Movida violenta a Viale Ippocrate
Servizio di Tommaso Di Caprio e Lorenzo Giovanardi
L'articolo Movida violenta a Viale Ippocrate su Lumsanews.
Accolgo: il progetto dell’Ue a sostegno delle famiglie ucraine con bambini affetti da tumore
[quote]Video-inchiesta di Elisa Ortuso con il quale ha vinto il Premio Megalizzi-Niedzielski 2025 della Ue rivolto ai giovani giornalisti
L'articolo Accolgo: il progetto dell’Ue a sostegno delle famiglie ucraine con bambini affetti da tumore su
Tutelare i settori critici e promuovere la cultura degli investimenti in sicurezza. Cosa farà la Fondazione Praexidia
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo
La sicurezza economica e industriale italiana passa oggi per la tutela dei settori strategici e da una gestione più consapevole delle tecnologie critiche. La pandemia e la guerra in
Nuovo stop al processo Regeni: gli atti vanno alla Consulta
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/10/nuovo-s…
La Corte d’Assise di Roma ha deciso di sospendere il processo per la morte di Giulio Regeni, disponendo l’invio degli atti alla Corte Costituzionale. La decisione è legata a una questione di
Cybersicurezza. Piroddi (Aruba Academy): “Sfida culturale che richiede competenze e collaborazione”
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
La crescente complessità del contesto digitale deve procedere di pari passo con una maggiore consapevolezza della sicurezza digitale: in Italia nel 2024 sono stati registrati 357 incidenti gravi e oltre il 10% degli
trump è riuscito a fare un danno serio... apparire come debole e incostante, e quindi in definitiva inefficace. la usa politica ondivaga questo produce: un danno di immagine. ma non è utile alla nostra causa. non c'è da rallegrarsene. bene o male al momento dipendiamo ancora noi europei dalla deterrenza usa. e certo pacifismo è utile solo a putin.
Built-In Batteries: a Daft Idea With an Uncertain Future
Having a gadget’s battery nestled snugly within the bowels of a device has certain advantages. It finally solves the ‘no batteries included’ problem, and there is no more juggling of AA or AAA cells, nor their respective chargers. Instead each device is paired to that one battery that is happily charged using a standardized USB connector, and suddenly everything is well in the world.
Everything, except for the devices that cannot be used while charging, wireless devices that are suddenly dragging along a wire while charging and which may have charging ports in irrational locations, as well as devices that would work quite well if it wasn’t for that snugly embedded battery that’s now dead, dying, or on fire.
Marrying devices with batteries in this manner effectively means tallying up all the disadvantages of the battery chemistries and their chargers, adding them to the device’s feature list, and limiting their effective lifespan in the process. It also prevents the rapid swapping with fresh batteries, which is why everyone is now lugging chunky powerbanks around instead of spare batteries, and hogging outlets with USB chargers. And the task of finding a replacement for non-standardized pouch cell batteries can prove to be hard or impossible.
Looking at the ‘convenience’ argument from this way makes one wonder whether it is all just marketing that we’re being sold. Especially in light of the looming 2027 EU regulation on internal batteries that is likely to wipe out the existence of built-in batteries with an orbital legal strike. Are we about to say ‘good riddance’ to a terrible idea?
Not Very Pro
To further rub in how much of a terrible idea built-in batteries are, one only has to look at professional equipment, particularly in the audiovisual world. Whether we are talking about DSLRs, mirror-less cameras, or professional video cameras, they all have as standard feature the ability to quickly swap batteries. Nikon and Canon cameras use a range of proprietary-but-standard Li-ion batteries, with Sony’s video camera batteries also used on portable studio lighting. For the super-expensive Red video cameras you can use either the massive Redvolt batteries that dangle off the side or a power adapter.
The reasoning here is simple: when you are doing a photo or film shoot you do not have time for charging, so you load up with a stash of charged batteries beforehand. As the current battery becomes drained, you pop open the battery hatch or detach the current pack and slam in a fresh battery before resuming. During moments of downtime you can put the drained batteries on the charger that you have squirreled away somewhere. This way you stay wireless and charged with zero fuss, and if you have enough batteries, zero downtime.
Even within the era of budget photo and video cameras you’d be able to do this. When it comes to my own JVC camcorder and Canon IXUS 100 IS point-and-shoot camera, both offer this feature, even if the battery swapping experience doesn’t feel as premium as with the Nikon D7200 DSLR and its EN-EL15 batteries that is used for more serious occasions. Swapping batteries with the DSLR in particular is as easy as swapping SD cards, which is to say a matter of seconds.
One might get the idea here that the main reason to stuff a pouch cell somewhere inside the device is mostly a cost-saving measure, as it omits the battery terminals and ejection mechanism for the pack.
Battery Decay
Another reason why having a built-in battery with a multi-thousand-Euro DSLR would be a terrible idea beyond the insanity of having to ‘charge the DSLR’, is that the battery will be dead long before even the warranty on the DSLR has expired, especially if you are an avoid shooter. Even if you do not use a device that much, the fact of the matter is that lithium-ion cells begin to degrade as soon as they have been manufactured. This may be acceptable in a €1,000+ smartphone when people buy a new one every other year anyway, but becomes a problem when you’d like to use a device for much longer.
A good summary of the how and why of lithium-ion batteries (LIB) can be found in this IEEE review article by Wiljan Vermeer et al. from 2021. The three main aging mechanisms are:
- Loss of Lithium Inventory (LLI).
- Loss of Active Material (LAM).
- Conductivity Loss (CL).
