404 Media

2025-11-03 21:04:05

Kodak Quietly Begins Directly Selling Kodak Gold and Ultramax Film Again

Kodak quietly acknowledged Monday that it will begin selling two famous types of film stock—Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ultramax 400—directly to retailers and distributors in the U.S., another indication that the historic company is taking back control over how people buy its film.

The release comes on the heels of Kodak announcing that it would make and sell two new stocks of film called Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200 in October. On Monday, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax showed back up on Kodak’s website as film stocks that it makes and sells. When asked by 404 Media, a company spokesperson said that it has “launched” these film stocks and will begin to “sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market.”

Unlike Kodacolor, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax have been widely available to consumers for years, but the way it was distributed made little sense and was an artifact of its 2012 bankruptcy. Coming out of that bankruptcy, Eastman Kodak (the 133-year-old company) would continue to make film, but the exclusive rights to distribute and sell it were owned by a completely separate, UK-based company called Kodak Alaris. For the last decade, Kodak Alaris has sold Kodak Gold and Ultramax (as well as Portra, and a few other film stocks made by Eastman Kodak). This setup has been confusing for consumers and perhaps served as an incentive for Eastman Kodak to not experiment as much with the types of films it makes, considering that it would have to license distribution out to another company.

That all seemed to have changed with the recent announcement of Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200, Kodak’s first new still film stocks in many years. Monday’s acknowledgement that both Kodak Gold and Ultramax would be sold directly by Eastman Kodak, and which come with a rebranded and redesigned box, suggests that the company has figured out how to wrest some control of its distribution away from Kodak Alaris. Eastman Kodak told 404 Media in a statement that it has “launched” these films and that they are “Kodak-marketed versions of existing films.”

"Kodak will sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market,” a Kodak spokesperson said in an email. “This direct channel will provide distributors, retailers and consumers with a broader, more reliable supply and help create greater stability in a market where prices have often fluctuated.”

The company called it an “extension of Kodak’s film portfolio,” which it said “is made possible by our recent investments that increased our film manufacturing capacity and, along with the introduction of our KODAK Super 8 Camera and KODAK EKTACHROME 100D Color Reversal Film, reflects Kodak’s ongoing commitment to meeting growing demand and supporting the long-term health of the film industry.”

It is probably too soon to say how big of a deal this is, but it is at least exciting for people who are in the resurgent film photography hobby, who are desperate for any sign that companies are interested in launching new products, creating new types of film, or building more production capacity in an industry where film shortages and price increases have been the norm for a few years.

How to Get Into Film Photography (And Why You Should)

Shooting film is expensive, slow, and incredibly inconvenient. That's what makes it so magical.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-03 17:00:28

Flock Logins Exposed In Malware Infections, Senator Asks FTC to Investigate the Company

Lawmakers have called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Flock for allegedly violating federal law by not enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), according to a letter shared with 404 Media. The demand comes as a security researcher found Flock accounts for sale on a Russian cybercrime forum, and 404 Media found multiple instances of Flock-related credentials for government users in infostealer infections, potentially providing hackers or other third parties with access to at least parts of Flock’s surveillance network.

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Flock Logins Exposed In Malware Infections, Senator Asks FTC to Investigate the Company

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-03 16:33:17

arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers

arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven’t been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues,” according to a press release about the change.

arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it’s become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don’t pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.
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But because of an onslaught of AI-generated research, specifically in the computer science (CS) section, arXiv is going to limit which papers can be published. “In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers,” arXiv said in a press release. “Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write.”

The site noted that this was less a policy change and more about stepping up enforcement of old rules. “When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration,” it said. “Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.”

According to the press release, arXiv has been inundated by "review" submissions—papers that are still pending peer review—but that CS was the worst category. “We now receive hundreds of review articles every month,” arXiv said. “The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand.

The plan is to enforce a blanket ban on papers still under review in the CS category and free the moderators to look at more substantive submissions. arXiv stressed that it does not often accept review articles, but had been doing so when it was of academic interest and from a known researcher. “If other categories see a similar rise in LLM-written review articles and position papers, they may choose to change their moderation practices in a similar manner to better serve arXiv authors and readers,” arXiv said.

AI-generated research articles are a pressing problem in the scientific community. Scam academic journals that run pay-to-publish schemes are an issue that plagued academic publishing long before AI, but the advent of LLMs has supercharged it. But scam journals aren’t the only ones affected. Last year, a serious scientific journal had to retract a paper that included an AI-generated image of a giant rat penis. Peer reviewers, the people who are supposed to vet scientific papers for accuracy, have also been caught cutting corners using ChatGPT in part because of the large demands placed on their time.

ChatGPT Looms Over the Peer-Review Crisis

Research shows that academics might be using generative AI tools to cut corners on a fundamental pillar of the scientific process.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-03 15:04:23

The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You

Do you and your human family have interest in sharing an exciting IRL experience supporting your [team of choice] with other human fans at The Big Game? In that case, don the chosen color of your [team of choice] and head to the local [iconic stadium]; Ticketmaster has exciting ticket deals, and soon you and your human family can look as happy and excited as these virtual avatars:

Ticketmaster's personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience: "Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are,” Zuckerberg said.

The Ticketmaster example you see above is rudimentary and crude, but everything we've seen over the last few months suggests that the real way Meta is bringing in revenue with AI is not through its consumer-facing products but with AI ad creation and targeting products for advertisers that allows them to create many different versions of any given ad and then to show that ad only to people it is likely to be effective on.

