The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed’s messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democrats.

On Aug. 13, The New York Post ran an “exclusive” story titled, “Google caught flagging GOP fundraiser emails as ‘suspicious’ — sending them directly to spam.” The story cited a memo from Targeted Victory – whose clients include the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn – which said it observed that the “serious and troubling” trend was still going on as recently as June and July of this year.

“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the memo reportedly said.

In an August 28 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson cited the New York Post story and warned that Gmail’s parent Alphabet may be engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.

“Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act,” Ferguson wrote. “And the partisan treatment may cause harm to consumers.”

However, the situation looks very different when you ask spam experts what’s going on with WinRed’s recent messaging campaigns. Atro Tossavainen and Pekka Jalonen are co-founders at Koli-Lõks OÜ, an email intelligence company in Estonia. Koli-Lõks taps into real-time intelligence about daily spam volumes by monitoring large numbers of “spamtraps” — email addresses that are intentionally set up to catch unsolicited emails.

Spamtraps are generally not used for communication or account creation, but instead are created to identify senders exhibiting spammy behavior, such as scraping the Internet for email addresses or buying unmanaged distribution lists. As an email sender, blasting these spamtraps over and over with unsolicited email is the fastest way to ruin your domain’s reputation online. Such activity also virtually ensures that more of your messages are going to start getting listed on spam blocklists that are broadly shared within the global anti-abuse community.

Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks published a graph of the stark disparity in spamtrap activity for WinRed versus ActBlue, showing a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed emails in the final week of July 2025.

“Many of our spamtraps are in repurposed legacy-TLD domains (.com, .org, .net) and therefore could be understood to have been involved with a U.S. entity in their pre-zombie life,” Tossavainen explained in the LinkedIn post.

Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. Dijkxhoorn said their spamtrap data mirrors that of Koli-Lõks, and shows that WinRed has consistently been far more aggressive in sending email than ActBlue.

Dijkxhoorn said the fact that WinRed’s emails so often end up dinging the organization’s sender reputation is not a content issue but rather a technical one.

“On our end we don’t really care if the content is political or trying to sell viagra or penis enlargements,” Dijkxhoorn said. “It’s the mechanics, they should not end up in spamtraps. And that’s the reason the domain reputation is tempered. Not ‘because domain reputation firms have a political agenda.’ We really don’t care about the political situation anywhere. The same as we don’t mind people buying penis enlargements. But when either of those land in spamtraps it will impact sending experience.”

The FTC letter to Google’s CEO also referenced a debunked 2022 study (PDF) by political consultants who found Google caught more Republican emails in spam filters. Techdirt editor Mike Masnick notes that while the 2022 study also found that other email providers caught more Democratic emails as spam, “Republicans laser-focused on Gmail because it fit their victimization narrative better.”

Masnick said GOP lawmakers then filed both lawsuits and complaints with the Federal Election Commission (both of which failed easily), claiming this was somehow an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats.

“This is political posturing designed to keep the White House happy by appearing to ‘do something’ about conservative claims of ‘censorship,'” Masnick wrote of the FTC letter. “The FTC has never policed ‘political bias’ in private companies’ editorial decisions, and for good reason—the First Amendment prohibits exactly this kind of government interference.”

WinRed did not respond to a request for comment.

The WinRed website says it is an online fundraising platform supported by a united front of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC), the NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

WinRed has recently come under fire for aggressive fundraising via text message as well. In June, 404 Media reported on a lawsuit filed by a family in Utah against the RNC for allegedly bombarding their mobile phones with text messages seeking donations after they’d tried to unsubscribe from the missives dozens of times.

One of the family members said they received 27 such messages from 25 numbers, even after sending 20 stop requests. The plaintiffs in that case allege the texts from WinRed and the RNC “knowingly disregard stop requests and purposefully use different phone numbers to make it impossible to block new messages.”

Dijkxhoorn said WinRed did inquire recently about why some of its assets had been marked as a risk by SURBL, but he said they appeared to have zero interest in investigating the likely causes he offered in reply.

“They only replied with, ‘You are interfering with U.S. elections,'” Dijkxhoorn said, noting that many of SURBL’s spamtrap domains are only publicly listed in the registration records for random domain names.

“They’re at best harvested by themselves but more likely [they] just went and bought lists,” he said. “It’s not like ‘Oh Google is filtering this and not the other,’ the reason isn’t the provider. The reason is the fundraising spammers and the lists they send to.”

from the 4-alarm-fire dept

Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP members such as Bill Cassidy have begun signaling wavering support for Kennedy.

But this wasn’t just contentious; it was a disaster. USA Today has one of many live update pages where you can go back and relive the timeline, but the topline summary is that Kennedy shouted over the Senators questions, often asked them questions instead of answering the questions he was asked, dissembled all over the place when asked direct and honest questions, and otherwise spouted conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence to back them up. And while it’s certainly true that questions from Democracts were done in a more hostile tone than those from the GOP, the open disdain, or at least concern, about Kennedy’s actions as of recent was entirely bipartisan.

