404 Media

2026-08-08 10:00:26

Crab Odyssey: Crustacean Wandered the Seas in a Bottle for Months, Scientists Find

Welcome back to another special edition of the Abstract! As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I have saved up some of the most mind-boggling studies from 2026 so far to share while I’m out on vacation.

With that said, here are the studies this year that hit the bottle, went hog wild, slithered into prominence, and double-detonated.

First, a tale of survival on the high seas from a trash-bound crab. Then: a hybrid emerges from radioactive fallout, a snake in the grass (and lots of other places), and a surprise from a space jellyfish.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Next week, we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Until then, enjoy the last special summer edition of the Abstract!

Tell me about a complicated crab

Sato, Hajime et al. “Swimming crab in a bottle: A two-month drift on the ocean surface while entrapped.” Ecosphere.

In the summer of 2022, scientists conducting a boat survey off the coast of Sesoko Island, Japan came across a floating bottle of Shaoxing cooking wine carrying a lonely female crab.

It appears that this three-spot swimming crab (Portunus sanguinolentus) entered the bottle as a youngster and then grew too large to get back out again. Judging by its size, the crab spent at least one or two months drifting across the seas, like a crustacean Odysseus consigned to Poseidon’s whims. Though the scientists released the crab, she did not get to enjoy her freedom for long as she was promptly dissected in order to reconstruct her journey, according to a study published in April.

“We hypothesized that the crab survived by hunting juvenile fish that entered the bottle,” said researchers led by Hajime Sato of Hiroshima University. “The stomach contents revealed that the crab consumed the same fish species…observed near the bottle. Green and brown algae…most likely growing inside the bottle, were also identified in the diet.”
(a) A plastic bottle immediately after being collected offshore Sesoko Island, Okinawa, Japan on July 15, 2022. (b) A large, live swimming crab, Portunus sanguinolentus, entrapped inside the bottle. (c) Several juvenile fishes were collected together with the bottle. Stomach contents of the crab included (d) fish scale, (e) fish bone fragment, and (f) algal fragments. The scale bar indicates 300 μm. Image: Hajime Sato.
The team likened the crab to the story “The Salamander” by the writer Masuji Ibuse, which tells the tale of a salamander that grew too large to escape its burrow. The story also reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes from a study: Anacondas will sometimes slither into chicken coops, feed on all the poultry, and then become so engorged that they’re unable to escape.

In addition to offering a timeless warning about feasting in confined spaces, the study is a testament to the negative impacts of anthropological debris on wildlife. Who knows how many other animals are out there in the wild, trapped in our trash?

“The bottle was made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which is buoyant in seawater and can persist in the environment for several decades (>28 years) while retaining its shape,” the researchers noted. “Given its narrow-neck design, we hypothesize that such bottles may have similar impacts on other crustaceans and fishes associated with drifting objects.”

“Although little evidence has suggested that drifting debris has an immediate and direct impact on crab populations,” they concluded, “shouldn't we listen faithfully and carefully to the tragic messages from small marine organisms?”

In other words, not every message in a bottle is an antiquated handwritten letter—some are living symbols of our changing world.

In other news…

Beware the crossbred radioactive boars

Anderson, Donovan et al. “Maternal lineage of rewilded swine in Fukushima contributes to faster introgression in wild boar populations.” The Journal of Forest Ecology.

The tale of the bottled crab is not the only study this year that sounds like a dark children’s allegory—indeed, it’s not even the only one from Japan.

In January, researchers reported on the emergence of hybrid pig lineages made up of domestic swine that escaped in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster and began breeding with wild boars.

The feral swine have introduced genes into wild boar populations through a hybridization process known as genetic introgression. The hybrid population has skyrocketed both due to the relative absence of human interference in the fallout zone, and because swine breed much more often, and produce larger litters, than wild boars.
Photograph of suspected hybrids between domestic swine and a wild boar, taken in the evacuation zone on August 31, 2017. Arrows indicate individuals with varying coat colors that are suspected to be hybrids. Image: Hiroko Ishiniwa/Mukogawa Women’s University
Genes “introduced by escaped swine following the FDNPP accident have persisted and spread within wild boar populations through repeated backcrossing and range expansion,” said researchers led by Donovan Anderson of Hirosaki University. “The results underscore the ecological significance of hybrid individuals as indicators of post-accident population recovery and gene flow dynamics in a contaminated landscape.”

Did I mention that the hybrid hogs are also radioactive? Their bodies contain high levels of cesium isotopes from their habitat, even after more than a decade. This phenomenon of radioactive wildlife has been observed at other contaminated sites, such as Chernobyl, offering yet another eerie glimpse of the persistent human impact on the natural world.

Snakes on multiple ecological planes

Simões, Tiago R. et al. “Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes.” Nature.

It’s time to return to one of my all-time favorite beats—SNAKE NEWS. Snakes have evolved into a dazzling array of species that range in length from a few inches to 36 feet and occupy wildly different habitats. But the origins of these legless lifeforms have long been shrouded in mystery, as scientists have debated whether early snakes first emerged in water, in underground burrows, on land, or falling from the sky (just kidding).

Scientists have now discovered that the answer is basically: all of the above. By studying rare fossilized remains of snakes—including one exceptionally-preserved new species that lived 85 million years ago—a team found that the earliest snakes lived in burrows (fossorial), above ground (non-fossorial), and in marine habitats, challenging the idea that they slithered into existence from one type of environment, according to a study published in July.
Newly discovered Cretaceous snake Tametara mirim from Brazil, which clarified snake origins. Image: Simões, Tiago R. et al. “
“Snake origins therefore were not shaped by a single, linear event as traditionally thought,” said researchers led by Tiago R. Simões of Princeton University. “Instead, early snake evolution involved repeated shifts in habitat use and sensory ecology, characterizing a dynamic ecological history in which multiple lineages independently explored fossorial and non-fossorial lifestyles.”

How appropriate that the evolutionary history of this amazing group should be non-linear and, dare I say, serpentine. This has been SNAKE NEWS.

A brilliant binary blowup

Michailidis, Miltiadis et al. Shared cloud interactions unveil a candidate binary-system supernova pair with no known analogue. Nature Communications.

What’s better than one star blowing up? That’s right: two stars blowing up right next to each other, a situation that has been reported for the first time in a study published in July.

For more than a century, astronomers have marvelled at a vast dust cloud called IC 443, also known as the Jellyfish Nebula, which is all that is left of a massive star that went supernova thousands of years ago.

Located about 6,000 light years from Earth, this beautiful nebula has been visible to telescopes since the 19th century. But a team only recently discovered that another supernova remnant, called G189.6+3.3, appears to occupy the same space thanks to long term gamma-ray observations captured by NASA’s Fermi telescope. The results suggest that the objects were once a pair of stars that orbited each other in a binary system before they both exploded.
IC 443, aka the Jellyfish Nebula. Image: Wikipedia/Siderevs nuncivs
“IC 443 is one of the most extensively studied supernova remnants in the Galaxy, yet the surrounding region remains shrouded in mystery,” said researchers led by Miltiadis Michailidis of Stanford University. “Here we show that 16 years of Fermi-LAT observations uncover…gamma-ray emission from G189.6+3.3, a source long hidden in the shadow of the much brighter IC 443.”

The discovery “bolsters the hypothesis that these two remnants are part of a binary system, both resulting from separate supernova events,” an observation that has “no known analogue” in all of observational astronomy.

It’s a reminder that even the most famous and well-observed celestial objects can still contain amazing hidden surprises for those patient enough to look.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.!

ChatGPT May Be Linked to 'Cognitive Debt,' New Study Finds

A preprint study found that participants who used an LLM to write essays performed worse “at all levels” than those who didn’t.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-07 15:27:49

Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Flock blogging, "rare" books, and Jesus Christ.

EMANUEL: I was out last Friday so I want to talk about the story I published two weeks ago about AI companies buying printed books so they can scan them for training data.

