il Post

2025-09-26 16:03:04

Le 300 tonnellate di cibo raccolto per Gaza sono bloccate al porto di Genova - Il Post
https://www.ilpost.it/2025/09/26/cibo-gaza-genova-bloccato/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Pubblicato su News @news-ilPost

Le 300 tonnellate di cibo raccolto per Gaza sono bloccate al porto di Genova

La ong che voleva portarle via terra ha rifiutato le imposizioni di Israele, che vieta l'ingresso di prodotti con amidi e zuccheri

^{Il Post}

404 Media

2025-09-26 15:25:00

Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit.

JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about 404 Media at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum, an annual conference. Over the years, I haven’t been to too many conferences, because honestly it was always too disruptive to the day-to-day journalism and work of managing a team to be able to get away. We’re more than two years into this, but one of the nice things about having this company is that I can mostly get my work done whenever makes sense for me, whether that’s late at night in Los Angeles or early in the morning in Greece.

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Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-26 14:14:21

Earth Was Mysteriously Thrown Off-Kilter In 2015. Now, Scientists Think They Know Why.

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Have you noticed anything out of whack about Earth since 2015? I’m speaking, of course, about how our planet’s wobble started shrinking that year, a mysterious shift that scientists have been puzzling over ever since.

Now, researchers think they might have an explanation for the sudden decrease in the Chandler wobble (CW), a deviation in Earth's rotational axis relative to its crust that causes a drift of about 20 feet over a cycle of roughly 14 months. The recent off-kilter wobble, known as the CW reduction event, may have been largely sparked by “mass anomalies” after the La Niña of 2010–2011, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

That particular La Niña event was one of the strongest on record and it was “followed by significant ocean mass loss due to changed precipitation and evaporation patterns, providing a possible cause of the CW reduction event,” reports the study.

“Polar motion, like the Chandler wobble, reflects changes in Earth’s overall angular momentum,” said study authors Taehwan Jeon and Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist and associate professor at Seoul National University, respectively, in a joint email to 404 Media. “Changes in regional mass, and velocity fields of ocean currents and winds can affect the wobble’s amplitude. Because the wobble sums up effects from all over the globe, it is usually hard to tell exactly which region contributed how much.”

“Still, given the scale of the phenomenon, it makes sense that global climate events such as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) have a stronger influence than small local changes,” the pair continued. “Not every El Niño or La Niña does this, but as our study shows, the 2010-2011 La Niña produced an unusually strong anomaly when viewed from the perspective of Earth’s polar motion.”

The Chandler wobble is one of many wandering deviations between the axis and crust; for instance, we recently covered the effect of impounded dam water on Earth’s rotation. The wobble has also increased and decreased many times in the past in response to shifting global mass distributions, so the latest anomaly isn’t unprecedented.

Still, scientists are curious what might be driving the recent CW reduction, which reached its peak intensity between 2015 and 2020. To approach this mystery, Jeon, Seo, and their colleagues broke the wobble up into two components: the forced wobble and the free wobble.

“The Chandler wobble is actually a two-dimensional pendulum-like motion, but for simplicity it can be compared to a one-dimensional swing,” explained Jeon and Seo. “If you let a swing move without pushing it, it will eventually slow down and stop. That ‘natural’ motion without any external force is what we call the ‘free wobble.’”

“Now imagine giving the swing a push at just the right timing,” they continued. “The swing will keep moving. Depending on how you push, its amplitude can increase or decrease. On Earth, all moving masses (such as air, oceans and water on land) act like those pushes. The part of the wobble driven by these pushes is called the ‘forced wobble.’”

Because the Chandler wobble is the sum of these two parts, the reduction is caused by the free and forced phases cancelling each other out, according to the team’s models. In other words, the study showed that the strong 2010-2011 La Niña event drove the forced wobble out of phase, allowing it to interfere with the free wobble and reduce the overall CW amplitude.

Jeon and Seo said their results “were partly expected and partly surprising.” On the one hand, they noted that oscillations naturally decay over time, so they were expecting to see only recent changes reflected in the Chandler wobble, with ENSO events of the past few decades playing an outsized role in those shifts.

“What surprised us was that not every ENSO event seems to matter, and in particular, the 2010-2011 La Niña turned out to be the strongest contributor,” the pair said. “That was not something we had fully predicted before doing the analysis.”

With that in mind, it’s possible that the Chandler wobble will continue to go haywire in the coming decades, as ENSO events are being amplified by human-driven climate change.

“Large-scale and systematic shifts in Earth’s mass and motion can strongly affect the Chandler wobble, especially when they show a cycle close to the Chandler period (about 433 days), which can resonate more strongly,” Jeon and Seo said.