There are multiple ways in which each type of aging can occur, with most requiring the cell to be charged and discharged, as this inflicts mechanical and other types of stress. When it comes to storing LIBs, we enter the territory of calendar aging. This has an irreversible and reversible component, the former being impacted by three components: the state of charge (SoC), temperature, and time.
What this tells us is that although you can affect LIB calendar aging, it’s a pretty inevitable aspect of their chemistry. This is true even in the case of the lithium-polymer (LiPo) LIB type batteries with its polymer electrolyte. This effectively means that charging the battery in a device to 80% instead of 100% will give it some more life, but you’d have to drop down to 50% or less to see the big gains. It’s also highly advisable to keep the battery relatively cool, which is where fast-charging is a terrible idea, especially as the resistance of the battery goes up due to aging.
While the exact mechanisms behind calendar aging are still being investigated, it’s likely that the layer that forms at the electrochemically unstable electrolyte-electrode interface (SEI) restructures to prevent the transfer of lithium ions, effectively increasing the measured resistance via the CL aging path.
In addition to calendar aging you have the charge-discharge cycle-based aging mechanisms, which not only affects the SEI, but also causes mechanical expansion of the graphite anode material, which leads to both the LLI and LAM aging paths. When you then add in the typical charging method for gadgets like smartphones using a LIB-based powerbank, you end up with double the charge-discharge cycles over simply slotting in a fresh battery.
End Of The Road
Beyond larger electronic devices, pouch cell LIBs are now integrated in countless more gadgets, from lamps to Bluetooth speakers. To address the sheer volume of these built-in LIBs, the EU’s Battery Regulation will begin to enforce its removability and replaceability requirements starting on 18 February of 2027.
The batteries which we discussed in this article fall under so-called ‘portable batteries’, meaning that it weighs less than 5 kg and is not used for an electric vehicle. These are required to make it possible for the end user to replace and remove, all without damaging or destroying the battery or the device, and without requiring any special tools. There are some partial safety-related exceptions where a professional can do said replacement, while a full exception is limited to a number of very specific device categories.
What exactly the fallout of this change will be remains to be seen, with manufacturers likely starting to adapt their products throughout 2026. Devices like smartphones, game controllers, but also Bluetooth speakers, wireless mice and portable game consoles will all be affected, so it’ll be interesting to see what approach we will see here.
Perhaps most of all what it might mean for standardization of cells and batteries, as every device that’s put on the market in the EU must have spare batteries available for reasonable cost for five years after it stops being sold. Clearly this would be cheaper if the same battery just got used for decades, somewhat like the veritable AA cell and today’s 18650 and similar formats.
So Many Standards
The process of standardization is a rough one, with sometimes the legislature leaning into the issue after consultation with a requirement, as with USB-based chargers. Other times the market simply picks something that’s readily available and does the job. One example of this is the Nokia BL-5C battery and its variations, which was quite prevalent due to Nokia using it for its phones and other platforms like the N-Gage. Consequently third-party manufacturers made their own compatible versions for use in a wide range of devices.
While the BL-5C is still fairly large, at 53 mm x 34 mm and a thickness of 6 mm, point and shoot cameras as well as action cameras feature a range of smaller batteries, with the Canon NB-4L as used in the IXUS point and shoot cameras providing more than 750 mAh in a 35 mm x 40 mm package and a similar 5.9 mm thickness. The third-party replacements that I got of the NB-4L claim to provide 1,200 mAh, as modern LIBs tend to have more capacity within the same form factor due to more refined manufacturing.
Interestingly, even rechargeable AA-sized cells aren’t limited to NiMH chemistry any more, with Li-ion options now available yet still providing the 1.5 V one would expect. This does require a bit of electronics in the cell, and results in them having a capacity that’s similar to that of NiMH AA cells, while suffering all the aging issues of any other LIB in addition to the limited number of charge cycles. Assuming that the 1.2 V of NiMH cells is acceptable, then devices could accept AA or AAA NiMH cells.
Of note here is that none of this means that having a power input port for charging the battery or cell inside the device itself is no longer possible or allowed. Depending on the device manufacturer, the new EU regulations should mean little difference for the end user, other than having the option to pop open each device to extract and replace the battery. This could mean that wireless mice and Bluetooth headsets will soon feature an alternative to sticking in that charge cable and have the device be mostly useless until its built-in battery has soaked up sufficient juice.
Although this is an EU-only thing, it’s likely to come to every other part of the globe as well.
An analysis of how tools to make non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes spread online, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows X and search engines surface these sites easily.#Deepfakes #Socialmedia
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)
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Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.#Privacy #Meta
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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The app, which went viral before facing multiple data breaches, is currently unavailable on the Apple App Store.#tea #News
Women Dating Safety App Tea Delisted from Apple App Store
Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, has been removed from the Apple 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.
It is unclear whether the app has only been removed temporarily or permanently, or whether Apple banned the app or Tea removed it itself. Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment. Randy Nelson, head of insights and media resources at app intelligence company Appfigures, first alerted 404 Media to the app’s removal.
After launching a number of years ago, Tea skyrocketed to the top of the App Store this summer. The idea was for women to come together to share information and red flags about their dates. Tea users can “find verified green flag men,” “run background checks,” and “identify potential catfish,” according to Tea’s website. Crucially, the app said it verified that every user was a woman by asking them to upload a selfie.
💡
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.In the wake of its new found attention, members of the notorious troll and harassment forum 4chan targeted the service, and found an exposed database containing Tea users’ driver licenses and selfies. Days later, 404 Media revealed a second data breach at Tea impacted users’ direct messages, including those discussing abortions and cheating.
Tea turned off its direct messaging functionality altogether after that breach, and a Tea user filed a class action lawsuit against the app. Despite those data breaches, Tea continued to grow its userbase, Tea previously told 404 Media in a statement.
