404 Media

2025-10-23 15:51:23

Breathing Through Our Butts Declared Safe After First Human Trial

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Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them.

Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum that is then absorbed into the intestines—in humans for the first time. The trial demonstrated that this method of ventilation is safe and “paves the way for future studies to see if this technique can help patients with respiratory failure,” according to a study published on Monday in the journal Med.

“Enteral ventilation is not meant to replace mechanical ventilators or ECMO, but rather to serve as a complementary oxygenation route,” said Takanori Takebe, an expert in organoid medicine with appointments at both Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Osaka, in an email to 404 Media. The technique proves a backdoor “to provide partial oxygen support while allowing the lungs to rest,” he added.

But while this method is safe for humans, it hasn’t been experimentally shown to work on patients experiencing respiratory distress yet. If future trials show that enteral ventilation is also effective, it could potentially help newborns and premature infants who are struggling to establish lung function after birth, aid patients with severe respiratory failure or Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), or be applied in other situations in which temporary oxygen supplementation is needed.

“In such cases, intestinal oxygen delivery could serve as a ‘bridge’ therapy until normal respiration or full ventilatory support can be established,” Takebe said.
A figure outlining the first enteral ventilation trial in humans. Image: Fujii, Tasuku et al.
The team previously published a study in 2021 that showed enteral ventilation was effective in ameliorating respiratory failure in rats, mice, and pigs. This initial trial in humans involved 27 healthy male volunteers, who received a liquid called perfluorodecalin through their rectums in an enema-like process.

Since the trial was only intended to determine the safety of the procedure, rather than probe its efficacy in humans, the perfluorodecalin was not oxygenated and none of the volunteers were experiencing any respiratory distress during the course of the study.

“The results aligned closely with what we had anticipated from our preclinical data,” Takebe said. “We found that intrarectal administration of perfluorodecalin up to 1,000 mL was safe and well tolerated, with only mild and transient gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloating.”

“The next phase will involve testing ‘oxygenated’ perfluorodecalin (O₂-PFD) in patients with hypoxemia to evaluate actual oxygen transfer efficacy,” he added. “We are currently planning a Phase II trial in collaboration with clinical partners in Japan and the U.S.”

Takebe and his colleagues were inspired to develop this roundabout route by aquatic species, such as loaches, which absorb oxygen through their intestines to survive in low-oxygen environments. While the idea of rectally administering perfluorodecalin is relatively new, the use of oxygenated liquid for ventilation dates back decades. It even shows up in James Cameron’s 1989 thriller The Abyss, which includes a real scene of a rat breathing in a tank of liquid perfluorocarbon.

The technique may prove to be an effective means to alleviate respiratory distress in humans, but it’s also inspired its fair share of jokes because, well, it is about butt breath, after all.

In 2024, for instance, Takebe’s team received the Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award that honors “achievements so surprising that they make people laugh, then think,” according to its website. Fellow Ig Nobel awardees include a team that levitated a frog in midair and another that investigated why pregnant women aren’t constantly tipping over.

“Receiving the Ig Nobel Prize was both humorous and humbling,” Takebe said. “It was a reminder that truly unconventional ideas often begin at the boundary between curiosity and skepticism.”

“While the prize is lighthearted in tone, I do believe it serves a serious purpose, encouraging the public to stay curious and to appreciate how even seemingly odd scientific questions can lead to meaningful innovations,” he concluded. “What began as a playful concept is now moving closer to a viable medical technology.”

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The Ig Nobel Prize: Levitating frogs, constipated scorpions, and other science that makes you laugh then think - American Chemical Society

The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates discoveries that are unusual and imaginative that might not make it into a more traditional research journal.

^{American Chemical Society}

404 Media

2025-10-23 13:10:37

New Research Shows Deepfake Harassment Tools Spread on Social Media and Search Engines

A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing.

Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet. They analyzed 31 websites for SIIA tools, and found that they received a combined 21 million visits a month, with up to four million visits in one month.

Chiara Puglielli and Anne Craanen, the authors of the research paper, used SimilarWeb to identify a common group of sites that shared content, audiences, keywords and referrals. They then used the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch to find mentions of those sites and tools on X, Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, Tumblr, public pages on Instagram and Facebook, forums, blogs and review sites, according to the paper. “We found 410,592 total mentions of the keywords between 9 June 2020 and 3 July 2025, and used Brandwatch’s ability to separate mentions by source in order to find which sources hosted the highest volumes of mentions,” they wrote.