I’ll give you some highlights, for lack of a better term, along with a summary of the key thing we learned in each highlight.

Mark Warner (D):

1. Kennedy claims neither he, nor anyone else, has any idea how many Americans died from COVID-19
2. Kennedy is unwilling to state that COVID vaccines did “anything” to prevent deaths from COVID-19
3. Kennedy was unaware of some specific implications of the latest budget bill on American healthcare

John Barrasso (R):

1. Barrasso points out all the chaos and failure that has happened under Kennedy, including the largest measles outbreak in decades.
2. Kennedy claims that CDC vaccine guidance has never before, in the history of the agency, been “clear, evidence based, and trustworthy.” He claims his leadership is the first time this will ever have happened.

This, by the way, is precisely how you get situations like unhinged people shooting up the CDC’s Atlanta campus. The CDC was born in 1946, initially to combat malaria. But, according to Kennedy, it has never in its entire history been trustworthy on the topic of vaccines. It’s a lie, of course, but those that believe it would logically be very, very pissed off.

Thom Tillis (R):

1. Tillis starts off by saying he’s going to make a statement and essentially begs Kennedy to not respond in the moment, but to go and gather his answers after the hearing and present them. Kennedy repeatedly attempts to answer those questions anyway.
2. Tillis points out that based on the myriad of conflicting statements Kennedy made within the hearing, he has no idea whether Kennedy thinks Operation Warp Speed was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Kennedy agrees with Tillis and others that Trump should be a Nobel prize for the government’s efforts in creating the mRNA vaccines. On the other, Kennedy claims the vaccines were deadly and can’t account for them being effective at all.
3. Tillis asks how a CDC Director can be lauded a month ago and fired four weeks later.
4. Tillis asks for evidence that Kennedy has kept any of the promises he’s made to Congress in the past.
5. Tillis points out that all he can get out of Kennedy’s HHS to a question about the economic impact of the budget bill that was passed amount to “word salad.”
6. Kennedy affirms his position that the COVID vaccines cause “serious harm” and “death”.

Folks, that’s as polite a way for a GOP Senator to state publicly that they don’t trust Kennedy as is possible.

Bernie Sanders (I):

This one takes a brief bit of preamble. When Senator Warren was questioning Kennedy about his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of CDC, she asked Kennedy about Monarez’s public claim in a WSJ editorial that he demanded she sign off on what ACIP would recommend prior to them even meeting and insisted she fire a slew of senior staffers at CDC for who knows what reason. Kennedy told Warren that was not true and, when she asked what was the reason he fired her, got this in response.

That is obviously not a believable story. I mean, to make light of it, why would an untrustworthy person tell their boss they were not trustworthy instead of lying?

In any case, with that context, we move on to the takeaways from the back and forth with Bernie Sanders.

1. Kennedy reiterates his claim that Monarez lied about why she was fired and that, again, he did so because she told him she was not trustworthy.
2. Kennedy calls a net -$100 million investment in rural healthcare “the largest infusion of public money” into rural healthcare.
3. Kennedy affirms the COVID vaccines are the deadliest vaccines in history and that Trump should get a Nobel prize for helping develop them.
4. Kennedy launches into a conspiracy theory in which the largest NGOs and others that disagree with him have all been corrupted by the pharma industry.

Bill Cassidy (R):

Cassidy is the one many of us were waiting to see in this hearing, for multiple reasons. He’s a doctor, for instance. He was a pivotal vote in Kennedy’s confirmation hearings and extracted several promises about vaccines and policy during those hearings. And, finally, several other Republican Senators have pointed to him as the one they trust on healthcare and medicine issues.

1. Kennedy again affirms that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, despite saying those vaccines killed people. Cassidy then points out that Kennedy sued to limit access to COVID vaccines before his time in government.
2. Cassidy points out that the ACIP conflicts of interests data that Kennedy has claimed was wildly inaccurate. Kennedy attempts to argue the point, but fails.
3. Cassidy points out that several current ACIP members, which Kennedy hand-picked, serve as paid witnesses in vaccine injury trials and asks Kennedy if that is a conflict of interests. Kennedy responds it may be a bias, but not a financial conflict of interest, which makes zero sense.
4. Stick around for the end in which Cassidy shares some personal interactions he’s had with constituents demonstrating precisely how Kennedy’s policy actions have introduced a limitation of vaccine access and chaos and confusion among doctors as to what they can prescribe or not, which is exactly what we indicated would happen.

