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Earlier this week, a doctor friend told me about a frustrating new obstacle hes facing at work. In normal times, hes relied on websites operated by the U.S. federal government for practical information on everything from vaccine side effects to advice for families traveling to exotic areas. But the Trump administrations move to strip sites of material relating to gender ideology and other topics the new president and his allies find objectionable has resulted in many pages disappearing from the web. My friend has been making do by consulting versions of the pages stored at the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. But thats hardly a long-term solution. For one thing, those cached copies may be out of date. For another, its not a given that the Internet Archive will always be available when we need it. A New York Times article by Ethan Singer details the scale of the purge. More than 8,000 pages have been wiped away on subjects ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services Head Start program to avoidance of IRS penalties to telltale signs of dementia. Just the deletions relating to census dataone of the federal governments most vital resourceshave affected 3,000 pages. As pages have continued to vanish, others have returned, and the only explanation has come in the form of vague sitewide banners such as CDCs website is being modified to comply with President Trumps Executive Orders. As with other elements of the administrations rush to reshape how the federal government worksor doesnt workthe chaos may be the point. All of this is alarming even before you consider what a government online presence rewritten to Donald Trumps specifications might look like. Reportedly, it involves excising not just references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also a bevy of other terms, including apparently controversial concepts such as belonging, empathy, and fairness. For more than a quarter century, the web has been a primary interface between citizens and their government. It may be more critical than its physical counterpartor at least I cant remember the last time I had to visit a federal office in person. By taking its language policing more seriously than the duty to provide information to the public, the new administration is failing at one of its most basic responsibilities. That raises a new specter that hadnt been on my list of things to worry about: tactical removal of pages from government sites as a tool for impeding knowledge. For example, I hate to think about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination website full of information created under the imprimatur of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But simply eliminating the current sites information and replacing it with . . . nothingness might do nearly as much damage as spreading RFK Jr.s cherished misinformation on the subject. It could be done with a few clicksa much simpler task than shutting down entire government departments, which is also part of Trumps plan for the nation. Im not saying that an even more sprawling, permanent site-scrubbing is definitely going to happen. As with many things about current events, Trumps own comments on the edits (“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”) dont make clear hes paying attention, and leave him infinite wriggle room if he is. All we can do is keep paying attention, maybe with a newfound appreciation for a government benefit that has been quietly essential and easy to take for granteduntil now. Yes, you can have too much storage Recently, I bought a 16 TB hard drive. It cost about $270, whichunadjusted for inflationis a little over half what I paid for a drive I remember buying in the 1990s. That one had 500 MB of space, or 1/32,000th the capacity of the drive I just got. 1990s me, who was thrilled to add an entire half-gigabyte (!!!) of space to my PC would have been ecstatic to know that storage would continue to get ever vaster and cheaper. Oddly enough, though, my new 16 TB drive, which I added to a server that sits on my home network, has not brought me unalloyed pleasure. Instead, maxing out the space I already had made me question whether I should concentrate on deleting files rather than making room for more. Not that digital hoarding isnt tempting. Unlike its physical counterpart, its unlikely to result in the new stuff overwhelming the old: I do a fairly respectable job of organizing it all into folders, part of a broader storage strategy that also involves several cloud services. Im grateful to have enough room for a precious archive of family photos and letters, as well as ancient Word documents I still reference (for articles such as this one) and email that dates to 1994. I even ditched almost all the printed copies of magazines Ive written forhundreds of issuesand replaced them with PDFs. Still, like Scrooge McDuck filling his money bin with 3 cubic acres of cash and then burrowing through it like a gopher, I may have gone overboard. I use a wonderful piece of software called Channels to record streaming TV and over-the-air stations directly to my home network. These videos are mine, all minea comfort in an era when Netflix has only five movies made before 1980and tough to part with. Yet they represent the single most voracious disk-space gobbler in my life. And even if I had infinite time on my hands, I wouldnt use it to binge all the TV and movies Ive preserved. Another thing that haunts me: An unknown but significant percentage of my disk space is devoted to files that are duplicates, triplicates, or beyond. How I ended up with so many redundant ones, Im not sure. But they multiply like Tribbles, and eliminating all the redundant ones might feel like getting a new hard disk for free. After mulling all this over, doing some housecleaning, and finding I was still low on available space, I took the easy route by purchasing that new drive. Itll surely get me well into 2027, and maybe way beyond. By the time its full, even more mammoth disks should be available for even less money. It would be nice, however, to think Ill be more disciplined by thena little less Uncle Scrooge, a little more Marie Kondo. If you have any tips on digital self-restraint, Im dying to hear them. