate services were often tied to the same infrastructure. That makes it harder for consumers to know which apps are safe and which are quietly monetizing their connection.

300,000 CHROME USERS HIT BY FAKE AI EXTENSIONS

Hidden software inside more than 600 apps allegedly turned phones and computers into internet relays for cybercriminals. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

7 ways you can protect yourself from Android proxy attacks

If millions of devices can be quietly turned into internet relay points, the big question is, how do you make sure yours isn’t one of them? These steps reduce the risk that your phone, TV box or smart device gets pulled into a proxy network without you realizing it.

1) Stick to official app stores

Only download apps from the Google Play Store or other trusted app marketplaces. Some apps hide small pieces of code that can secretly use your internet connection. These are often spread through third-party app stores or direct app files called “APKs,” which are Android app files installed manually instead of through the Play Store. When you sideload apps this way, you bypass Google’s built-in security checks. Sticking to official stores helps keep those hidden threats off your device.

2) Avoid “earn money by sharing bandwidth” apps

If an app promises rewards for sharing your unused internet bandwidth, that’s a major red flag. In many cases, that is exactly how residential proxy networks recruit devices. Even if it sounds legitimate, you are effectively renting out your IP address. That can expose you to abuse, blacklisting or deeper network vulnerabilities.

3) Review app permissions carefully

Before installing any app, check what permissions it requests. A simple wallpaper app should not need full network control or background execution privileges. After installation, go into your phone’s settings and audit which apps have constant internet access, background activity rights or special device permissions.

4) Install strong antivirus software

Today’s mobile security tools can detect suspicious app behavior, unusual internet activity and hidden background services. Strong antivirus software adds an extra layer of protection beyond what’s built into your device, especially if you’ve installed apps in the past that you’re unsure about. Get my picks for the best 2026 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices at Cyberguy.com.

5) Keep your devices updated

Android security updates patch vulnerabilities that proxy operators may exploit. If you’re using an older phone, tablet or Android TV box that no longer receives updates, it may be time to upgrade. Unpatched devices are easier targets for hidden SDK abuse and botnet enrollment.

6) Use a strong password manager

If your device ever becomes part of a proxy network or is otherwise compromised, attackers often try to pivot into your accounts next. That’s why you should never reuse passwords. A password manager generates long, unique passwords for every account and stores them securely, so one breach does not unlock your email, banking or social media. Many password managers also include breach monitoring tools that alert you if your credentials appear in leaked databases, giving you a chance to act before real damage is done. Check out the best expert-reviewed password managers of 2026 at Cyberguy.com.

7) Remove apps you don’t fully trust

Go through your installed apps and delete or uninstall anything you don’t recognize or haven’t used in months. The fewer apps running on your device, the fewer opportunities there are for hidden SDKs to operate. If you suspect your device has been compromised, consider a full reset and reinstall only essential apps from trusted sources.

ANDROID MALWARE HIDDEN IN FAKE ANTIVIRUS APP

Threat groups and state-linked actors allegedly used compromised devices to mask online activity and automate attacks. (Photo Illustration by Serene Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Kurt’s key takeaway

Residential proxy networks operate in a gray area that sounds harmless on paper but can quickly become a shield for cybercrime. In this case, millions of everyday devices were quietly enrolled into a system that attackers used to hide their tracks. Google’s takedown is a major move, but the broader market for residential proxies is still growing. That means you need to be cautious about what you install and what permissions you grant. Free apps are rarely truly free. Sometimes, the product being sold is you and your internet connection.

Have you ever installed an app that promised rewards for sharing bandwidth, or used a free VPN without thinking twice about it? Let us know your thoughts by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Technology

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk

Published

19 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.

Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission – a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.

Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.

As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.

Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.