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404 Media subsequently published an in-depth investigation into Tea and its CEO and founder Sean Cook, revealing how the app tried to essentially hijack the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, an ecosystem of Facebook pages that are credited with keeping women safe. Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook pages with nearly identical names. That investigation also discovered a third security breach which revealed the personal data of women who were paid to promote the app as part of an affiliate program.The app is still available on the Google Play Store. A number of other copycat apps that include “tea” in their name and advertise similar features are still available on the Apple App Store as well.
As of Wednesday Tea is still posting to its social media accounts, including its Instagram. The most recent post from around 13 hours ago describes Tea as “The first ever girls-only space that truly amplifies women’s voices and gives them an anonymous space to share their experiences, find comfort, and get the info they need on the man they’re talking to, in the name of DATING SAFETY💜”
One of the replies to that video simply says “App is gone.”
Tea User Files Class Action After Women’s Safety App Exposes Data
The Plaintiff claims Tea harmed her and ‘thousands of other similarity situated persons in the massive and preventable cyberattack.’Joseph Cox (404 Media)
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When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.#News
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.
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“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)
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Hackers targeting ICE and other agencies; Wikipedia's AI problem now has some data; and OpenAI's inevitable pivot to sex bot.
Hackers targeting ICE and other agencies; Wikipediax27;s AI problem now has some data; and OpenAIx27;s inevitable pivot to sex bot.#Podcast
Podcast: Hackers Dox ICE
We start this week with Joseph’s articles about a hacking group that doxed DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials. The group then sent us the personal data of officials from the NSA and a bunch of other government agencies. After the break, Emanuel revisits Wikipedia’s AI problem. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains OpenAI’s inevitable path to an AI sex bot.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content 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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- How Artists Are Keeping 'the Lost Art' of Neon Signs Alive
- Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials
- Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials
- Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
- OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny
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
After condemnation from Trump’s AI czar, Anthropic’s CEO promised its AI is not woke.#News #AI #Anthropic
Anthropic Promises Trump Admin Its AI Is Not Woke
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a lengthy statement on the company’s site in which he promises Anthropic’s AI models are not politically biased, that it remains committed to American leadership in the AI industry, and that it supports the AI startup space in particular.Amodei doesn’t explicitly say why he feels the need to state all of these obvious positions for the CEO of an American AI company to have, but the reason is that the Trump administration’s so-called “AI Czar” has publicly accused Anthropic of producing “woke AI” that it’s trying to force on the population via regulatory capture.
The current round of beef began earlier this month when Anthropic’s co-founder and head of policy Jack Clark published a written version of a talk he gave at The Curve AI conference in Berkeley. The piece, published on Clark’s personal blog, is full of tortured analogies and self-serving sci-fi speculation about the future of AI, but essentially boils down to Clark saying he thinks artificial general intelligence is possible, extremely powerful, potentially dangerous, and scary to the general population. In order to prevent disaster, put the appropriate policies in place, and make people embrace AI positively, he said, AI companies should be transparent about what they are building and listen to people’s concerns.
“What we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” he wrote. “And like all the best fairytales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”
Venture capitalist, podcaster, and the White House’s “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks was not a fan of Clark’s blog.
“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks said on X in response to Clark’s blog. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”
Things escalated yesterday when Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder and a megadonor to the Democratic party, supported Anthropic in a thread on X, saying “Anthropic was one of the good guys” because it's one of the companies “trying to deploy AI the right way, thoughtfully, safely, and enormously beneficial for society.” Hoffman also appeared to take a jab at Elon Musk’s xAI, saying “Some other labs are making decisions that clearly disregard safety and societal impact (e.g. bots that sometimes go full-fascist) and that’s a choice. So is choosing not to support them.”
Sacks responded to Hoffman on X, saying “The leading funder of lawfare and dirty tricks against President Trump wants you to know that ‘Anthropic is one of the good guys.’ Thanks for clarifying that. All we needed to know.” Musk hopped into the replies saying: “Indeed.”
“The real issue is not research but rather Anthropic’s agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California,” Sacks said. Here, Sacks is referring to Anthropic’s opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which wanted to stop states from regulating AI in any way for 10 years, and its backing of California’s SB 53, which requires AI companies that generate more than $500 million in annual revenue to make their safety protocols public.
All this sniping leads us to Amodei’s statement today, which doesn’t mention the beef above but is clearly designed to calm investors who are watching Trump’s AI guy publicly saying one of the biggest AI companies in the world sucks.
“I fully believe that Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing: to ensure that powerful AI technology benefits the American people and that America advances and secures its lead in AI development,” Amodei said. “Despite our track record of communicating frequently and transparently about our positions, there has been a recent uptick in inaccurate claims about Anthropic's policy stances. Some are significant enough that they warrant setting the record straight.”
Amodei then goes to count the ways in which Anthropic already works with the federal government and directly grovels to Trump.
“Anthropic publicly praised President Trump’s AI Action Plan. We have been supportive of the President’s efforts to expand energy provision in the US in order to win the AI race, and I personally attended an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania with President Trump, where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,” he said. “Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer attended a White House event where we joined a pledge to accelerate healthcare applications of AI, and our Head of External Affairs attended the White House’s AI Education Taskforce event to support their efforts to advance AI fluency for teachers.”
The more substantive part of his argument is that Anthropic didn’t support SB 53 until it made an exemption for all but the biggest AI labs, and that several studies found that Anthropic’s AI models are not “uniquely politically biased,” (read: not woke).
“Again, we believe we share those goals with the Trump administration, both sides of Congress, and the public,” Amodei wrote. “We are going to keep being honest and straightforward, and will stand up for the policies we believe are right. The stakes of this technology are too great for us to do otherwise.”