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Do you work in the advertising industry and have any insight into how generative AI is changing ad creative and targeting? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

Ticketmaster, in this case, has has invented several virtual families whose football team allegiances change presumably based on a series of demographic, geographic, and behavioral factors that would cause you to be targeted by one of its ads. I found these ads after I was targeted by one suggesting I join this ethnically ambiguous, dead-eyed family of generic blue hat wearers at the World Series to root on, I guess, the Dodgers. I looked Ticketmaster up in Facebook’s ad library and found that it is running a series of clearly AI-generated ads, many of which use the same templates and taglines.

“There’s nothing like a sea of gold. See Vanderbilt football live and in color.” “There’s nothing like a sea of red. See USC football live and in color.” “There’s nothing like a sea of maize. See Michigan football live and in color,” and so on and so forth. There are a couple dozen of these ads for college football, and a few others that use different AI-generated people. My favorite is this one, which features the back of AI people’s heads standing and cheering at other fans and not facing where the game or field would be.

As AI slop goes, this is relatively tame fare, but it is notable that a company as big as Ticketmaster is using generative AI for its Facebook ads. It is also an instructive example that shows a big reason why Facebook and Google are bringing in so much revenue right now, and highlights the fact that social media is not so slowly being completely drowned in low-effort AI content and ads.

Here's why you're seeing more AI ads on social media, and why Meta and its advertising clients seem intent on making this the future of advertising.

- Generative AI creative material is cheap: The effort and cost required to make this series of ads is incredibly low. Generating something like this is easy and, at most, requires just a small amount of human prompting and touchup after it is generated. But most importantly, Ticketmaster doesn’t have to worry about paying human models or photographers, does not have to worry about licensing stock photos, and, notably, there are no logos or actual places highlighted in any of these ads. There are no players, no teams, just the evocation of such. There is no need to get permission from or pay for logo licensing (this reminds me of a Wheaties box of Cal Ripken that I got as a kid in the immediate aftermath of him breaking the 2131 consecutive games record. In the boxes released immediately, he was wearing only a black t-shirt and a black helmet. A few days later, after General Mills presumably secured the rights to use Orioles logos, they started selling the same box with his Orioles jersey and helmet on them).

- Less money on creative means more budget for spend, and more varieties of ads: I’ve written about this before, but a big trend in advertising right now is AI-powered ad creative trial and error. Using AI, it is now possible to make an essentially endless number of different variations of a single ad that uses slightly different language, slightly different images, slightly different calls to actions, and different links. AI targeting also means that “successful” variations of ads will essentially automatically find the audience that they’re supposed to. This means that companies can just flood social media with zillions of variations of low-effort AI ads, put their “spend” (their ad budget) into the versions that perform best, and let the targeting algorithms do the rest. AI in this case is a scaling tactic. There is no need to spend tons of time, money, and human resources refining ad copy and designing thoughtful, clever, funny, charming, or eye-catching ads. You can simply publish tons of different versions of low-effort bullshit, and largely people will only see the ones that perform well.

- This is Meta’s business model now: Meta’s user-facing commercial generative AI tools are pretty embarrassing and in my limited experience its chatbot and image and video generation tools are more rudimentary than OpenAI’s, Google’s, and other popular AI companies’ tools. There is nothing to suggest that Meta is making any real progress on Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent goal of “superintelligence.” But its AI and machine learning-powered ad targeting and ad variation tools seem to be very successful and are resulting in companies spending way more money on ads, many of which look terrible to me but which are apparently quite successful. Meta announced its third quarter earnings on Wednesday, and in its earnings call, it highlighted both Advantage+ and Andromeda, two AI advertising products that do what I described in the bullet above.

Advantage+ is its advertiser-facing AI ad optimization platform which lets advertisers optimize targeting, but also lets them use generative AI to create a bunch of variations of ads: “Advantage+ creative generates ad variations so they are personalized to each individual viewer in your audience, based on what each person might respond to,” the company advertises.

“Within our Advantage+ creative suite, the number of advertisers using at least one of our video generation features was up 20% versus the prior quarter as adoption of image animation and video expansion continues to scale. We’ve also added more generative AI features to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance. In Q3, we introduced AI-generated music so advertisers can have music generated for their ad that aligns with the tone and message of the creative,” Meta said in its third quarter earnings report.

Susan Li, Meta's CFO, said "now advertisers running sales, app or lead campaigns have end-to-end automation turned on from the beginning, allowing our systems to look across our platform to optimize performance by automatically choosing criteria like who to show the ads to and where to show them."

Andromeda, meanwhile, is designed to “supercharge Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine.” It is basically a machine learning-powered ad targeting tool, which helps the platform determine which ad, and which variation of an ad, to show a specific user: “Andromeda significantly enhances Meta’s ads system by enabling the integration of AI that optimizes and improves personalization capabilities at the retrieval stage and improves return on ad spend,” the company explains.

This is all going toward a place where Meta itself is delivering hyper personalized, generative AI slop ads for each individual user. In the Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg described exactly this future: “Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are.”

I don’t know if Ticketmaster used Advantage+ for this ad campaign, or if this ad campaign is successful (Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment). But the tactics being deployed here are an early version of what Zuckerberg is describing, and what is obviously happening to social media right now.

Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine - Engineering at Meta

Andromeda is Meta’s proprietary machine learning (ML) system design for retrieval in ad recommendation focused on delivering a step-function improvement in value to our advertisers and people.  Thi…

^{Neeraj Bhatia (Meta)}

404 Media

2025-11-03 14:00:38

The Crackdown on ICE Spotting Apps (with Joshua Aaron)

For this interview episode of the 404 Media Podcast, Joseph speaks to Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock. Apple recently removed ICEBlock from its App Store after direct pressure from the Department of Justice. Joshua and Joseph talk about how the idea for ICEBlock came about, Apple and Google’s broader crackdown on similar apps, and what this all means for people trying to access information about ICE.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’
• Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’
• Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}