The story has gone mega viral on X, but mostly in the form of a post from an engagement farming account that both misrepresented my article and didn’t properly link back to our website. This is frustrating because it means a lot of other people siphoned traffic from our site and also because it caused a fair bit of confusion about what is happening.

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Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-07 14:55:33

City That Arrested Person for Clapping at Data Center Meeting Moves to Virtual Meetings for 'Public Safety'

The small town that arrested a person who clapped during a city council meeting about a hyperscale data center held its meeting on Wednesday virtually and had no public comment period in the name of “public safety.” It says it will do the same for another meeting later this month.

The city, Emporia, Kansas, announced the change just two days before the meeting.

“In the interest of public safety, the Emporia City Commission meetings scheduled for Wednesday, August 5, 2026, and Wednesday, August 19, 2026, will be conducted virtually,” Emporia said in a post about the change on Facebook. “No public comment period will be provided during either meeting.” Then it shared the city’s email and phone number for citizens who wanted to voice concerns privately. Emporia’s police chief told KVOE News that city leaders had received death threats.
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“The City remains committed to conducting the public’s business in an open and transparent manner while taking reasonable measures to protect the safety of elected officials, City staff, and members of the public,” the post said. “The City appreciates the public's understanding and cooperation as it implements these temporary measures while ensuring the continuity of City business.”

Citizens upset about the data center and no longer allowed to make a public comment gathered outside Emporia’s municipal auditorium to protest on Wednesday. Lux Claridge, the person arrested for clapping, attended the protest and told 404 Media that both the protest and the virtual city commission meeting went well. “The commissioners voted unanimously to get our petition on the ballot measure to ban high-impact data centers to a judge. They said that doing otherwise could open up the city to a lawsuit but didn't really elaborate on who, why, or how,” they said.

Some citizens in Emporia are upset about a proposed gigawatt data center called the Flint Hills Digital Campus that would sit on 1,000 acres of prairie land. Zoning and city commission meetings have been held about the project, during which citizens have pushed back during the public comment periods of meetings. During a July 22 meeting, a city leader ordered Claridge to be arrested for clapping. Police charged Claridge with disorderly conduct and interference with police.

On Wednesday, the city commission streamed its meeting on the city website. Residents could watch, but not participate. The commission voted 5 - 0 to send the petition to a judge to see if Kansas law would allow that kind of restriction.

“I would like to see it go to the courts, that way it has an outside decision, so that we don't get ourselves entangled in something that could come back later and we'd be sued over,” Emporia mayor Becky Smith said.

“I think if you accept it or decline it, you’re opening yourself up to a legal battle either way so let’s just send it straight to a judge,” commissioner Erren Harter said.

Claridge said the reason the commission meetings had gone virtual and closed public comment was that members of the commission had reported receiving death threats. “This was also happening days leading up to my arrest, but the threats seem to have ramped up. While I don't doubt that there are credible threats, my big question is on how many there are and from where they are coming,” they said. “Mayor Smith did mention in yesterday's meeting that the threats don't seem to really be coming from locals but ‘it only takes one’ to ruin a meeting so they went virtual. I feel like we're being punished for the actions of outsiders.”

“I'm not so upset about going virtual, it makes sense, but back it up with examples of these threats. I'm more upset that they opted to close public comment and I don't understand why,” Claridge added.

The commissioners will meet, virtually, again on August 19 but they have not yet published the agenda on the city’s website. The commission did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

With ‘credible threats’ aimed at city commissioners and staff, Emporia city meetings Wednesday, Aug 19 to be held virtually

The Emporia City Commission is meeting Wednesday. It will not meet in person. A news release from the city say...

^{Chuck Samples (KVOE)}

404 Media

2026-08-07 12:00:26

Flock Pitched a Plan To Turn Uber and Lyft Drivers Into Roaming Surveillance Vehicles

Flock planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed, essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media.

The document provides more details on Flock’s planned partnership with Nexar, a popular dashcam company. 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan. The presentation shows Flock was actively pitching this partnership, and its use of Uber and Lyft drivers, to potential customers right around the time 404 Media reported on it.

💡
Do you work for Flock, Axon, or a similar company? 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.

Flock told 404 Media in an email it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still shows Flock’s ambitious plan to conscript rideshare and delivery drivers to collect license plate data for its network. It is not clear whether Uber or Lyft, or drivers working for those apps, would have been aware of the data collection.

“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the presentation, written by Flock to present to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August, reads. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.”

Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia, resident who obtained the presentation through a public records request, shared the document with 404 Media.
Image: screenshot of the presentation.
Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are usually stationary cameras installed on tall poles that constantly scan the license plate, color, make, and brand of every vehicle that drives past. The Nexar partnership would have made those data collection efforts mobile. Axon, the law enforcement contracting giant that also sells ALPR cameras, sells some of its cameras to be installed in police officers’ roaming cars. Vigilant Solutions and the Digital Recognition Network (DRN), two ALPR companies now owned by Motorola, perform similar license plate data collection through cameras in vehicles belonging to repossession agencies.

Nexar sells various different models of dashcams providing front, cabin, and rear views, and already can provide “clear license plate capture with Full HD video,” according to its website. Nexar markets the cameras to rideshare drivers and also “commuters,” “long-distance drivers,” and “casual drivers.”
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In September, 404 Media reported that a hacker broke into Nexar and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken by customers’ cameras. Those included footage of people driving around sensitive Department of Defense locations.

Flock has explored obtaining other unusual datasets too. Last May, 404 Media reported Flock was building a massive people lookup tool that would use hacked data to “jump from LPR to person,” according to leaked audio. Flock scrapped those plans after 404 Media’s coverage and internal pressure.

Neither Uber nor Lyft responded to a request for comment. Neither did Nexar.

In May, 404 Media reported a company called BusPatrol, that has cameras installed in tens of thousands of school buses, plans to turn those cameras into ALPRs and give access to that data to law enforcement.

Flock Decides Not to Use Hacked Data in People Search Tool

The move comes after internal pressure and 404 Media’s reporting.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-06 19:13:34

Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AI’s Soaring Cost

SAP, one of the world’s biggest software companies, suspended most travel and hiring last month because of AI’s soaring cost, with exceptions only being made for AI-related travel or hires, according to an internal SAP email obtained by 404 Media.

Bloomberg reported on the email and the freezes in July, but a current SAP employee said the bans are still in effect. The employee said the company had a global employee meeting recently where this was brought up again. They added SAP is currently rolling out a newly created AI tool to the entire company “which I can only imagine massively increases the costs.” 404 Media granted the source anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

The email highlights how companies both big and small are coming to grips with the reality of AI’s cost. Rather than being a massive cost saver, in some cases companies are throttling employees’ AI use as it spirals out of control, and scrambling to find other ways to keep costs down.

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Do you work at a company dealing with AI's costs? 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.

“As AI reshapes the future of our industry, we are making significant investments in the products and AI capabilities we build, complemented by strategic acquisitions in data and AI where we need additional expertise and technology,” the email, sent by SAP leadership to all SAP employees worldwide on July 1, reads. “We are also investing in how we consume AI across SAP, with token usage and related costs increasing as more AI-driven scenarios go live. Taken together, this makes it even more important that we focus our spending on what matters most to future proof SAP.”

As part of this, SAP needs to “be disciplined in how we spend,” the email continues. That includes focusing “new hiring on selected profiles only [emphasis in original], mainly core AI roles, that are critical for our long-term success.”

The cost cutting measures also include travel. “Going forward, we will put a pause to our internal travel,” the email continues. “Customer-facing trips and travel that is directly related to our AI development efforts around our ‘All in on AI’ program as well as travel to deliver mission-critical Al trainings for employees will continue.”