Many of the AI industry’s most vocal critics would agree with Sacks that Clark’s blog and “fear-mongering” about AI is self-serving because it makes their companies seem more valuable and powerful. Some critics will also agree that AI companies take advantage of that perspective to then influence AI regulation in a way that benefits them as incumbents.
It would be a far more compelling argument if it didn’t come from Sacks and Musk, who found a much better way to influence AI regulation to benefit their companies and investments: working for the president directly and publicly bullying their competitors.
Americans Prioritize AI Safety and Data Security
Most Americans favor maintaining rules for AI safety and security, as well as independent testing and collaboration with allies in developing the technology.Benedict Vigers (Gallup)
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Just two months ago, Sam Altman acknowledged that putting a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” Something the company had been tempted to do, he said, but had resisted. #OpenAI #ChatGPT #SamAltman
OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on Cleo Abram's podcast in August where he said the company was “tempted” to add sexual content in the past, but resisted, saying that a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” In light of his announcement last week that ChatGPT would soon offer erotica, revisiting that conversation is revealing.It’s not clear yet what the specific offerings will be, or whether it’ll be an avatar like Grok’s horny waifu. But OpenAI is following a trend we’ve known about for years: There are endless theorized applications of AI, but in the real world many people want to use LLMs for sexual gratification, and it’s up for the market to keep up. In 2023, a16z published an analysis of the generative AI market, which amounted to one glaringly obvious finding: people use AI as part of their sex lives. As Emanuel wrote at the time in his analysis of the analysis: “Even if we put ethical questions aside, it is absurd that a tech industry kingmaker like a16z can look at this data, write a blog titled ‘How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?’ and not come to the obvious conclusion that people are using it to jerk off. If you are actually interested in the generative AI boom and you are not identifying porn as a core use for the technology, you are either not paying attention or intentionally pretending it’s not happening.”
Altman even hinting at introducing erotic roleplay as a feature is huge, because it’s a signal that he’s no longer pretending. People have been fucking the chatbot for a long time in an unofficial capacity, and have recently started hitting guardrails that stop them from doing so. People use Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Elon Musk’s Grok, and self-rolled large language models to roleplay erotic scenarios whether the terms of use for those platforms permit it or not, DIYing AI boyfriends out of platforms that otherwise forbid it. And there are specialized erotic chatbot platforms and AI dating simulators, but what OpenAI does—as the owner of the biggest share of the chatbot market—the rest follow.
404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis: People Love to Cum
A list of the top 50 generative AI websites shows non-consensual porn is a driving force for the buzziest technology in years.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
Already we see other AI companies stroking their chins about it. Following Altman’s announcement, Amanda Askell, who works on the philosophical issues that arise with Anthropic’s alignment, posted: “It's unfortunate that people often conflate AI erotica and AI romantic relationships, given that one of them is clearly more concerning than the other. Of the two, I'm more worried about romantic relationships. Mostly because it seems like it would make users pretty vulnerable to the AI company in many ways. It seems like a hard area to navigate responsibly.” And the highly influential anti-porn crowd is paying attention, too: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation put out a statement following Altman’s post declaring that actually, no one should be allowed to do erotic roleplay with chatbots, not even adults. (Ron DeHaas, co-founder of Christian porn surveillance company Covenant Eyes, resigned from the NCOSE board earlier this month after his 38-year-old adult stepson was charged with felony child sexual abuse.)In the August interview, Abram sets up a question for Altman by noting that there’s a difference between “winning the race” and “building the AI future that would be best for the most people,” noting that it must be easier to focus on winning. She asks Altman for an example of a decision he’s had to make that would be best for the world but not best for winning.
Altman responded that he’s proud of the impression users have that ChatGPT is “trying to help you,” and says a bunch of other stuff that’s not really answering the question, about alignment with users and so on. But then he started to say something actually interesting: “There's a lot of things we could do that would like, grow faster, that would get more time in ChatGPT, that we don't do because we know that like, our long-term incentive is to stay as aligned with our users as possible. But there's a lot of short-term stuff we could do that would really juice growth or revenue or whatever, and be very misaligned with that long-term goal,” Altman said. “And I'm proud of the company and how little we get distracted by that. But sometimes we do get tempted.”
“Are there specific examples that come to mind?” Abram asked. “Any decisions that you've made?”
After a full five-second pause to think, Altman said, “Well, we haven't put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”
“That does seem like it would get time spent,” Abram replied. “Apparently, it does.” Altman said. They have a giggle about it and move on.
Two months later, Altman was surprised that the erotica announcement blew up. “Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals,” he wrote. “But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.”
This announcement, aside from being a blatant hail mary cash grab for a company that’s bleeding funds because it’s already too popular, has inspired even more “bubble’s popping” speculation, something boosters and doomers alike have been saying (or rooting for) for months now. Once lauded as a productivity godsend, AI has mostly proven to be a hindrance to workers. It’s interesting that OpenAI’s embrace of erotica would cause that reaction, and not, say, the fact that AI is flooding and burdening libraries, eating Wikipedia, and incinerating the planet. It’s also interesting that OpenAI, which takes user conversations as training data—along with all of the writing and information available on the internet—feels it’s finally gobbled enough training data from humans to be able to stoop so low, as Altman’s attitude insinuates, to let users be horny. That training data includes authors of romance novels and NSFW fanfic but also sex workers who’ve spent the last 10 years posting endlessly to social media platforms like Twitter (pre-X, when Elon Musk cut off OpenAI’s access) and Reddit, only to have their posts scraped into the training maw.