In particular, the pair pointed to how much ENSO events can disrupt rainfall patterns, which ended up being a main factor in how the 2010–2011 La Niña anomalies impacted on the CW reduction. Changes in global ice mass, however, have more influence over the long-term drift of Earth’s rotation axis, and don’t influence the short-term Chandler wobble as much.

“Since 2010-2011, mass and velocity field changes have continued around the globe, and separating their individual effects remains very challenging,” Jeon and Seo said. “Still, because the Chandler wobble’s amplitude has been increasing again since late 2020, we expect that it may soon return to levels comparable to those observed before 2010.”

“Although the amplitude drop during 2015-2020 was unusual, there were also earlier periods when the Chandler wobble was decreased or increased in amplitude,” the pair concluded. “We suspect that major ENSO events may have played a similar role during those times as well. A next step would be to investigate the broader patterns—what kinds of ENSO events tend to leave a mark on Earth’s polar motion, and what features make them most influential.”

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Has climate change already affected ENSO?

The swings between El Niño and La Niña have been bigger in recent decades than earlier ones. Our guest blogger covers new research pointing the finger at human-caused climate change.

^{NOAA Climate.gov}

Kevin Beaumont

2025-09-25 11:39:25

Regulation works again - if you run Windows 10 in Europe, you will keep receiving extended security updates for free. No need to enable Windows Backup or jump through hoops. October 2025 isn't the end.

theverge.com/news/785544/micro…

Microsoft forced to make Windows 10 extended security updates truly free in Europe

You won’t have to enable Windows Backup to get extended Windows 10 security updates in the European Economic Area.

^{Tom Warren (The Verge)}

404 Media

2025-09-25 18:20:10

Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies

People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. The tide of terrible Twin Peaks related slop lasted for about two days before the subreddit’s mods broke, reversed their decision, and deleted the AI generated content.

Twin Peaks is a moody TV show that first aired in the 1990s and was followed by a third season in 2017. It’s the work of surrealist auteur David Lynch, influenced lots of TV shows and video games that came after and has a passionate fan base that still shares theories and art to this day. Lynch died earlier this year and since his passing he’s become a talking point for pro-AI art people who point to several interviews and second hand stories they claim show Lynch had embraced an AI-generated slop future.

On Tuesday, a mod posted a long announcement that opened the doors to AI on the sub. In a now deleted post titled “Ai Generated Content On r/twinpeaks,” the moderator outlined the position that the sub was a place for everyone to share memes, theories, and “anything remotely creative as long as it has a loose string to the show or its case or its themes. Ai generated content is included in all of this.”

The post went further. “We are aware of how Ai ‘art’ and Ai generated content can hurt real artists,” the post said. “Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the world we live in today. At this point I don’t think anything can stop the Ai train from coming, it’s here and this is only the beginning. Ai content is becoming harder and harder to identify.”

The mod then asked Redditors to follow an honor system and label any post that used AI with a special new flair so people could filter out those posts if they didn’t want to see them. “We feel this is a best of both worlds compromise that should keep everyone fairly happy,” the mod said.

An honor system, a flair, and a filter did not mollify the community. In the following 48 hours Lynch fans expressed their displeasure by showing r/twinpeaks what it looks like when no one can “stop the Ai train from coming.” They filled the subreddit with AI-generated slop in protest, including horrifying pictures of series protagonist Cooper doing an end-zone dance on a football field while Laura Palmer screamed in the sky and more than a few awful ChatGPT generated scripts.
Image via r/twinpeaks.
Free-IDK-Chicken, a former mod of r/twinpeaks who resigned over the AI debacle, said the post wasn’t run by other members of the mod team. “It was poorly worded. A bad take on a bad stance and it blew up in their face,” she told 404 Media. “It spiraled because it was condescending and basically told the community--we don’t care that it’s theft, that it’s unethical, we’ll just flair it so you can filter it out…they missed the point that AI art steals from legit artists and damages the environment.”

According to Free-IDK-Chicken, the subreddit’s mods had been fighting over whether or not to ban AI art for months. “I tried five months ago to get AI banned and was outvoted. I tried again last month and was outvoted again,” she said.

On Thursday morning, with the subreddit buried in AI slop, the mods of r/twinpeaks relented, banned AI art, and cleaned up the protest spam. “After much thought and deliberation about the response to yesterday's events, the TP Mod Team has made the decision to reverse their previous statement on the posting of AI content in our community,” the mods said in a post announcing the new policy. “Going forward, posts including generative AI art or ChatGPT-style content are disallowed in this subreddit. This includes posting AI google search results as they frequently contain misinformation.”