The email closes with a paragraph on how “These measures are not about doing less.” Instead, “They are about making deliberate choices: investing where it matters most — in our people, our customers, and the technologies that define the next era of enterprise software — and being careful and responsible in areas where we can save. By balancing where we invest and where we save, we ensure that SAP remains strong, competitive, and well-positioned for the long term.”

SAP did not respond to a request for comment.

404 Media has been reporting on how various companies across all sorts of industries are responding to the climbing cost of AI. Citi, for example, shut off access to certain AI models. Atlassian ended unlimited use of AI tools and introduced a dashboard for employees to track their usage. Adobe decided not to renew unlimited Claude access. Microsoft introduced budget limits for AI and said “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for.”

In leaked audio, an Accenture employee said they were seeing “soaring token spend.” Accenture was trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through their AI budgets by using AI for trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, the audio showed.

In some cases, companies even made Claude and Codex talk like a caveman to limit the tools’ verbose responses and lower costs.

404 Media

2026-08-06 16:49:49

Scientists Designed a Virtual Alien Lifeform to Hunt for Extraterrestrials

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Scientists have designed a virtual model of an alien cell and dropped it onto a hypothetical exoplanet to see how it behaves, an approach that could help astronomers recognize signs of extraterrestrial life on distant worlds, according to a recent study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The results revealed new insights about how microbes that produce methane gas, known as methanogens, might evolve on different exoplanets, such as Earth-sized ocean worlds or a class of hypothetical giant “Hycean planets” that host global oceans and hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

Predicting the impacts that methanogens might have on their environments could help scientists recognize potential signs of life, known as biosignatures, in the skies of worlds outside of our solar system.

Whereas many past studies have speculated about what forms of life might evolve on a particular type of exoplanet, this approach flips the idea on its head by starting with a general cell model and then considering how it might evolve in different biospheres.

“This is a kind of plausible life that's very unconstrained by Earth-based conditions,” said Arwen Nicholson, an astrophysicist at Exeter University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We can put it into different environments, and then see: What other effects does it have?”

The idea, she explained, is to simplify one aspect of the hugely complex search for alien life .

“This is a generalized idea of what biology would roughly do that we can then put in different places to try and start getting biosignature predictions ideally for different planets, or to understand what we're seeing from the telescopes,” said Nicholson.

It’s possible that the first lifeforms to emerge on Earth were methanogens that thrived some four billion years ago when our planet was far more depleted in oxygen. These microbes still exist in a wide variety of ecological niches today. Unlike photosynthetic life, which requires sunlight for energy, methanogens can run on chemical energy in a process known as chemosynthesis. As a result, methanogens are adaptable and provide a useful model for considering the emergence of life in a diverse array of habitats, including dark regions that receive no direct starlight.

“We do know that the Earth's early biosphere did have this big component of it that was producing methane and consuming methane,” Nicholson said. “That gives us a starting point to look at other planets. It's a reaction we know works. It works on Earth, and it's something that is thought to work in environments that are very different to Earth.”

To that end, the team developed a baseline model of a spherical methanogen microbial cell and tinkered with different cell sizes, life cycles, and environmental effects that might evolve in various alien biospheres.

The results revealed a host of insights, including that a planet’s levels of hydrogen and methane are sensitive to the microbe’s particular features. In this way, “life will act to ‘erase’ abiotic aspects of their environment” by transforming the composition of gasses in the atmosphere in ways that could be detectable to astronomers, according to the study.

The team also speculated that resource competition on alien worlds would likely favor methanogens that are smaller and longer-lived, which could outcompete similar species that are shorter-lived, larger, or require more energy. But while these clues may help scientists spot likely biosignatures in the future, it will be a challenge to actually predict what sort of lifeform is producing those signals.

“You could have different life forms in your ocean and they would look the same in terms of a biosignature,” Nicholson said. “You could have a single film of some algae covering the whole ocean, or a little amoeba, or maybe something else. I thought that was quite interesting. It almost frees us up from making too many assumptions of what alien life would look like, because how are we going to know?”

“We can use spherical microbes as a representation, but even if we found a biosignature, even if it all made sense, and we found life, we still wouldn't actually know what they look like,” she added.

Nicholson and her colleagues plan to continue this line of research by modeling simplified cells of photosynthetic life and predicting their impact on different exoplanet environments. Ultimately, these studies will help scientists distinguish between genuine biosignatures and complex atmospheric chemistry that arises from geological activity.

It’s also worth preparing for the rather excruciating possibility that we find clear biosignatures on some farflung exoplanet and are never able to learn much more about them. In science fiction, we are used to aliens showing up on Earth or sending us obviously artificial messages. But it’s more likely that we would discover gassy signs of life in a distant world’s skies and then have to accept that we might never learn its specific nature.

“We don't live in sci-fi,” said Nicholson. “Sci-fi is super cool. I love it too. But the reality is, we're looking at a habitable planet like our own. If we find anything, they will be life forms embedded in their world, just like we're embedded in our world.”

“It's a super exciting time to be in astrobiology again with all of this data, and it's super neat that people are so interested in it as well,” she concluded.

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404 Media

2026-08-06 13:14:07

Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers

A handful of cities across the U.S. have ditched Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and immediately replaced them with equivalent systems from law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to local media reports and government documents from around the country. Axon, for example, advertises AI-powered cameras that attach to an existing streetlamp and are designed to completely blend in with their surroundings, and also collects license plate data with cameras installed inside police officers’ patrol vehicles.

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Do you work at Axon? Do you know anything else about its technology or expansion? 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.

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Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-05 14:50:49

Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed

Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal. They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested on marijuana possession charges, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media.

The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges. But the criminal complaint makes clear that beyond the bail jumping and domestic violence charges, police specifically studied Abrams-Phillips’ interstate travel to create the pretext for searching his car for marijuana. The bail jumping charge was dismissed; Abrams-Phillips was found guilty only of weed possession in the case, according to the court records.
An excerpt from the "Probable Cause" section of the court records.
The complaint explains that Abrams-Phillips was tracked via Flock’s network over the course of the day to determine that he drove from Wisconsin to Michigan, a “known source state for marijuana as it is legal there,” the complaint states, adding that previous Flock hits indicated that he “travels to Michigan frequently.” Police note that, using Flock, they were able to track Abrams-Phillips driving from Wisconsin to Michigan, then back to Wisconsin over the course of several hours, where he was pulled over and arrested. The Flock searches and arrests happened in April 2025.

“The vehicle was observed hitting flock on several occasions to include 41 northbound from Brown Rd, 41NB and County Line in Marinette [Wisconsin], and 41 NB on Bridge St. going into Michigan. Based on prior flock hits, the vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there,” the charging document notes. “Around 3:56 p.m., the vehicle was seen on Flock heading southbound on interstate 41 towards Green Bay [Wisconsin]. Deputies made a coordinated effort to intercept the vehicle on 41 from Brown Rd. Deputy Kowalski initiated a traffic stop on the vehicle as the driver matched the description of Edward.”

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After pulling him over, the complaint states that police “detected the odor of what he knew to be raw marijuana coming from inside the vehicle.”

The case is an example of Flock cameras being used to arrest a wanted alleged criminal suspected of committing a violent crime. But it is also an example of police surveillance overreach in that the cameras were specifically used to create a pretext to tack on additional petty crimes based primarily on where a person’s vehicle had traveled. There is a long history of surveillance technology being used in problematic ways in seemingly unsympathetic cases, which eventually creates a slippery slope where the technology can be used against the masses or to enforce against very minor crimes.

It is not difficult to imagine police in one state using Flock to track a resident of their state cross state lines to, for example, obtain an abortion that is legal in one state but not in another. Last year, 404 Media reported on police in Texas who searched more than 80,000 cameras across Flock’s nationwide network for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.