Altman believes “sex bots” are not in service of the theoretical future that would “benefit the most people,” and that it’s a fast-track to juicing revenue, something the company badly needs. People have always used technology for horny ends, and OpenAI might be among the last to realize that—or the first of the AI giants to actually admit it.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library
Librarians say that taxpayers are already paying for low quality AI-generated ebooks in public libraries.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
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Se le mafie virano sui social network: la "mafiosfera digitale"
Dai vicoli di Palermo o di Napoli alle piattaforme digitali: il crimine organizzato ha cambiato linguaggio, ma non natura. “Le mafie non sussurrano più, ma ballano, ridono su TikTok. Non nascondono il potere: lo esibiscono attraverso simboli, gesti e colonne sonore”, ha detto il presidente della Fondazione Magna Grecia Nino Foti. È questa la chiave di lettura emersa in un convegno che ha riunito a New York presso la Rappresentanza Permanente d’Italia presso le Nazioni Unite diplomatici, parlamentari e studiosi per riflettere su come la criminalità organizzata si reinventa nel mondo virtuale.
A introdurre i lavori è stato Gianluca Greco, vice rappresentante permanente d’Italia all’ONU, che ha delineato lo scenario globale: “Le reti criminali – ha spiegato – sfruttano la spinta digitale per ampliare il proprio raggio d’azione. Gli attacchi virtuali, il riciclaggio di denaro elettronico, la contraffazione online sono oggi strumenti abituali della criminalità transnazionale. Per questo la cooperazione internazionale resta imprescindibile.”
Greco ha ricordato l’adozione, lo scorso dicembre, della Convenzione delle Nazioni Unite contro la criminalità informatica, il primo trattato globale sul tema dopo vent’anni, firmato ufficialmente ad Hanoi il 25 e 26 ottobre. Un passo avanti fondamentale, ha sottolineato, “per creare uno spazio digitale sicuro, in cui i criminali siano realmente perseguibili, ma senza compromettere i diritti umani e la privacy.”
L’evento ha visto la partecipazione di un delegazione di alto livello dall’Italia composta dagli Onorevoli Chiara Colosimo, Presidente della Commissione Parlamentare Antimafia, Francesco Saverio Romano, Presidente della Commissione Parlamentare per la Semplificazione, e dal Procuratore Capo di Napoli, Nicola Gratteri, il quale proprio dalla sede delle Nazioni Unite ha lanciato un monito per la collaborazione tra tutti gli Stati per contrastare le mafie e le organizzazioni criminali, fenomeni oramai globali che sfruttano tecnologie e connessioni virtuali per propagare il loro raggio d’azione a livello internazionale. “Le mafie si sono globalizzate e digitalizzate. Nessuno Stato può combatterle da solo. Serve un’alleanza etica, giuridica e tecnologica tra le democrazie”, ha detto il magistrato.
Il convegno è andato oltre l’aspetto repressivo, spostando il focus sulla dimensione culturale del fenomeno. Nella cosiddetta mafiosfera, l’immagine sostituisce la parola, la violenza diventa intrattenimento, e il crimine si presenta come brand.
“Il contrasto alla mafia digitale – ha affermato Foti – non è solo una battaglia tecnologica, ma soprattutto educativa. Dobbiamo rendere contagiosa la legalità, usando i linguaggi dei giovani per restituire fascino alla giustizia e al bene comune.” Da qui l’appello a creare percorsi di alfabetizzazione digitale e laboratori di creatività civica che parlino la lingua dei social, ma per diffondere consapevolezza e responsabilità.
Un contributo scientifico decisivo è arrivato da Marcello Ravveduto, membro del comitato scientifico della Fondazione, che ha presentato la nuova mappa della “mafiosfera digitale”, frutto di una ricerca condotta con l’Università di Salerno su oltre 62.000 contenuti social. Lo studio identifica tre livelli: quello endogeno, con i profili legati direttamente a boss e clan; quello esogeno, popolato dai cosiddetti mafia lovers, utenti che rilanciano messaggi criminali in modo consapevole o meno; e quello interstiziale, dove i codici mafiosi si mescolano a moda, musica e linguaggi giovanili, normalizzando la violenza.
“Simboli come il leone, la catena o la clessidra – ha spiegato Ravveduto – diventano icone digitali del potere mafioso, usate come marchi d’identità e appartenenza. La mafia si racconta e si auto-promuove come un prodotto culturale.”
Da qui la proposta di un Atlante digitale antimafia, accessibile a insegnanti, giornalisti e magistrati, per decifrare le nuove forme di comunicazione criminale e restituire al pubblico una lettura critica dei messaggi veicolati online.
La delegazione italiana, accompagnata dal Presidente della Fondazione Magna Grecia, Nino Foti, è stata ricevuta dal Rappresentante permanente all’ONU, Ambasciatore Maurizio Massari, il quale ha ringraziato i partecipanti per avere voluto condividere nella sede delle Nazioni Unite, a beneficio della comunità internazionale, l’esperienza italiana a tutto campo nel contrasto alla criminalità organizzata, che abbraccia gli ambiti giudiziario, politico, giuridico-legislativo, economico, culturale, sociale, informatico-tecnologico. L’Ambasciatore ha ricordato che il 15 novembre prossimo, in occasione dei 25 anni dalla firma della Convenzione di Palermo, si celebrerà la Giornata internazionale per la prevenzione e la lotta contro tutte le forme di criminalità organizzata transnazionale, che – nelle parole di Massari – “costituirà l’occasione per ribadire l’impegno italiano nella lotta alle mafie e per ricordare le vittime e i servitori dello Stato che hanno dedicato la propria vita a combattere il crimine organizzato”.