Lynch has become a mascot for pro AI boosters. An image on a pro-AI art subreddit depicts Lynch wearing an OpenAI shirt and pointing at the viewer. “You can’t be punk and also be anti-AI, AI-phobic, or an AI denier. It’s impossible!” reads a sign next to the AI-generated picture of the director.
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
As evidence, they point to aBritish Film Institute interview published shortly before his death where he lauds AI and calls it “incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity.” AI boosters often leave off the second part of the quote. “I’m sure with all these things, if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror. But I’m hoping better times are coming,” Lynch said.
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
The other big piece of evidence people use to claim Lynch was pro-AI is a secondhand account given to Vulture by his neighbor, the actress Natasha Lyonne. According to the interview in Vulture, Lyonne asked Lynch for his thoughts on AI and Lynch picked up a pencil and told her that everyone has access to it and to a phone. “It’s how you use the pencil. You see?” He said.

Setting aside the environmental and ethical arguments against AI-generated art, if AI is a “pencil,” most of what people make with it is unpleasant slop. Grotesque nonsense fills our social media feeds and AI-generated Jedis and Ghiblis have become the aesthetic of fascism.

We've seen other platforms and communities struggle with keeping AI art at bay when they've allowed it to exist alongside human-made content. On Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, low-effort garbage is flooding online spaces and pushing productive human conversation to the margins, while floating to the top of engagement algorithms.

Other artist communities are pushing back against AI art in their own ways: Earlier this month, DragonCon organizers ejected a vendor for displaying AI-generated artwork. Artists’ portfolio platform ArtStation banned AI-generated content in 2022. And earlier this year, artists protested the first-ever AI art auction at Christie’s.

Artists Are Revolting Against AI Art on ArtStation 

Artists are fed up with AI art on the portfolio platform, which is owned by Epic Games, but the company isn't backing down.

^{Chloe Xiang (VICE)}

404 Media

2025-09-25 16:29:37

The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers

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Tuesday, the Secret Service said it “dismantled a network” of “300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.” The Secret Service suggested that this network posed a threat to the United Nations General Assembly meeting, which was “within 35 miles” of the servers and which it said could have been used to “disable cell phone towers.” The story quickly went viral, with the New York Times and CNN’s reports being widely shared and discussed.

CNN reported that the SIM servers were used in swatting calls against members of Congress, and the New York Times quoted an expert who said that they believed the servers could be used for espionage. As security researcher Robert Graham points out in a post called “That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus—it’s just normal crime,” the Secret Service has not yet released any actual evidence of what the SIM servers were used for and it is unclear how such a setup could be used for “espionage.” Graham notes that, based on photos released by the Secret Service and its description of the operations, claims that such a network could have only been created by a sophisticated nation state actor are particularly ridiculous: “I can pull this off, personally. It’s just a SIM farm. Sure, there’s some capital involved, on the order of $1 million, but it could be setup and managed by a single person. It likely wasn’t setup all at once with that much money, but has been slowly growing for years as profits are funneled back into setting up more SIM accounts,” he wrote.

The discovery of a bunch of SIM banks (also called SIM farms, SMS gateways, and several other things) anywhere is interesting from a spam / cybercrime perspective, and they give a type of cyberpunk visual that, frankly, is extremely my shit. But the breathless way this bust has been announced—with a special video announcement by Secret Service director Sean Curran and a clearly embargoed rollout with the New York Times and CNN, makes these SIM farms seem as though they are particularly special and high tech, when they clearly are not. The technology used, which can be seen clearly in photos released by the Secret Service, are regularly used by SMS scammers, spammers, and marketers, yes, but the tech is also extremely widely used by ticket scalpers seeking to create lots of Ticketmaster accounts with which to buy tickets. This is off-the-shelf technology that anyone can buy and use; if one had enough money, one could surely buy 300 of them from Ejointech, the Chinese company that makes them, and set something like this up.

I have been familiar with and meaning to write about SIM banks for a few months now, specifically because they have become popular with ticket scalpers. Like many “anti-scalping” and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn’t actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets.

This SMS verification system has created a new underground market for various technologies and software that lets scalpers game this SMS verification system. SIM boxes are such an important part of that new underground market that Ejointech now advertises one of its products—which looks very much like the models shown in the Secret Service’s images from the seized servers in New York—as specifically being good “for ticketing & bulk SMS.”

“Popular model: used by 5,000+ leading ticket brokers globally & trusted for thousands of large-scale SMS campaigns!,” Ejointech advertises on the $3,730 Ejoin 256 SIM 4G LTE SMS Gateway. On TikTok, it advertises a similar, 512 SIM card model as having “human behavior,” “cloud management,” and “auto SIM card switch.”