The case is also particularly concerning considering that Flock cameras have popped up outside of weed dispensaries in Michigan. The JARS Cannabis dispensary in Madison Heights, Michigan, went viral this week for putting a “No Flock Zone” sign in front of a Flock camera in the dispensary’s parking lot. “We share our community’s concerns about increased surveillance, which is why we placed the No Flock Zone sign in front of the camera to block its ability to record,” the dispensary said in a public statement. “JARS does not control the camera or have access to any of the data it collects … after we installed our No Flock Zone sign, the city issued a demand letter warning of sanctions if we did not remove it within 48 hours.” But that Flock camera exists specifically to monitor the license plates of people who come and go to the dispensary. It was required by Madison Heights as one of the conditions for giving a dispensary license to JARS: “[The dispensary] must place a FLOCK license plate scanning camera system at the entrance of the customer parking lot prior to commencement of retail sales, and it will give the Madison Heights Police Department unhindered live access to the FLOCK camera, camera footage, and any and all data, which must remain operational at all times.”

Jars cannabis dispensary responded to the Flock camera put up in their parking lot in Michigan 💪 pic.twitter.com/77l1yqA6kA
— Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) July 31, 2026

Flock Audit Reports covering searches done by the Brown County, Wisconsin Sheriff’s Department from April 26, 2025 show that the department used Flock dozens of times that day, often searching thousands of Flock cameras at a time (it is not clear which specific searches were done for Abrams-Phillips’ car, because many of the searches simply list “warrant” or “traffic inv” as the reason).

Tuesday, Flock executives tweeted video examples of their cameras being used to rescue abducted children, in what appears to be a new marketing strategy for the company. “Every child in this video is home tonight because Flock gave officers the right information at the right second,” Flock’s Chief Strategy Officer Rahul Sidhu tweeted. “That’s the mission. That’s the whole company. I wouldn't trade that for anything.”
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Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) on X

^{Orwell Day (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-08-05 14:23:24

Podcast: This Man Might Go to Prison for Wiping His Phone

We start this week with Joseph’s article about Samuel Tunick, the man charged with allegedly wiping his phone before DHS officials could search it. It’s a wild case with a lot to unpack. After the break, Jason tells us all about a TikTok Shop scheme powered by AI. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about possibly the dumbest AI tool ever made.
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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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• ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠
• ⁠‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone⁠
• ⁠Inside an AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements Recalled By the FDA⁠
• ⁠Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images⁠

Inside an AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements Recalled By the FDA

How a company called Rosabella used AI content to market its supplements: "If you’re trying to sell health products to a 50-year-old, well, make your avatar 50 years old."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-05 13:46:30

Apple's ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users’ Real IP Addresses

A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say.

The Private Relay leak is the second issue to recently impact Apple’s paid-for privacy products. Last month 404 Media reported a bug in Apple’s Hide My Email feature was actually revealing peoples’ real email addresses. Apple knew about that issue for more than a year before fixing it.

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Apple's ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users’ Real IP Addresses

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-04 17:41:56

The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and “child safety.” The bills each have their own issues when it comes to privacy, data collection, parental rights, and free speech. But one bill, the partisan Republican SCREEN Act, is a Christian nationalist nightmare.

Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act in February 2025, alongside exclusively Republican cosponsors and supporters Senators John Curtis, Jim Banks, and Representative Mary Miller.

The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as “harmful to minors” to verify visitors’ ages. It defines “harmful to minors” as content that “depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;” is “obscene” or “child pornography;” or “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.”

Unlike the many laws now in place around the U.S. that apply to sites made up of at least one third adult content, like porn sites and some social media platforms, SCREEN would place the burden and risk of verifying users’ ages to every website on the internet that falls under the law, which would be most sites with user-generated content and also mainstream entertainment platforms like Netflix. It also attacks virtual private networks (VPNs) by requiring sites to verify based on IP addresses; many people in states that have age verification laws in place use VPNs to get around submitting sensitive personal data like ID and biometrics to a smattering of third-party websites in use today. Critics say the SCREEN Act would be a privacy and free speech disaster.

And the agenda of its sponsors is clear: “Internet pornography has infected our culture and corroded the vulnerable minds of America’s kids, with the average age of initial exposure being 12 years old. That’s appalling,” Banks said in Lee’s press release.

A number of religious, conservative, Christian nationalist, and anti-pornography groups are in support of the bill, according to the press release from Lee’s office. They include the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (which recently represented a Kansas mother who sued multiple porn sites because her son found her old laptop and used it to watch Chaturbate), the National Decency Coalition, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (which is “working to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics,” according to its website), the Family Policy Alliance (whose stated mission is to “advance biblical values through civic engagement”), the Family Research Council (whose “mission is to serve in the kingdom of God by championing faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview”), and many more.

Heritage Action, a conservative lobbying group and one of the organizations Lee lists in support of the SCREEN Act, is a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025. Heritage Action “works with lawmakers to implement Heritage Foundation solutions,” according to the Heritage Foundation website. This is important because of how Project 2025, the playbook for right-wing and extremist conservative leadership, has influenced policies and lawmaking in America in the last few years of the Trump Administration. That stretches from attacks on programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, to attacks on trans and queer people, to turning the FBI into a political entity.

Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
Missouri’s age verification law, enacted on November 30, is the halfway mark for the sweep of age verification laws across the country.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

One of Project 2025’s stated goals is to redefine and eradicate pornography: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection,” the playbook says, calling for imprisonment of pornographers but also educators and librarians. “And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

The Senate Commerce Committee will also debate and mark up the text of the Youth AI Privacy Act which would require chatbots to disclose they’re not human among other features like limiting data retention; the CHATBOT Act which would require AI companies to build “family account” systems where parents can monitor kids’ activity; the Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act which would create a federal study into toys that include AI components; and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

KOSA would impose a legal “duty of care” on social media platforms to prevent and mitigate promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for products like tobacco. KOSA has been introduced, and failed, multiple times since its first introduction in 2022; it has bipartisan lawmaker support but is extremely unpopular across all sides of the political spectrum among groups that care about freedom of speech because of its potential to increase censorship.

New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.
Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (again) last week, which would criminalize porn at the federal level.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

“Whatever disclaimers and exceptions the bill includes, the practical effect is unchanged,” the Electronic Freedom Foundation recently wrote about KOSA. “When platforms face liability for content that someone later claims contributed to harms like anxiety, eating disorders, or substance use, the safest response is to remove lawful speech or shut down forums discussing those topics altogether.”

Unlike KOSA and many of the other age verification laws that have spread across the country, the SCREEN Act does not have bipartisan support. It’s the latest in Lee’s repeated attempts to criminalize content he and his co-sponsors personally consider immoral. Last year, Lee introduced the now-stalled Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) for the third time. IODA would change the 1973 “Miller Test” for determining what qualifies as obscene, and seeks to make all pornography illegal at the federal level. “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee said in a press release. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-04 16:17:16

Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’

Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company’s goal.

This makes Microsoft one of the last major companies to rein in its employees’ expensive AI use. Scaling back maximalist AI use, or what some companies have called “tokenmaxxing,” is a trend we’ve covered in recent months as the price for using AI has increased while not always delivering commensurate productivity gains.

“As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens,” Jay Parikh, an executive vice president at Microsoft said in an email to Microsoft employees. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and GitHub Copilot is an AI coding tool. “Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business.”

“As such, we are updating our internal guidance and managing token spend with the same discipline we apply to every other critical resource,” Parikh said in the email.

Parikh’s email says that in an effort to “get greater value from our token investment” Microsoft is making OpenAI GPT-5.6, which is cheaper to use than other models, the default model for internal use. His email also links to updated internal Copilot guidelines stating that, as of July 2026, Microsoft divisions will have an “AI token budget target,” and that employees can track their individual AI spending.

“While there is no target spend value being shared at this time. The data shows that many engineers spend in the range of hundreds of dollars a month to a few thousand dollars in tokens,” the guidelines say. They also say that some decisions may place further restrictions as they monitor spend.