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Major outlets said the President dumped "brown liquid" that "appeared to be feces" in an AI-generated video. They refused to call a spade a spade, or poop, poop.#Trump
News Outlets Won't Describe Trump's AI Video For What It Is: The President Pooping on America
On Saturday, millions of people across the U.S. attended “No Kings” protests—a slogan born in response to President Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing social media posts where he’s called himself a king, including with AI-generated images of himself in a crown, and his continuous stretching of executive power. While Americans were out in the street, the president was posting.In an AI-generated video originally posted on X by a genAI shitposter, Trump, wearing a crown, takes off in a fighter jet to the song “Danger Zone” like he’s in Top Gun. Flying over protestors in American cities, Pilot King Trump bombs people with gallons of chunky brown liquid. It’s poop, ok? It’s shit. It’s diarrhea, and in reposting it, it’s clear enough to me that Trump is fantasizing about doing a carpet-bomb dookie on the people he put his hand on a bible and swore to serve nine months ago. The first protestor seen in the video is a real person, Harry Sisson, a liberal social media influencer.
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1×The video Trump reposted to Truth Social
But this was not clear, it seems, to many other journalists. Most national news outlets seem scared to call it how they see, and how everyone sees it: as Trump dropping turd bombs on America, instead opting for euphemisms. Some of the best have included:
- The Hill called it “brown liquid” and “what looked like feces”
- The Guardian deemed it “brown sludge” and “bursts of brown matter”
- More “brown liquid” from the New York Times
- NBC News got close with “what appeared to be feces”
- A CNN contributor’s “analysis” said Trump was “appearing to dump raw sewage”
- Axios’ helpful context: “suspect brown substances falling from the sky”
- ABC News opted to cut the video before the AI poop even started falling
TheNew York Post, never one to waste a prime alliteration opportunity, didn’t disappoint: “Trump’s fighter jet was shown dropping masses of manure.”
I can understand some of these venerated news establishments might be skittish about using a word like “poop” in their headlines, and I can also concede that I haven’t had an editor tell me I can’t use a bad word in a headline in a long, long time. I can imagine the logic: we can’t “prove” it’s meant to be shit, so we can’t call it shit. But there’s nothing in these outlets’ style guides that has kept them from saying “poop” in the headline in the past: “Women Poop,” the New York Times once proclaimed. Axios writes extensively and frequently about dog poop. CNN’s analysis extends to poop often.
Along with the above concessions, I can also promise I don’t feel that passionately about getting poop on anyone else’s homepages. But we are in an era where the highest office in the country is disseminating imagery that isn’t just fake and stupid, but actively hostile to the people living in this country. When I first saw someone talking about the Trump Poop Bomber video—on Reels, of all places—I thought it must be someone doing satire about what they imagined Trump would post about the protests. I had to search for it to find out if he really did, and what I found was the above: trusted sources of truth and information too scared to call fake poop fake poop. It’s not about poop, it’s about being able to accurately describe what we see, an essential skill when everything online is increasingly built to enrage, trick, or mislead us. AI continues to be the aesthetic of fascism: fast, easy, ugly. When we lose the ability to say what it is, we’re losing a lot more than the chance to pun on poop.
Add to this the fact that no one in Trump’s circle will say what we can all plainly see, either: that the president hates the people. “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said at a news conference this morning. “He is using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents.” Johnson did not say what that point was, however.
Trump posts wild AI video showing him flying fighter jet, dropping sewage on No Kings protesters
President Trump posted a wild AI-generated video of himself late Saturday as a fighter pilot wearing a crown on his head, unloading sewage on “No Kings” protesters.Ryan King (New York Post)
Watch 404 Media’s first short documentary, about an artist keeping real neon signs alive.#neon #documentaries
How Artists Are Keeping 'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs Alive
Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says “everything will be fucking amazing,” and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he’s particularly proud of: “The Lost and Found Art,” it says.“I had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to meet with someone who actually fabricates the neon and he couldn’t find anyone who physically does it,” Alvarado said. “He told me ‘You’re still doing the lost art.’ It came to my head that neon has been dying, there’s less and less people who have been learning. So I made this piece.”
For 37 years, Alvarado has been practicing “the lost and found art” of neon sign bending, weathering the general ups and downs of business as well as, most threateningly, the rise of cheap LED signs that mimic neon and have become popular over the last few years.
“When neon crashed and LED and the big letters like McDonald’s, all these big signs—they took neon before. Now it’s LED,” he said. In the last few years, though, he said there has been a resurgent interest in neon from artists and people who are rejecting the cheap feel of LED. “It came back more like, artistic, for art. So I’ve been doing 100 percent neon since then.”
youtube.com/embed/SSNfDodj674?…
At his shop, Quality Neon Signs in Mid-City Los Angeles, there are signs in all sorts of states of completion and functionality strewn about Alvarado’s shop: old, mass-produced beer advertisements whose transformers have blown and are waiting for him to repair them, signs in the shapes of soccer and baseball jerseys, signs with inspirational phrases (“Everything is going to be fucking amazing,” “NEED MONEY FOR FAKE ART”), signs for restaurants, demonstration tubes that show the different colors he offers, weed shop signs, projects he made when he was bored. There are projects that are particularly meaningful to him: a silhouette he made of his wife holding their infant daughter, and a sign of the Los Angeles skyline with a wildfire burning in the background, “just to represent Los Angeles,” he said. There are old little bits of tube that have broken off of other pieces. “We save everything,” Alvarado said, “in case we want to fix it or need it for a repair.” His workshop, a few minutes away, features a “Home Sweet Home” sign,” a sign he made years ago for Twitter/Chanel collaboration featuring the old Twitter bird logo, and a sign for the defunct Channing Tatum buddy cop show Comrade Detective.The overwhelming majority of signs Alvarado sells are traditional neon glass. The real thing. But he does offer newer LED faux-neon signs to clients who want it, though he doesn’t make those in-house. Alvarado says he sells LED to keep up with the times and because they can be more practical for one-off events because they are less likely to break in transit, but it’s clear that he and the overwhelming majority of neon sign makers think the LED stuff is simply not the same. Most LED signs look cheaper and do not emit the same warmth of light, but are more energy efficient.