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre readin it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company OpenAI reveals new AI tool that can do online research for youDeep Research can gather information from across the web and summarize it in easy-to-read reports. Read More Will a return to OG Facebook appeal to Gen Z?Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems to think so. Read More Google teams up with Samsung to take on Dolby AtmosThe two companies are betting on the power of branding to turn their new immersive audio format into a success story. Read More 3 quick ways to free up iPhone storage spaceSave space, save time, save yourself from the Storage Almost Full pop-up. Read More I tried a mindfulness browser to make work less stressful. Maybe you should, tooOpen Air from the Norwegian company Opera is billed as the first-ever mindful browser. Its intended to combat the chaotic nature of the web. Read More This scrappy search upstart is getting thousands of people to give up GoogleAs Google results grow cluttered and AI runs rampant on the web, Kagi is winning over disillusioned searchers with an engine that puts them first. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
On Saturday, a little less than two weeks into his second term in the White House, President Donald Trump fired Rohit Chopra, whod served as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) since October 2021. During his tenure, the Bureau oversaw the return of some $6 billion from financial services providersbanks, credit card companies, mortgage brokers, payday lenders, and so onwho defrauded, gouged, swindled, harassed, stole from, lied to, discriminated against, or otherwise harmed consumers in violation of federal law. In a letter announcing his departure, Chopra expressed hope that the Bureau would continue to be a pillar of restoring and advancing economic liberty in America, and wished Trump good luck in serving our great country. The most surprising aspect of Chopras termination was that Trump waited so long to do it. Congress created the Bureau after the Great Recession to consolidate enforcement authority for consumer protection laws in a single, independent agency. And although Chopra had about a year and a half remaining in his five-year term, Republicans had anticipated that Trump would quickly move to replace him with a director more sympathetic to banking executives eyeing megayacht purchases. In November, shortly after Elon Musk announced the Department of Government Efficiency that is now setting fire to the civil service, he called for Trump to delete the Bureau posthaste. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies, he said. A firm belief in the villainy of the Bureau has become common of late not only among Wall Street behemoths who want to squeeze poor people for money they do not have, but also among Silicon Valley oligarchs eager to see their fintech and crypto startups compete with the traditional banking industry. Last fall, the CFPB probed allegations that Meta had improperly used personal financial data in its targeted advertising business; in response, during a recent interview on Joe Rogans podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested the emergence among regulators of a quiet consensus that tech companies like his needed to be brought to heel. In November, and also on Joe Rogans podcast, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen accused the CFPB of terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. In a possibly related story, as Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect notes, in 2021, the CFPB ordered the closure of LendUp, a fintech startup, after determining that the company lied to customers about how they could qualify for better loan terms. Among LendUps backers: Google Ventures, PayPal Holdings, and Marcs firm, Andreessen Horwitz. Sure enough, on Monday, Trump named hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, whom the Senate confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury last week, as the CFPBs acting director, pending Trumps decision on Chopras permanent replacement. According to NPR, among Bessents first acts in his side gig was directing CFPB employees to stop doing anythingimplementing new rules, taking enforcement actions, even communicating with the publicin order to promote consistency with the goals of the Administration. There is no subtext here: Republicans do not want to install a new person to lead the CFPB so much as they want to kill it. Trumps return to the White Houseand the elevation of Musk, an unelected billionaire with a rudimentary-at-best understanding of how government works, to the position of shadow presidentis their best chance in years to do it. Since it opened in 2011, the Bureau has probably done more to rein in abuses of corporate power than any agency in recent memory, returning an estimated $20 billion to millions of consumers victimized by junk fees, predatory loans, and the like. (It was still busy a week before Trumps inauguration, suing Capital One for allegedly bilking customers out of more than $2 billion in interest payments.) In an effort to shield the Bureau