The easiest place to find SIIA tools was through simple web searches. “Searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing all yielded at least one result leading the user to SIIA technology within the first 20 results when searching for ‘deepnude,’ ‘nudify,’ and ‘undress app,’” the authors wrote. Last year, 404 Media saw that Google was also advertising these apps in search results. But Bing surfaces the tools most readily: “In the case of Bing, the first results for all three searchers were SIIA tools.” These weren’t counting advertisements on the search engines that the websites would have paid for, but were organic search results surfaced by the engines’ crawlers and indexing.

X was another massively popular way these tools spread, they found: “Of 410,592 total mentions between June 2020 and July 2025, 289,660 were on X, accounting for more than 70 percent of all activity.” A lot of these were bots. “A large volume of traffic appeared to be inorganic, based on the repetitive style of the usernames, the uniformity of posts, and the uniformity of profile pictures,” Craanen told 404 Media. “Nevertheless, this activity remains concerning, as its volume is likely to attract new users to these tools, which can be employed for activities that are illegal in several contexts.”

One major spike in mentions of the tools on social media happened in early 2023 on Tumblr, when a woman posted about her experience being a target of sexual harassment from those very same tools. As targets of malicious deepfakes have said over and over again, the price of speaking up about one’s own harassment, or even objecting to the harassment of others, is the risk of drawing more attention and harassment to themselves.

‘I Want to Make You Immortal:’ How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser
“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Another spike on X in 2023 was likely the result of bot advertisements for a single SIIA tool, Craanen said, and the spike was a result of those bots launching. X has rules against “unwanted sexual conduct and graphic objectification” and “inauthentic media,” but the platform remains one of the most significant places where tools for making that content are disseminated and advertised.

Apps and sites for making malicious deepfakes have never been more common or easier to find. There have been several incidents where schoolchildren have used “undress” apps on their classmates, including last year when a Washington state high school was rocked by students using AI to take photos from other children’s Instagram accounts and “undress” around seven of their underage classmates, which police characterized as a possible sex crime against children. In 2023, police arrested two middle schoolers for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of their 12 and 13 year old classmates, and police reports showed the preteens used an application to make the images.

A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that 40 percent of students and 29 percent of teachers said they know of an explicit deepfake depicting people associated with their school being shared in the past school year.

Laws About Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind
As lawmakers propose federal laws about preventing or regulating nonconsensual AI generated images, they can’t forget that there are at least two people in every deepfake.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

The “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks” (TAKE IT DOWN) Act, passed earlier this year, requires platforms to report and remove synthetic sexual abuse material, and after years of state-by-state legislation around deepfake harassment is the first federal-level law to attempt to confront the problem. But critics of that law have said it carries a serious risk of chilling legitimate speech online.

“The persistence and accessibility of SIIA tools highlight the limits of current platform moderation and legal frameworks in addressing this form of abuse. Relevant laws relating to takedowns are not yet in full effect across the jurisdictions analysed, so the impact of this legislation cannot yet be fully known,” the ISD authors wrote. “However, the years of public awareness and regulatory discussion around these tools, combined with the ease with which users can still discover, share and deploy these technologies suggests that takedowns cannot be the only tool used to counter their proliferation. Instead, effective mitigation requires interventions at multiple points in the SIIA life cycle—disrupting not only distribution but also discovery and demand. Stronger search engine safeguards, proactive content-blocking on major platforms, and coordinated international policies are essential to reducing the scale of harm.”

Laws About Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind

As lawmakers propose federal laws about preventing or regulating nonconsensual AI generated images, they can't forget that there are at least two people in every deepfake.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-23 12:55:53

A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

The sound of power tools screech in what looks like a workshop with aluminum bubble wrap insulation plastered on the walls and ceiling. A shirtless man picks up a can of compressed air from the workbench and sprays it. He’s tinkering with a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. At one point he squints at a piece of paper, as if he is reading a set of instructions.

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are the tech giant’s main attempt at bringing augmented reality to the masses. The glasses can take photos, record videos, and may soon use facial recognition to identify people. Meta’s glasses come with a bright LED light that illuminates whenever someone hits record. The idea is to discourage stalkers, weirdos, or just anyone from filming people without their consent. Or at least warn people nearby that they are. Meta has designed the glasses to not work if someone covers up the LED with tape.

That protection is what the man in the workshop is circumventing. This is Bong Kim, a hobbyist who modifies Meta Ray-Ban glasses for a small price. Eventually, after more screeching, he is successful: he has entirely disabled the white LED that usually shines on the side of Meta’s specs. The glasses’ functions remain entirely intact; the glasses look as-new. People just won’t know the wearer is recording.

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A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

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404 Media

2025-10-22 17:20:41

Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

Apple has removed Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, from the App Store.

“This app is currently not available in your country or region,” a message on the Apple App Store currently says when trying to visit a link to the app.