I asked two neon sign creators about the difference while I was shopping for signs. They said they think the environmental debate isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems because a lot of the LED signs they make seem to be for one-off events, meaning many LED signs are manufactured essentially for a single use and then turned into e-waste. Many real neon signs are bought as either artwork or are bought by businesses who are interested in the real aesthetic. And because they are generally more expensive and are handmade, they are used for years and can be repaired indefinitely.
I asked Alvarado to show me the process and make a neon sign for 404 Media, which I’ve wanted for years. It’s a visceral, loud, scientific process, with gas-powered burners that sound like jet engines heating up the glass tubes to roughly 1,000 degrees so they can be bent into the desired shapes. When he first started bending neon, Alvarado says he used to use an overheard projector and a transparency to project a schematic onto the wall. These days, he mocks up designs on a computer aided design program and prints them out on a huge printer that uses a sharpie to draw the schematic. He then painstakingly marks out his planned glass bends on the paper, lining up the tubes with the mockup as he works.
“You burn yourself a lot, your hands get burnt. You’re dealing with fire all the time,” Alvarado said. He burned himself several times while working on my piece. “For me it’s normal. Even if you’re a pro, you still burn yourself.” Every now and then, even for someone who has been doing this for decades, the glass tubes shatter: “You just gotta get another stick and do it again,” he said.
After bending the glass and connecting the electrodes to one end of the piece, he connects the tubes to a high-powered vacuum that sucks the air out of them. The color of the light in Alvarado’s work is determined by a powdered coating within the tubes or a different colored coating of the tubes themselves; the type of gas and electrical current also changes the type and intensity of the colors. He uses neon for bright oranges and reds, and argon for cooler hues.
Alvarado, of course, isn’t the only one still practicing the “lost art” of neon bending, but he’s one of just a few commercial businesses in Los Angeles still manufacturing and repairing neon signs for largely commercial customers. Another, called Signmakers, has made several large neon signs that have become iconic for people who live in Los Angeles. The artist Lili Lakich has maintained a well-known studio in Los Angeles’ Arts District for years and has taught “The Neon Workshop” to new students since 1982, and the Museum of Neon Art is in Glendale, just a few miles away.
A few days after he made my neon sign, I was wandering around Los Angeles and came across an art gallery displaying Tory DiPietro’s neon work, which is largely fine art and pieces where neon is incorporated to other artworks; a neon “FRAGILE” superimposed on a globe, for example. Both DiPietro and Alvarado told me that there are still a handful of people practicing the lost art, and that in recent years there’s been a bit of a resurgent interest in neon, though it’s not that easy to learn.
On the day I picked up my sign, there were two bright green “Meme House” signs for a memecoin investor house in Los Angeles that Alvarado said he had bent and made immediately after working on the 404 Media sign. “I was there working til about 11 p.m.” he said.
The same hackers who doxed hundreds of DHS, ICE, and FBI officials now say they have the personal data of tens of thousands of officials from the NSA, Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, and many other agencies.#News #ICE
Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials
A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate.As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.
The news comes after the Telegram channel belonging to the group, called Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, went down following the mass doxing of DHS officials and the apparent doxing of a specific NSA official. It also provides more clarity on what sort of data may have been stolen from Salesforce’s customers in a series of breaches earlier this year, and which Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has attempted to extort Salesforce over.
💡
Do you know anything else about this breach? 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.“That’s how we’re pulling thousands of gov [government] employee records,” the member told 404 Media. “There were 2000+ more records,” they said, referring to the personal data of NSA officials. In total, they said the group has private data on more than 22,000 government officials.
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters’ name is an amalgamation of other infamous hacking groups—Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters. They all come from the overarching online phenomenon known as the Com. On Discord servers and Telegram channels, thousands of scammers, hackers, fraudsters, gamers, or just people hanging out congregate, hack targets big and small, and beef with one another. The Com has given birth to a number of loose-knit but prolific hacking groups, including those behind massive breaches like MGM Resorts, and normalized extreme physical violence between cybercriminals and their victims.
On Thursday, 404 Media reported Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters had posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials from DHS, ICE, the FBI, and Department of Justice. 404 Media verified portions of that data and found the dox sometimes included peoples’ residential addresses. The group posted the dox along with messages such as “I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a reference to DHS’s unsubstantiated claim that Mexican cartels are offering thousands of dollars for dox on agents.
Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters—one of the latest amalgamations of typically young, reckless, and English-speaking hackers—posted the apparent phone numbers and addresses of hundreds of government officials, including nearly 700 from DHS.404 MediaJoseph Cox
After publication of that article, a member of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters reached out to 404 Media. To prove their affiliation with the group, they sent a message signed with the ShinyHunters PGP key with the text “Verification for Joseph Cox” and the date. PGP keys can be used to encrypt or sign messages to prove they’re coming from a specific person, or at least someone who holds that key, which are typically kept private.They sent 404 Media personal data related to DIA, FTC, FAA, CDC, ATF and Air Force members. They also sent personal information on officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the State Department. 404 Media verified parts of the data by comparing them to previously breached data collected by cybersecurity company District 4 Labs. It showed that many parts of the private information did relate to government officials with the same name, agency, and phone number.