“Ticket brokers, streamline your Ticketmaster operations with EjoinTech! Our SMS gateway devices support up to 512 SIM cards, ensuring you never miss a verification code,” the company says. “Designed for efficiency with no unnecessary noise.”
youtube.com/embed/BZnrXxt47Qw?…
There is of course no evidence that the SIM boxes seized by the Secret Service this week were used by ticket scalpers, but there’s also no public evidence released by the Secret Service that suggests they were going to try to disrupt the UN General Council’s meeting. The point I’m making is that these devices and these types of farms have become somewhat common in recent years, and they are used not just to send messages in bulk but to receive them in bulk, too. They are used not just for crimes, but for various grey market and controversial, but not necessarily illegal, purposes too.

“Proxies” and real SIM cards that can receive SMS messages have become critical to the ticket scalping industry. The way ticket scalping works now is that big time brokers will create many (hundreds or thousands) of unique Ticketmaster accounts, each associated with their own phone number. These are sometimes made using prepaid or low-cost wireless carriers like MobileX, whose SIM cards appeared in bulk in Secret Service materials.

Not every big time broker is going to want to roll their own SIM bank, so a series of companies have popped up that offer “proxies,” which just means that they are basically a company running and selling access to phone numbers, keeping them online, and forwarding SMS codes directly to the ticket broker buying them. These companies do not advertise what specific hardware they are using to do this, but SIM boxes could easily be used to do this, and the scale of farm that the Secret Service found is not particularly large considering these types of services exist. They go by names like “WiredSMS,” “TextChest,” “Quick-Text,” “SMSPass,” and “Jivetel,” among others. TextChest advertises “industry-leading physical SIM lines, trusted by thousands.” A company called Seat Heroes notes that it is “carrier compliant” and that “while others rely on risky, unauthorized setups, Seat Heroes runs on the first ever Tier 1 carrier-integrated infrastructure—no modems, no VOIP, just proprietary and exclusive access to genuine numbers—always on, 24/7” and “no SIM banks—just direct connections.”

In practice, ticket brokers connect their proxies—either bought from a third party or rolled by themselves—to other bespoke ticketing-buying software that helps them actually manage tons of Ticketmaster accounts and tons of phone numbers at once. There are a host of ticket broker-specific internet browsers that allow brokers to open hundreds or thousands of browser tabs, which each have a browsing session tied to either a specific SIM card or to an IP proxy which can also be bought from third-party services. This allows brokers to power through Ticketmaster’s “Virtual Waiting Rooms” because a broker can have hundreds or thousands of independent browser sessions waiting as separate “people.” The SIM box (or a SIM proxy service) can then be set up in these bespoke browsers to automatically forward and submit Ticketmaster’s SMS two-factor authentication, which is supposedly designed to prevent scalpers from getting tickets.

At one point, Private Tabs, one of the bespoke browsers for ticket scalpers, was advertising a “SIMBOX HARDWARE ADD-ON,” which could “add 512 phone numbers for $3 per line.”

“These hardware devices allow you to add 512 phone numbers to your Private Tabs account,” an archived version of the Private Tabs website reads. “If you already have one, then you can just add it to the config or call us, and we’ll set it up for ya. This ensures that every account you load in has its dedicated number. Rather than paying $9 to $24 per phone number, you can purchase one of these devices and get a phone line for as little as $3 per number. Typically, they pay for themselves within 2 months since each device can hold 512 numbers. With this device you do not need ‘TextChest’ or ‘Private Tab Phones’ [a proxy service] as you can host your own numbers for half the cost.”

The Private Tabs web browser no longer advertises SIM boxes, and in a FAQ on its current website, it says says people using their own telecom hardware may run into problems: "There have been recent reports as of 9/5/2025 that some people using Chinese hardware is a problem. You may want to contact your phone company before trying to integrate it with the API to confirm it works ok."

Ticketmaster Used Revolving Barcodes to Control Ticket Resale Market and Surveil Customers, DOJ Alleges

"We now not only know the person that bought the ticket, but we’re going to know those three people that you are taking to the show, which we have not known historically."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-25 13:53:05

How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump

In a blog post published in June, Garrett Langley, the CEO and co-founder of surveillance company Flock, said “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.” The post explained that the company believes the laws of the country and individual states and municipalities, not the company, should determine the limits of what Flock’s technology can be used for, and came after 404 Media revealed local police were tapping into Flock’s networks of AI-enabled cameras for ICE, and that a sheriff in Texas performed a nationwide search for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

💡
Do you work at any of these companies or others like them? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Langley’s statement echoes a common refrain surveillance and tech companies selling their products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other parts of the U.S. government have said during the second Trump administration: we live in a democracy. It is not our job to decide how our powerful capabilities, which can track peoples’ physical location, marry usually disparate datasets together, or crush dissent, can or should be used. At least, that’s the thrust of the argument. That is despite the very clear reality that the first Trump administration was very different to the Biden administration, and both pale in comparison to Trump 2.0, with the executive branch and various agencies flaunting ordinary democratic values. The idea of what a democracy is capable of has shifted.

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How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}