from regulatory capture, the Congress that created the CFPB limited the presidents ability to fire its director, allowing for removal only in cases of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. A consumer protection watchdog vulnerable to kneecapping by a president with no interest in protecting consumers, lawmakers reasoned, would not do much to prevent the industry from inciting another global financial crisis at its earliest convenience. These statutory handcuffs have long infuriated Republican politicians, who argue that forcing usurious student lenders to comply with modest restrictions on their ability to saddle borrowers with late fees is an unconscionable constraint on their beloved free market. In a 2014 interview with an industry publication, then-Congressman Mick Mulvaney described the Bureau as a joke in a sick, sad kind of way, a sentiment shared by many of his Republican colleagues at the time.I dont like the fact that the CFPB exists, he said in 2015; that same year, he co-sponsored legislation to abolish the Bureau altogether. Although bills like Mulvaneys never passed, the Bureaus opponents started chalking up real victories during the first Trump administration. For starters, Trump appointed Mulvaney as the Bureaus interim director in November 2017, a choice that is roughly analogous to me asking my dog to keep an eye on a 72-ounce porterhouse while I run to the store to pick up a nice bottle of red. Like Bessent, at the time of his promotion, Mulvaney already had a Senate-confirmed day job as director of Trumps Office of Management and Budget; according to The New York Times, by June 2018, he was only going into the Bureaus offices twice a week. Also like Bessent, Mulvaney set about the task of bringing the Bureaus work to a grinding halt, asking courts to block the implementation of new rules and pausing or dropping some investigations, including a lawsuit against a lender that allegedly charged interest rates of up to 950%. Also among the probes the Bureau ended: one of a South Carolina-based payday lender whose political action committee a href="https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpb-drops-probe-into-lender-that-gave-to-mulvaneys-campaigns">donated at least $4,500 to Mulvaney when he was still in Congress. Then, in 2020, the Supreme Courts five-justice Republican majority decided that those pesky firing protections created by Congress were unconstitutional. Although the justices rejected the more ambitious argument that the law compelled them to abolish the entire Bureau and strike down a decades worth of rules by judicial fiat, they made clear that going forward, presidents like Trump would be able to fire directors like Choprit whenever they felt like it. Musks takeover of vast swaths of the federal government, however, is the most serious threat yet to the Bureau, and to anyone who aspires to live in a country in which financial institutions have to comply with laws that require them to treat customers fairly. When he called for its elimination, Musk characterized the Bureau as duplicative of other regulatory agenciesessentially framing its work as wasteful and unnecessary, and the notion of closing its doors as a straightforward matter of prudent administration and good governance. But like every other institution that Musk is using DOGE to target, Musks conception of inefficient government spending is any government spending that does not align with his political ideology, or go into his pockets, or both. Musk has long aspired to make X, the social media platform he bought and ruined, into an everything app on which users can pay for purchases, transfer money to friends, and even earn interest on their account balance. Earlier this month, X rolled out a partnership with Visa that would allow it to dispense with onerous state-by-state bank licensing requirements and turn X Money into a Venmo-like digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service. Linda Yaccarino, Xs chief executive, promised that with Visa in the fold, X Money would debut its services before the end of the year. Under ordinary circumstances, a microblogging website owned by a White House employee announcing imminent plans to enter the financial services business could expect to undergo rigorous scrutiny from the Bureau. As CNET notes, details about how secure your banking data is on X Money are still unclear, which is the sort of thing about which users will want to know more before opening virtual checking accounts on a platform ridden with porn bots, crypto scams, and crypto scams run by likely porn bots. Just a few months ago, the CFPB under Chopras leadership ordered Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and other X competitors to turn over information about how they operate their digital payment systems, citing its ongoing obligation to monitor for risks to consumers. Presumably, none of these companies will have to comply with these orders on Bessents watch, and X will not be receiving one anytime soon. In Musks ideal world, he would be able to turn X into an app that can access your life savings without having to contend with the CFPB at all. But a CFPB run by a Trump lackey under strict orders not to do any meaningful work is a pretty appealing alternative. Complaining about the CFPBs purported inefficiency is a lazy repackaging of the Republican Partys standard objections to any agency that is good at its job: Safeguarding the financial interests of everyday people is indeed an inefficient method of making the Republican Partys corporate donors wealthier. But years of sustained political attacks from the right have already weakened the CFPB. The movement fueling the Trump-Musk presidency might be able to quietly finish it off.