As Parikh’s email notes, the change in policy about AI spend wasn’t introduced because Microsoft is tight on cash. To the contrary, its latest earnings report shows the company revenue, operating income, and net income all increased for the year, beating Wall Street expectations. But the new policy is in line with recent changes at other companies that are trying to curb wasteful AI usage. As we previously reported, companies like Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, and Citi are all trying to throttle employees’ AI use.

“It's very telling, to me, that a company which has invested so heavily in AI and subsidized so much AI inference is now guiding its own employees to curb spending,” a Microsoft employee, who asked to be anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told me. “This really feels like the ultimate admission that we, as hosts of AI infra, can't afford our own AI products. And if that's even partially the case, how could the companies we sell it to manage?”

Parikh’s email said Microsoft will keep learning and adjusting its AI policies as models and products evolve, and stressed that he doesn’t want to slow down the company’s progress towards becoming “AI-first.”

“We are not optimizing for fewer tokens,” he said. “We are optimizing for more impact per token.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vos paramètres de confidentialité

^{finance.yahoo.com}

404 Media

2026-08-04 14:23:54

‘DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE’: How Cops Are Trying to Hide the Existence of Flock

When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”

The police guidance document is unusual in how clearly it tells police not to mention their Flock use, but it also highlights several important things in the Flock debate. While Flock likes to say that it is a transparent surveillance company and that it cares about “accountability” and “governance,” some of its customers believe its use should be kept secret. Flock is now operating in thousands many cities and towns, and when, how, and why police use the system is wildly inconsistent. Even though Flock does have various auditing and transparency tools, police have their own opinions about what Flock can and should be used for and what the policies for it should be.

It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage. Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be “as vague as permissible” about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice. Residents of many towns using Flock also say that their cities entered into contracts with Flock with little public oversight, essentially quietly opting them into a nationwide surveillance network without robust public debate.

Wapello County’s “standard operating procedures” document for Flock cameras was created in November of 2025 and was obtained by a 404 Media reader using a public records request and was shared with us. Coincidentally, Wapello County’s largest city is Ottumwa, Iowa, where 404 Media ran a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year. The county has four Flock cameras via a contract it signed with the company in late 2024. The policy further instructs police to be vague in any arrest report, suggesting that they simply call the Flock system “county resources.”

“DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. If asked a direct question about ALPR usage by someone such as an attorney, tell the truth,” it says. “If it is necessary to explain in a report, it is advised to use language such as ‘Using county resources, I discovered the suspect vehicle was bearing an Iowa plate.’ Treat the ALPR information like you would intelligence. It is simply a lead that you verified and acted on.”
embed.documentcloud.org/docume…
The guidance to keep Flock use secret is reminiscent—but less extreme—than guidance on some other secretive police technologies. For years, police tried to hide the existence of cell site simulators (popularly known as Stingrays), going as far as to drop criminal cases where it was likely that a judge would expose information about them. Stingrays are essentially fake cell phone towers that can be used to identify the phones of people in a specific area.

In the public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said “there is no need” to tell people about the use of Flock.

“Our policy requires deputies to check the license plate to make sure the correct plate is accurate and the information as to an arrest warrant, stolen vehicle, stolen plate or missing person is correct,” he said. “There is no need to tell them about our investigative methods or sources, such as the camera system, because the information is verified by the deputy running the license plate. It is common practice for law enforcement to refrain from disclosing investigative methods and sources to prevent criminals from learning how to circumvent them.”

Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.

Surreal Stingray Secrecy: Uncovering the FBI’s Surveillance Tech Secrecy Agreements | ACLU

The public has a right to know whether the FBI is forcing law enforcement agencies to keep information on invasive surveillance technology a secret.

^{Adeline Lee (American Civil Liberties Union)}

404 Media

2026-08-04 13:55:10

The SEC Bought Airline Data to Monitor Flights Worldwide

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bought access to what it described as more than a billion airline ticketing records, related to not just U.S. domestic flights or those landing in the country, but also flights between foreign countries, according to SEC documents obtained by 404 Media. A group of the world’s airlines, including Delta, United, and American, previously sold the data under the company name ARC; that is where the SEC bought the data from.

ARC, or the Airlines Reporting Corporation, stopped selling airline ticketing records after repeated coverage from 404 Media and pressure from lawmakers last year. But the newly obtained records provide additional insight into the breadth of data that airlines were selling without their customers' knowledge, and that law enforcement agencies were tapping into, likely without a warrant.

“ARC's ticketing data includes not only US domestic flights and international flights to/from the US, but also flights entirely between or within foreign countries,” one of the documents obtained by 404 Media reads. 404 Media obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the SEC.

The data includes each passengers’ name, their credit card number used to buy the ticket, the departure and arrival cities of their travel, the date of their flight, the flight number, and the “selling agency,” likely referring to the travel agency the person used, according to the documents. ARC obtained its data by acting as the conduit between airlines and travel agencies. Whenever someone booked a flight with a travel agency like Expedia or Kayak, ARC received information about that booking and then resold it as part of its data broker business.

💡
Do you know about any other companies selling data to the government? 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.

ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program (TIP), as the data product was called, was also capable of sending daily search results related to a specific list of names, the document says. “ARC sends daily reports regarding any air ticketing purchased by individuals over the prior 24 hours),” it adds. The document says SEC required access to 1-25 daily searches through this alert service.

The SEC did not respond to a request for comment.

ARC previously told 404 Media that TIP “was established by ARC after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has since been used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community to support national security and prevent criminal activity with bipartisan support. Over the years, TIP has likely contributed to the prevention and apprehension of criminals involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, sex trafficking, national security threats, terrorism and other imminent threats of harm to the United States.”

Airlines Will Shut Down Program That Sold Your Flights Records to Government

The move comes after intense pressure from lawmakers and 404 Media’s months-long reporting about the airline industry's data selling practices.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-03 17:13:24

‘Own the Narrative’: Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech

404 Media has obtained a coaching guide that Flock surveillance gives to police about “how to speak to city councils about public safety technology.” The handbook highlights how Flock and police team up to convince cities to buy and keep its automated license plate reader technology, even when there is widespread public opposition to it, and encourages police to “own the narrative before someone else does” by championing the technology before citizens can oppose it during public comment periods.

The PDF guide notes that the general public and cities now “increasingly expect transparency, oversight, and accountability alongside public safety outcomes,” and tells police to not argue with people who believe that Flock’s license plate readers are “mass surveillance.”

“One of the most common questions agencies hear today is whether license plate recognition (LPR) technology constitutes mass surveillance. Many leaders instinctively respond by attempting to refute the claim. Flock's Jamie Hudson recommends a different approach,” the guide reads.

“Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not,” the company recommends. Flock tells law enforcement agencies they need to try to convince city council and city managers that the technology is worthwhile before meetings with the public occur; that they need to have a “carefully scripted presentation” ready to go; and that police need to say they want Flock because they want to keep the community safe: “You care about your community. That’s why you’re bringing this in.”
embed.documentcloud.org/docume…
Flock began offering this guide as part of a broader attempt to coach police on how to push back against criticism of its policies and security practices, many of which 404 Media has investigated and shed light on. These include the fact that Flock data was regularly making its way to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often in violation of sanctuary city and state laws; that Flock was used to search 83,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had an abortion in Texas; and that Flock has been used by police to stalk people and surveil protesters. These investigations and broader concern over the surveillance state have led many cities to hold city council meetings to reconsider their Flock contracts, and this Flock-produced guide is an attempt to help police shape the narrative in a way that will either convince cities to buy Flock or to keep their contracts.

The guide is associated with a Flock webinar for police called “How to Speak to City Councils: Meeting the Moment with Confidence,” which included modules on “how to address misinformation with clarity.” After public opposition late last year, the company began to offer Q&A sessions with its CEO, Garrett Langley, for city council members, police, and mayors to address what Flock described as an “era of unprecedented misinformation.”

“The recent headlines about our company are largely a result of this environment,” the company told cities.