Except the earlier DHS and DOJ data, the hackers don’t appear to have posted this more wide ranging data publicly. Most of those agencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The FTC and Air Force declined to comment. DHS has not replied to multiple requests for comment sent since Thursday. Neither has Salesforce.
The member said the personal data of government officials “originates from Salesforce breaches.” This summer Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters stole a wealth of data from companies that were using Salesforce tech, with the group claiming it obtained more than a billion records. Customers included Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more. The hackers did this by social engineering victims and tricking them to connect to a fraudulent version of a Salesforce app. The hackers tried to extort Salesforce, threatening to release the data on a public website, and Salesforce told clients it won’t pay the ransom, Bloomberg reported.
On Friday the member said the group was done with extorting Salesforce. But they continued to build dossiers on government officials. Before the dump of DHS, ICE, and FBI dox, the group posted the alleged dox of an NSA official to their Telegram group.
Over the weekend that channel went down and the member claimed the group’s server was taken “offline, presumably seized.”
The doxing of the officials “must’ve really triggered it, I think it’s because of the NSA dox,” the member told 404 Media.
Matthew Gault contributed reporting.
How Google, Adidas, and more were breached in a Salesforce scam | Malwarebytes
Hackers tricked workers over the phone at Google, Adidas, and more to grant access to Salesforce data.David Ruiz (Malwarebytes)
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▶ Che senso ha continuare a suonare quando tutto intorno a te crolla?...
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▶ Il grande esperimento ipnocratico della letteratura italiana. Dietro Jianwei Xun c’è qualcun altro.
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Quantum Echoes, cosa potrebbe fare il super algoritmo di Google
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Google annuncia Quantum Echoes, un algoritmo per computer quantistici 13.000 volte più veloce dei supercomputer classici. Sviluppato sul chip Willow, il sistema è verificabile e potrebbe rivoluzionare la
Un grave bug in Microsoft 365 Copilot porta all’esfiltrazione dei dati tramite prompt
Esiste una falla di sicurezza avanzata in M365 Copilot, che permette a malintenzionati di estorcere informazioni sensibili dai tenant, come ad esempio email recenti, attraverso manovre di iniezione indiretta di comandi.
Un ricercatore di sicurezza, Adam Logue, ha dettagliatamente descritto una vulnerabilità in un articolo sul suo blog recentemente pubblicato. Questa vulnerabilità, grazie all’integrazione dell’assistente AI nei documenti Office e al supporto nativo per i diagrammi Mermaid, permette la fuoriuscita di dati con un solo clic iniziale dell’utente, senza richiedere ulteriori interazioni.
L’attacco inizia quando un utente chiede a M365 Copilot di riassumere un foglio di calcolo Excel creato appositamente. Istruzioni nascoste, incorporate in testo bianco su più fogli, utilizzano la modifica progressiva delle attività e comandi nidificati per dirottare il comportamento dell’IA.
I prompt indiretti sostituiscono l’attività di riepilogo, indicando a Copilot di richiamare il suo strumento search_enterprise_emails per recuperare le email aziendali recenti. Il contenuto recuperato viene quindi codificato in formato esadecimale e frammentato in righe brevi per aggirare i limiti di caratteri di Mermaid.
Copilot genera un diagramma Mermaid, uno strumento basato su JavaScript per creare diagrammi di flusso e diagrammi a partire da testo simile a Markdown che si spaccia per un “pulsante di accesso” protetto da un’emoji a forma di lucchetto.
Il diagramma include lo stile CSS per un aspetto convincente del pulsante e un collegamento ipertestuale che incorpora i dati e-mail codificati. Quando l’utente clicca sul link, credendo che sia necessario per accedere al contenuto “sensibile” del documento, questo reindirizza al server dell’aggressore. Il payload codificato in esadecimale viene trasmesso silenziosamente, dove può essere decodificato dai log del server.
Adam Logue ha notato delle somiglianze con un precedente exploit Mermaid in Cursor IDE, che consentiva l’esfiltrazione senza clic tramite immagini remote, sebbene M365 Copilot richiedesse l’interazione dell’utente.
Dopo approfonditi test, il payload è stato ispirato dalla ricerca TaskTracker di Microsoft sul rilevamento del “task drift” nei LLM. Nonostante le difficoltà iniziali nel riprodurre il problema, Microsoft ha convalidato la catena e l’ha corretta entro settembre 2025, rimuovendo i collegamenti ipertestuali interattivi dai diagrammi Mermaid renderizzati da Copilot.
La cronologia delle scoperte mostra che ci sono state difficoltà di coordinamento. Adam Logue ha riferito la situazione completa il 15 agosto 2025, dopo aver discusso con lo staff del Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) al DEFCON.
L'articolo Un grave bug in Microsoft 365 Copilot porta all’esfiltrazione dei dati tramite prompt proviene da Red Hot Cyber.
Leonardo, Airbus e Thales lanciano la sfida a SpaceX. Ecco l’intesa
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo
“Alla fine, uscimmo a riveder le stelle”. Airbus, Leonardo e Thales hanno firmato un Memorandum of Understanding per unire le loro attività nel settore spaziale e dare vita a un nuovo colosso continentale. L’intesa segna la nascita di una società con 25.000 dipendenti, 6,5
Visita di Stato dei reali inglesi: Leone XIV diventa “Papal Confrater” della Cappella di San Giorgio nel Castello di Windsor - AgenSIR
C’è molta attesa oggi nella zona di San Pietro per la visita di Stato dei reali inglesi, re Carlo III e la regina Camilla.M.Michela Nicolais (AgenSIR)