There was much, much more. More dissembling. More conspiracy theories. More lies. By any honest viewing of the hearing, it was a bipartisan verbal indication of no confidence in Kennedy, with some Senators choosing to be more polite about it than others. This was a more pointed and thorough takedown of Kennedy from both sides of the aisle than even I had hoped for.

So of course the White House is pretending this is all a partisan hitjob because Kennedy is so awesome.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Kennedy after he faced tense questioning by both Democratic and Republican senators.

The Health secretary “is taking flak because he’s over the target,” she said on X several hours after the hearing concluded. “The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.”

Although she blamed Democrats for attacking “that commonsense effort,” Republican senators such as Cassidy and Barrasso had also expressed disapproval during the hearing with some of Kennedy’s most recent actions concerning vaccines.

As I said in a previous post, this is by no means the end of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. But it just might be the beginning of that end. No amount of White House gaslighting is going to be able to counter rising illnesses, full hospitals, or explosive growth in the casket manufacturing business.

Filed Under: autism, bernie sanders, bill cassidy, cdc, covid, elizabeth warren, health and human services, john barrasso, mark warner, rfk jr., thom tillis, vaccines

from the who-needs-to-see-the-big-dipper-anyway dept

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.

And it appears to be getting worse as Musk (and other companies, like Amazon) launch more LEO satellites. A new study (hat tip, Gizmodo) found that all of the launched satellites exceed brightness limits established by the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), harming scientists’ ability to conduct scientific research:

“Although there are no official regulations in place, the CPS established recommendations for maximum acceptable brightness for satellites orbiting below 341 miles (550 kilometers). The IAU established a maximum brightness of +7 magnitude for professional astronomy and below +6 magnitude as the aesthetic reference so it does not impact the public’s ability to stargaze without interference from satellites.”

Again, it’s worth reiterating that Musk initially stated this would never be a problem. While the study found that the brightness levels of Starlink satellites have improved some, the lower orbiting altitude of some of the newer Starlink satellites means the brightness impact is actually worse.

Despite Musk’s endless whining about “burdensome regulations,” the U.S. doesn’t really regulate this sort of thing. And the damage goes well beyond astronomy.

Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.

Starlink’s about to get a big boost by taxpayers, too. Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect billions in subsidies to Elon Musk and Starlink, despite the service’s high costs, congestion problems, and increasingly problematic environmental impact. And, of course, Starlink is just one of several emerging competitors in the LEO space, all jockeying for a huge boost in taxpayer subsidies.

Filed Under: astronomy, elon musk, leo, low earth orbit satellites, research, science, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink

An Orange County woman faces five felony charges after she was accused of paw-litical fraud by registering her dog to vote and illegally casting ballots for the pooch in two elections, authorities said.

Laura Lee Yourex, 62, of Costa Mesa, allegedly mailed in ballots registered under her dog’s name, Maya Jean Yourex, in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election and the 2022 primary election, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office. The 2021 ballot was accepted, while the 2022 ballot was rejected, prosecutors said.

Yourex allegedly bragged about the feat on social media, sharing a picture of Maya toting an “I Voted” sticker and posing with the illegal ballot in January 2022, prosecutors said. In October, Yourex posted a photo of Maya’s dog tag and a vote-by-mail ballot with the caption, “Maya is still getting her ballot,” even though the dog had passed away.

She has been charged with one count of registering a nonexistent person to vote, one count of perjury, one count of procuring a false or forged document to be filed and two counts of casting a ballot when not entitled to vote, prosecutors said. Yourex is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.

If convicted as charged, Yourex faces up to six years in state prison.

The Orange County Registrar of Voters contacted the district attorney’s office on Oct. 28 after a resident self-reported that she had registered her dog to vote and cast two ballots in her dog’s name, authorities said.

California residents must sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury to register to vote. While proof of residence is required for first-time voters to cast a ballot in a federal election, it is not required to cast a ballot in a state election.

This is why the dog’s ballot for the 2021 state election to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom was accepted, while the 2022 midterm elections ballot was rejected, prosecutors said.

The recall attempt was ultimately voted down by 61.9% of voters. It’s not clear how “Maya” voted.

In June, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page for allegedly refusing to provide the Justice Department with records pertaining to the removal of people lacking documentation from its voter registration list. The Justice Department has sent letters to at least 26 states requesting details about voters, election processes and election officials.

In August, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to refuse to comply with the DOJ’s demands to turn over the voter registration records of 17 individuals who were ineligible to cast a ballot but had appeared on the county’s voter registration rolls.

The O.C. Registrar of Voters faced attacks over the integrity of the 2024 election after unfounded allegations of forged signatures, non-U.S. citizens voting and duplicated ballots circulated on social media.

In January, the Orange County Grand Jury published a report concluding that the registrar exhibited the “highest level of integrity” in the 2024 election and that there was no evidence of voter fraud.

Times staff writers Hannah Fry and Gabriel San Román contributed to this report.