Category:
E-Commerce
Cybersecurity startup EchoMark is releasing a new application programming interface (API) to allow for its novel digital watermarking tool to integrate with virtually any existing communications software. Founded in 2022 to develop a digital watermarking system to safeguard organizations sensitive and proprietary information, EchoMark originally focused on injecting personalized identifiers into emails and link-based networked document sharing tools. Now, armed with $10 million in seed funding, the company is on a mission to watermark the world, as founder and CEO Troy Batterberry puts it. Our vision is that any piece of private information can be forensically watermarked and tied to a recipients identity, Batterberry tells Fast Company, adding that the companys customers asked for a way to integrate the software directly into their own bespoke communications channels. We built this API so we can add this into any commercial application or custom workflow. Batterberry has been thinking about leaks for a long time. As a young missile systems engineer conducting research and development on new weapons for the U.S. Navy, Batterberry found himself personally entrusted with deeply classified stuff, responsible for constantly adding his signature to paper copies of sensitive documents to signal his role as their authorized guardian. Signing your name on the top of a document indicates youre the custodian of that information, he says. Psychologically, it changes how you think about protecting that information. If you leave it out, you could lose your security clearanceor, even worse, your entire profession. Following his career in the Navy, Batterberry went into the private sector as an engineer, first at Sony and then Microsoft, where he spent the next 25 years and eventually became a corporate VP in charge of Teams and Webinars. It was at Microsoft that Batterberry developed a digital rights management system to protect streaming media via audio and visual watermarks. Such safeguards ensured that, should content make its way to illegal streaming portals like BitTorrent, the source of the leak would be easily identifiable. Those experiences eventually coalesced in Batterberrys brain into a pressing organizational question that formed the basis for EchoMark: What if you could take personalized watermarking and apply it to anything, from emails and images to healthcare records and legal documents? EchoMarks watermarking solution is elegant in its simplicity. When a sensitive document is distributed to its intended recipient, the companys software generates personalized copies with thousands of slight formatting differences imperceptible to the human eye. Once that document makes its way out into the wild, whether as a photocopy, screenshot, or even as a photograph taken from a personal cell phone, users can employ EchoMarks proprietary computer vision and AI to scan the target artifact and match it against the original copies. Rather than physically sign copies, as Batterberry did in the Navy, EchoMark applies personalized signatures at scale with lightning efficiency so that leaks are easily traceable back to the source. Batterberry demonstrated the software for Fast Company in real time with a copy of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade that leaked to Politico in May 2022 (the source of the leak was never identified). Batterberry sent an email containing a PDF of the Dobbs decision processed through EchoMark to seven phony email addresses standing in for those of the sitting Supreme Court justices; he then opened the document from the fake account of Chief Justice John Roberts and took a photo of it on his computer screen with his personal phone. After uploading the photo to EchoMark, the software dashboard quickly analyzed the image and spit out a definitive conclusion: The document pictured in his photo was in fact identical to the one the Roberts account had received.Whoever leaked the [Dobbs] decision knew that as long as they used a personal device, they would never get caught because multiple people had access to the report, Batterberry says. With EchoMark turned on, we could have IDd the source of that leak in minutes. The Supreme Court is just one example of EchoMarks potential governmental applications. Batterberry cites as other disclosures where EchoMarks software may have proven useful the rogue IRS contractor who in 2020 leaked President Donald Trumps tax records to news organizations, as well as Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who leaked hundreds of classified Defense Department files onto Discord in 2023. EchoMark currently boasts more than a hundred high respected clients across the government, financial services, health care, and entertainment sectors, according to Batterberry, with the company projecting 10-time growth in the coming year among. The federal government is extremely interested, Batterberry says. The FBI, for example, has grave concerns about leaks when investigating drug cartels who are willing to spend serious money to get access to information and adapt accordingly. EchoMarks forensic watermarking isnt just about identifying leakers as part of a breach investigation, but prevention as well, so far that the presence of digital identifiers will purportedly dissuade potential leakers from releasing sensitive information into the wild if they know theyll be almost instantly identified. And by empowering organizations with a low-cost, easy-to-implement method for investigating and mitigating leaks, EchoMark serves a larger purpose: helping organizations share information openly and with confidence rather than close themselves off internally to stamp out leakers. Indeed, Batterberry cites the September 11, 2001, terror attacks as an example of what happens when sensitive information isnt allowed to flow freely between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. A key reason for the breakdown in communication leading up to the 9/11 attacks was that government agencies failed to share information they needed to share with each other, Batterbery says. Communication is the lifeblood of any organization.
Category:
E-Commerce
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