“Opponents have a very carefully scripted narrative. They come prepared. You should also have a carefully scripted presentation that addresses those concerns ahead of time,” the guide says. “The agencies that navigate these conversations successfully rarely wait until a council meeting to educate stakeholders. They brief city managers early. They meet with council members before votes occur. They share policies proactively and answer questions before public comment periods become the first introduction to the program.”
youtube.com/embed/BKYYpLC9u5I?…
The guide also tells police that they can convince city councils that Flock is worth the monetary cost by conveniently not focusing on how much the cameras cost, but by “reframing the financial discussion itself” to focus on “the cost of unresolved crime.” Flock also writes that much of the opposition to its technology is happening because people “do not understand how it works or how it is governed.” This idea is one that has been regularly repeated by Langley over the last several months.

Surveillance companies regularly try to get police to act as quasi salespeople and spokespeople for their companies, pitting a private company and taxpayer-funded law enforcement on one side and citizens on the other. “For years, surveillance vendors like Flock Safety have shaped policy debates cities are supposed to run independently — staging council ‘prep calls’ and exploiting a basic asymmetry: the vendor controls the facts, and city staff are rarely positioned to challenge them,” Sarah T. Hamid, director of strategic campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told 404 Media after reviewing the guide. “The financial interest is obvious. Flock isn’t just selling surveillance, it’s scripting the public case for buying it. Because Flock treats public trust as a messaging problem rather than a governance outcome, that script keeps officials focused on ‘accountability’ in the abstract instead of the concrete harms and documented abuses its network has already enabled.”

404 Media has watched numerous city council meetings around the country where police talk about how Flock is a critical law enforcement system for them; in many cases, a police chief will speak about Flock and then introduce a Flock employee to give a presentation about the surveillance system. On Monday, 404 Media published an interview with a former Flock government affairs manager who regularly pitched the technology to cities at public meetings. An activist who has been pushing back against Flock in their community and who shared the guide document with 404 Media said that they have regularly seen the strategies suggested by Flock deployed in city council meetings they have attended and watched. 404 Media agreed to keep the activist anonymous to protect them from retaliation.

“I think this document shows a coordinated effort from Flock Safety to compel law enforcement agencies to convince our elected leaders to represent their interests as a company rather than the interests of concerned citizens,” they said. “I have watched many meetings locally in my city and my state and across the country, and you can see the techniques used in this ebook in the presentations given by law enforcement. Pivoting conversations away from concerns about mass surveillance and directing them towards procedure and governance is a vehicle that's used to downplay the concerns of privacy-minded citizens. We have every right to expect our elected leaders to listen to us, and it's very common to see city councils vote with a supermajority in favor of approving Flock contracts despite standing-room only attendance at city council meetings with little to no public support for this product.”

The guide specifically highlights several supposed success stories in which communities had very real concerns about Flock but ultimately decided not to get rid of the technology. For example, it highlights how Flock was able to get a vote in favor of its technology in Oakland, California, despite it being “one of the most scrutinized public safety technology debates in the state,” with “more than 140 public comments” and opposition from the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission: “The conversation shifted when officials stopped asking the public to trust the technology and started showing how the technology could be audited, reviewed, and held accountable.”

It also tells the story of Richmond, California, which allowed its Flock contract to temporarily lapse after the city’s cameras were included in the company’s national lookup tool. City officials there worried that their cameras’ data would be accessed by ICE, in violation of California and local law. “After concerns emerged around data sharing and sanctuary city policies, the city's program was paused and subjected to intense public scrutiny,” the Flock guide says. “Rather than relying on generalized claims about effectiveness, department leadership presented two and a half years of local results, including 274 arrests and 259 vehicle recoveries connected to the program. The council ultimately voted 4-3 to reinstate the system.”

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed

Following 404 Media’s reporting and in light of new legislation, automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company Flock has stopped agencies reaching into cameras in California, Illinois, and Virginia.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-03 14:02:31

Why a Flock Worker Quit: ‘They Lied’

This is an adaption of a podcast interview 404 Media recorded with Jonathan Paz, a former Flock employee who is now running running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District. Check out the whole thing here on YouTube.

Jonathan Paz was initially nervous when he started working at the surveillance company Flock. It was his first tech job. But he was interested in the company’s mission. Flock’s cameras, which constantly scan the license plate of every vehicle driving past, were for finding missing people. Staff at the company were able to solve real issues.

In his job as a government affairs manager a couple of years ago, Paz represented Flock in public hearings, with the goal of getting a city to purchase Flock cameras. These sorts of hearings are happening on a near constant basis all across the country, as cities and towns participate in a national conversation about whether they want Flock cameras in their community or not.

“My job was to make sure that we were not only defending the company, but also representing the product as best as possible and making sure that we can get approved at council,” Paz said. He would get flown out to different cities and towns to help get Flock across the finish line. He was the break-in-case-of-emergency button.

In one case, Paz went to a place that was planning on purchasing Flock cameras but there was a lot of community pushback. Those people did not want these cameras in their community. Paz realized his job was to “make sure that this resistance doesn't become a vote reflected in the vote of the council.”

“That's kind of what started unraveling for me very quickly: this facade that we were helping these democratically elected boards” represent the people who voted for them.
youtube.com/embed/BKYYpLC9u5I?…
Before Flock, Paz had a career in social justice work, including as an activist, union organizer, and an elected city councilor in Waltham, Massachusetts, he said. He focused in part on municipal broadband. At the time he held some “techno optimism, that maybe technology can be the answer to some of these existential crises of our time,” he said.

He ran for mayor but didn’t win. After that, he went to the 2023 National League of Cities conference in Atlanta, Georgia, a large meeting for municipal officials. Flock is headquartered in Atlanta.

This is where a Flock representative pitched him the idea of joining the company, Paz said. To him, Flock’s technology made sense. Flock sold cameras, and they helped find missing people. It definitely wasn’t part of some broader surveillance apparatus.

He joined Flock and found the company had a startup culture. Things moved fast and the people were “brilliant.”

💡
Do you work at Flock or Axon? 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.

At the time, Paz thought Flock “had a deep respect for civil rights and liberties.” There was an emphasis on catering to the values of whatever municipality or agency they happened to be working with. “We were honoring and respecting the wishes of the people,” Paz thought. His coworkers at Flock would speak about the company’s mission and how it was helping to solve crime.

Then things changed. Beyond Paz’s evolving feelings around his own job’s purpose, 404 Media revealed how local cops were performing Flock searches for Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE).

“Throughout this whole time, I'm expressing my concern within the company,” Paz, who also happens to be the son of immigrants, said. “Do we work with ICE? Are we working with ICE? Are there plans to work with ICE? And throughout the whole time, the company line was ‘we don't work with ICE.’”

Journalists around the country followed our reporting, including 9NEWS in Denver which found evidence Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had direct access to Flock’s cameras. At the time, Flock strongly denied such direct access by federal agencies existed. Eventually, Flock came clean: CBP did have direct access, as part of a pilot program. So did ICE.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
404 Media then reported the Secret Service and the Navy’s criminal investigation division had access too.

“That was what I was sold and lied to about,” Paz said. “I didn't know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.”

Come July 2025, Paz quit Flock. Paz said he “rejected tens of thousands in company equity and a severance package from Flock.” After leaving Flock, he founded an organization to help pay rent, food, and legal fees for people impacted by ICE’s mass deportation effort. Now he is running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District.

404 Media asked Flock for comment on what exactly workers in Paz’s previous role do when it comes to helping convince cities to buy Flock. A company spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “Our conversations with communities are valuable and give us direct feedback from the people we serve. That input has helped us enhance product controls and refine our positions on important matters of public policy.”

The statement added: “We will continue investing in public engagement and continue to make improvements to Flock based on our dialogue with communities nationwide. The decision to adopt Flock technology rests solely with each community.”

Jonathan Paz: A Fighter for the Working Class

Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.