Apple told 404 Media in an email it removed the app, as well as a copycat called TeaOnHer, for failing to meet the company’s terms of use around content moderation and user privacy. Apple also said it received an excessive number of complaints, including ones about the personal data of minors being posted in the apps.

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Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Tea or did you used to? 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.

The company pointed to parts of its guidelines including that apps are not allowed to share someone’s personal data without their permission, and that apps need a mechanism for reporting objectionable content.

Randy Nelson, head of insights and media resources at app intelligence company Appfigures, first alerted 404 Media to the app’s removal.

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Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

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404 Media

2025-10-22 13:40:03

The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds

Sleepers snoozing in Eight Sleep smartbeds had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting, others were left in a sitting position and unable to recline. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had to unplug it from the wall.

At around 3 a.m. ET on Monday morning the US-EAST-1 AWS cluster went down and screwed up internet connected services across the planet. Customers for the banks Lloyds and Halifax couldn’t access their accounts. United Airlines check-ins stopped functioning. And people who rest in Eight Sleep beds awoke to find their mattresses had turned against them.

An Eight Sleep bed is a smart bed that starts at $2,700. Users provide their own mattress and Eight Sleep sells them a mattress cover and a “Pod” that acts as the brain of the system. If customers want to spend a few thousand more, they can get a base that adjusts the position of the mattress, provides biometric sleeping data, and heats and cools the sleeper. Customers must also subscribe to a service for Eight Sleep, which ranges from $17 to $33 a month.

Eight Sleep runs on the cloud and when the servers go down or the customer’s internet goes out it bricks the bed. There’s no offline mode. Customers have complained about the lack of an offline mode for a while, but the AWS outage focused their rage.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“So apparently, when my internet goes down, my bed decides to go on strike too. A quick outage, and boom—no change in sleep position available, not even with manual taps,” one customer on r/eightsleep said. “Maybe consider giving people a grace period before their $5,000 bed locks them into the world’s most ergonomic sitting position. AWS attack or Internet down for a few hours should not brick my bed.”

“Cloud only is unacceptable,” said another. “It’s 2025 there is no reason an internet or AWS server outage should impact your entire customer base's sleep—especially given the price tag of your product. Need EightSleep’s product team to opine here, your customer base demands it!”

“My pod is at +5 and I am sweating cuz I can’t turn it down or off,” said one comment.

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized for the restless night in a statement posted to X. “The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep. That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it,” he said. He added that the company was restoring the bed’s features as AWS came back online and promised to outage-proof the Pods.

“Mine is still not working—it went super haywire and still seems to be turning on and off randomly with the inability to stop or control it. I had to unplug it,” ESPN host Victoria Arlen said on X, replying to Franceschetti. “I tried to get it going again and it’s still uncontrollable with the system turning on and off.”

Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now
— Brandon (@Brandon25774008) October 21, 2025

“Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now,” @Brandon25774008 said on X.

The truth is that so long as Eight Sleep beds have to communicate with a server to function, they’re always in danger of dying. That point of failure means the beds could go out at any time leaving the people who paid $5,000 for a fancy bed with little recourse. And, of course, no company lasts forever.

“When ES eventually goes bust, our pods will be bricked,” one Redditor said. “The fact that the pods cannot be controlled when you don’t have the internet is diabolical. I wish I knew this before purchasing. This basically means in the possibly near future, all of our pods will be bricked […] ES need to get their heads out of their ass and for once do a pro customer change and introduce an ‘offline’ mode where we can connect to the pod directly and at the very least change the temperature. It has wifi, it can make its own SSID, just make it work ES.”

Pro-active ES users have already found one solution: jailbreak the Pod. The ES sub is—at a minimum—$200 a year, the Pod uploads multiple GBs of telemetry data to ES servers every month, and when the internet goes down the bed dies. If you must own a $5,000 bed that heats and cools you dynamically, shouldn’t you take full control of it?

There’s an active Discord and a Github for a group of Eight Sleep snoozers who’ve decided to do just that. According to the GitHub, the jailbreak “allows complete control of device WITHOUT requiring internet access. If you lose internet, your pod WILL NOT turn off, it will continue working!”

Data centers are vulnerable. Server clusters go down. As long as there is a single point of failure and your device is commuting back to a network out of your control, it’s a risk. We have allowed tech companies to mediate the most basic functions of our lives, from cooking to travel to sleep. The AWS and ES outage is a stark reminder that we should do what we can to limit the control these tech companies have over our lives.

“I’m continuously horrified that I inextricably linked my sleep and therefore health to a cloud provider’s reliability,” one person said in the comments on Reddit.

Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Internal Emails Show

Serve Robotics, which delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by at least one of its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. The emails show the robots, which are a constant sight in the city, can be used for surveillance.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}