^{Jonathan Paz (YouTube)}

404 Media

2026-08-01 10:00:47

We Need to Quarantine Aliens on the Moon, Scientists Propose

Welcome to a special edition of the Abstract! I’m out on vacation for the next two weeks, which means it’s time to break out all of the weird and wild studies that have come out so far in 2026, but that slipped through the cracks for one reason or another. I’ve been saving these gems up for a special occasion and hope you enjoy the roundups this week and next!

So without further delay, here are the studies this year that put aliens on lockdown, bedazzled their axes, undulated spermily, and captured shooting stars.

First, scientists come up with a game plan to protect Earth from invasive extraterrestrial species. Then: a trove of rare decorative tools, GIGANTIC SPERM, and a long-sought solution to a Venusian mystery.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Stay tuned for another special edition of the Abstract next week!

An island quarantine, but it’s in outer space

Moxley, Frederick I. & Ricciardi, Anthony. “Protecting earth from extraterrestrial contamination: The case for a lunar biocontainment facility.” Ambio.

Well, folks: It’s finally time to build a quarantine on the Moon for aliens.

That’s the upshot of a study published in May that argues for the establishment of “a lunar biocontainment facility” to house extraterrestrial samples en route to Earth until they are deemed safe.

The U.S. and China's space programs both aim to bring back samples from the surface of Mars in the coming years, and many missions have already delivered rocks from asteroids. The new study anticipates a disastrous scenario in which samples from nearby celestial bodies might contain dangerous extraterrestrial life.

“If samples from Mars or other celestial bodies harbor dormant or active biological entities, then Earth’s biosphere could become exposed to a potentially invasive novel organism with unpredictable pathogenicity or ecological effects,” said Frederick I. Moxley of Strategic Threat and Analysis Research Laboratories, LLC, and Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University.

“For example, if extraterrestrial life exists, its molecular architecture could reflect atypical biochemistry (such as chirality reversal or alternative nucleic acid analogs) that is hazardous to Earth’s ecosystems and even to human biology,” the team added.

The team pointed to earthly analogs, such as viral strains that have broken containment or species that thrive in habitats that are completely different from the ones in which they originally evolved. If life on Earth can be this adaptable and unpredictable, why should we expect anything different from life elsewhere?

“The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said. “The formalization of such precautionary lunar quarantine protocols will not only safeguard our planet, but also affirm humanity’s maturity as an interplanetary civilization.”

Moreover, “the economic cost for a lunar biocontainment facility is negligible compared to the potential ecological devastation of an invasive extraterrestrial organism.”

There you have it: We can’t afford not to build an alien Moon quarantine.

In other news…

Axes of ancients

Barkai, Ran and Shalata, Muataz. “Lower Palaeolithic Tools of Potency: Handaxes Shaped around Fossils and Other Extraordinary Features at Sakhnin Valley, Israel.” Tel Aviv.

Some 500,000 years ago, early humans collected fossils and geodes and crafted them into handaxes, according to a study published in March that suggested these decorative tools had symbolic significance to their makers.

From 2024 to 2025, archaeologists discovered an unprecedented trove of ten fossil-bearing handaxes in what is today the Sakhnin Valley in Israel, which were made by the influential early human Homo erectus. While previous digs have unearthed the occasional handaxe containing fossils, this is the first site to yield a whole hoard of them.
A handaxe shaped around a fossil imprint. Image: Barkai, Ran and Shalata, Muataz.
“To our knowledge, no other archaeological context besides Sakhnin Valley has yielded more than a single extraordinary specimen,” said authors Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University and Muataz Shalala, a local independent researcher who found the site.

“We propose that these handaxes served as tools and mediators between humans and the cosmos, conceived as objects of potency enhanced by the primeval fossil imprints and unique geological features within the stone,” the team said. “The richly embellished rocky landscape of Sakhnin Valley, particularly with its abundant geodes, may have encouraged early humans to express their profound and extraordinary relationships with the cosmos via stones.”

The human appreciation for cool rocks knows no bounds. Given that there’s no obvious functional advantage to the fossil-bearing stones beyond aesthetics, It’s tantalizing to imagine what these geological rarities meant to the bygone humans who selected them.

Go with the (sperm) flow

Alsous, Jasmin Imran, Chakrabarti, Brato, et al. “The physical consequences of sperm gigantism.” Nature Physics.

Here’s a fun fact to share at a party: Fruit flies have the longest sperm in nature. Measuring anywhere from several millimeters to more than two inches depending on the species, these bugs offer an extreme example of “sperm gigantism,” a phenomenon seen across many animal species.

Now, scientists have probed the mystery of how these “ultralong sperm” avoid getting all tangled up in their journey through the female reproductive tract, according to a study published in June.

Using in vivo imagery and mathematical models, researchers revealed how two-millimeter-long sperm from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster autonomously organizes themselves en route to prospective fertilization.
Illustration of collective flows of fruit fly sperm. Image: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation
“Giant sperm have evolved in several animal taxa for >100 million years—a testament to the enduring success of sperm gigantism as a sexual strategy,” said researchers co-led by Jasmin Imran Alsous of the Flatiron Institute and Brato Chakrabarti of International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in India.

Fruit fly sperm seamlessly forms “collective flows” that are “primarily associated with the dense packing of sperm, rather than the specific geometry of the confining organs,” the team found.

Who knew fruit fly sperm could be so mesmerizing? Nature continues to astonish in the most unexpected places.

Venus gets a cosmic glow-up

Karyu, Hiroki et al. “A cosmic origin of Venus’ lower haze.” Nature Astronomy.

For more than a half-century, scientists have pondered the origin of the so-called “lower haze” on Venus, a particle-rich layer of clouds at about 20 to 30 miles of altitude that was first detected by spacecraft in the 1970s.

In April, a team finally solved the mystery; turns out it’s just a light sprinkling of cosmic dust from bygone shooting stars that broke up and dispersed in the Venusian skies. In addition to providing an ethereal explanation for the phenomenon on Venus, the new results may also inform our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.
A figure illustrating the cosmic dust origin of Venus’s lower haze. Image: ©Hiroki Karyu et al.
“On planets like Earth, where surface liquid water exists, rain constantly scavenges involatile particles from the air,” said researchers led by Hiroki Karyu of Tohoku University. “However, as observed in our Solar System, planets with surface liquid water are truly unique; most planets possess dry atmospheres where liquid droplets evaporate before reaching the surface.”

“In such worlds, the lower haze originating from cosmic dust can accumulate in the hot lower atmosphere, enhancing cloud formation” and “substantially [impacting] the planet’s climate,” the team added. “These effects establish cosmic dust as an essential component of planetary climates, a role that is also likely to be important for exoplanets.”

No big deal, Venus is just marinating in cosmic crumbs that can shed light on alien skies. Go on with your day.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-07-31 16:24:50

Behind the Blog: Silent Retreat

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss going into the woods, a "he admit it" moment, and a tofu sandwich.

JOSEPH: Thank you to everyone who came to Thursday’s FOIA Forum. It was a great turnout with a ton of really good questions. We spoke mostly about mining city council meetings for tips or context you can then use to fuel your public records requests. I’ll upload the video soon and put it on the site for everyone to watch.

The other 404 Media co-founders have been writing in Behind The Blog about disconnecting recently. I’m doing something related to that shortly: going to an Airbnb in the woods to do a makeshift ‘silent retreat’.

This post is for subscribers only

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Behind the Blog: Silent Retreat

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-31 16:03:08

Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images

On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran.

Usually, Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts to digitally monitor areas of interest and see how they change over time, say, during a conflict or disaster. Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation.

💡
Do you work at Google? 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 404 Media’s tests, we were able to add skyscrapers to a rural area, added a “homeless encampment” to a part of Los Angeles where homelessness has become a major political issue, added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles, and digitally created protesters outside Google's own corporate buildings.

(Update: after the publication of this piece, Google sent 404 Media a statement saying it was “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.” The statement added, “We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies.”)

0:00
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1×

One of the tests by 404 Media.

“Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” Henk van Ess, an OSINT researcher, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

The button now available in the web version of Google Earth lets a user type in a prompt while hovering over their desired location to create something new there. It is powered by Google’s Nano Banana model, according to a Google statement.
A fake protest outside Google corporate buildings.
“If you type the address of your workplace and then prompt it to ‘make it look like a drone attack happened here,’ it will create a damning image that looks very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones,” Ben Heubl, another OSINT professional, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Obviously, this isn’t great for ensuring that screenshots from Google Earth are showing what anywhere on the planet actually looks like in reality. “It’s harrowing and horrific, and it will make verification work much more difficult, Heubl added.

0:00
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Another of the tests by 404 Media.

Asked for comment, Google pointed 404 Media to a tweet the company posted on Thursday. “We take misinformation seriously – every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections,” it read.

This of course ignores the very obvious fact that plenty of people do not bother to verify themselves if an image is real or not. People spreading misinformation also often don’t care about eventually getting caught; they can cause a massive amount of damage to a certain conversation very quickly before anyone calls them out for their bullshit.

Heubl added, “Even if you can use detection tools to determine that an image was altered by Google, there are ways to override those indicators, no matter what people tell you. This is BAD.”

Update: this piece has been updated to include a screenshot and description of a fake AI-generated image showing protesters outside Google corporate buildings, and Google’s statement saying it was rolling back the feature.

News from Google (@NewsFromGoogle) on X

@MarioNawfal We take misinformation seriously – every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image…

^{News from Google (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-07-31 14:25:01

YouTube Bans Popular ASMR Artists, Accusing Them of Making 'Sexually Gratifying' Content

YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying” content, leaving creators confused and angry.

Several creators received the same notice from YouTube about their channels being removed on Wednesday and Thursday. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube,” the email said.

So far, YouTube creators affected by the wave of bans who’ve spoken publicly about YouTube removing their channels include ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen, all of whom had significant followings on the platform. There are still many ASMR creators on YouTube, making the bans even more confusing.

ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, describes the tingling feeling that some people get when hearing certain sounds; it’s become shorthand for a genre of content where ASMR artists whisper, brush, tap or make other sounds near a microphone. A lot of ASMR content is meant for relaxation, mindfulness, and sleep.

“YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community."

"We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy," a spokesperson for YouTube told 404 Media in a statement. "Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content."

Slight Sounds, who has been making ASMR content on YouTube since 2013, told me that this has been her full-time career since around 2018. “This has been my livelihood and my career for eight or nine years now, so getting it removed and taken away from me without warning obviously affects me financially,” she said. “It's a part of my income. It's a part of how I get new people to follow me on other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. It's how I get sponsorships, ad money. So a big part of this is this fear that I just lost income that I don't know how I'm going to get back. But I think the mental stress of building my own community and not having the option to have access to that anymore is really disturbing... Being told not only that you’re not going to make money on this, but also your archive, your life's work, videos that mean so much to me and so many other people are just gone, and I can't access that. That's something that's really hard to grapple with.”

YouTube’s ban email to creators said: “We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it's our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform - but if you believe we've made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You'll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below.” Creators report that appealing didn't change the decision.

The email continued: “Explicit content that's meant to be sexually gratifying isn't allowed on YouTube.”

ASMR content creators have long asserted that their content is not sexual or pornographic. Erotic ASMR exists, but that’s not what these artists were doing on YouTube.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
ASMR artist Bunnii’s channel was removed at around 227,000 subscribers and over 55 million views across hundreds of videos. She told me she started uploading content to YouTube because, unlike during her streams on Twitch, she didn’t have to rely on subscriptions and donations to earn money. The passive income she earned from YouTube meant she could offer that content without a paywall. “I've been so lucky to have such a supportive community but not everyone has money to spare to help make sure I continue creating content that they find comforting for anxiety and sleep. YouTube was a place I could direct people who wanted to offer support but couldn't directly,” she said. “I hate that the option is gone. There are people who really do depend on this kind of content to get a good night's sleep, deal with insomnia, or manage mental health issues like anxiety, PTSD, and depression (therapy and whatnot isn't exactly cheap or accessible to everyone). And in times like this when world issues feel so heavy and no one can afford anything, having a free, easily accessible option, where the creator can benefit from just views is so important.”

"I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe'"

Being sexualized not just by people outside of the community who misunderstand it, but the platform where she’d grown an audience and made a living, is “incredibly disheartening,” Bunnii said, and she finds YouTube’s guidelines and decisions too vague. People are speculating about what she did to deserve removal, she said, even though she considers everything she uploaded to YouTube family friendly.

“YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community. Making it feel like something that is intended to be comforting, is taboo,” she said. “And while this is uncomfortable for the creators, I can't imagine it makes the people who enjoy this content or consume it for sleep and anxiety feel comfortable with these decisions either. We're all trying to navigate a form of content where the boundaries aren't concrete but deleting channels with no warning is scary. I'm sure any of us would complied given one, and kept it in mind moving forward. It feels like they don't care for their creators.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
In 2019, YouTube added language to its terms of use that forbids content that is “meant to be sexually gratifying in nature.” Other platforms, like Patreon, have similar terms. This standard is incredibly difficult to define. In 2022, YouTube updated its terms to specifically mention ASMR: “We’ve strengthened our policies to better identify and action ASMR content that is sexually gratifying. ASMR videos with audio sexual sounds may be age-restricted or removed from the platform,” YouTube said in a policy update announcement. Creators faced a similar wave of bans following that change.

When Slight Sounds started making ASMR content, she said, most people still didn’t understand what it was. “If you liked ASMR, you kept it to yourself because there was this judgment around it because people didn't understand,” she said. “One of the things that people would always say is like, ‘Oh, is that a sex thing? Is that a sexual thing?’” But for most people making it, there was no sexual connotation, she said.

“I think because ASMR is very female-dominated — because it is a very intimate video style, and there is this sweet woman taking care of you and whispering to you — I think people, especially men, confuse closeness and intimacy with sex,” she said. Some ASMR is sensual, but sensual does not equal sexual, she said. “There is this inherent thing that happens when men interact with women online in a specific way, and there is this sexual energy that they feel, even if it's just closeness that they're feeling. I think that ASMR has always had this undercurrent of: No matter what you do as a woman in ASMR, someone is going to find it sexual. Someone's going to call it weird. Someone's going to fetishize it.”

Some ASMR artists also upload content to adult sites like Onlyfans and Fansly, which are often kept separate from their other, more public platforms like YouTube. Slight Sounds started uploading content to these kinds of sites a few years ago. “I had thought about it for many years before, but didn't because of the judgment and the fear, and knowing that if I made that decision to make erotic content outside of YouTube, there would be so many people that would lose respect for me,” she said. “That would say all of the work that you've done, no matter how separate the two are, is going to undermine your life's work, you know, and that's really hard to to think about.”

She made “a very big point” to keep these sites and links separate from her YouTube channel, she said. “Women will make a choice, an autonomous choice, to do something that doesn't even affect the other content they're making. It is a wholly separate experience. And we're still being told that we're sexualizing ASMR on YouTube, and we're being sexual,” she said. “I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe,’ and giving people a place to escape the world and just be with themselves and me for a little bit. My content has stayed consistently the same. I have not pushed any boundaries, and I am still, it seems, being punished for something that has nothing to do with my YouTube. It is really hard to think about.”

Updated 12:40 p.m. ET with comment from YouTube. Headline updated to reflect that information.

Sensual ASMR has boomed on YouTube — but creators are facing a crackdown

A popular genre might be too hot for YouTube.

^{Jessica Lucas (The Verge)}

404 Media

2026-07-31 14:04:26

Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.”

On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We've taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books. For more than two decades, ISBNdb has been the card catalog of the book world — the data behind how bookstores, libraries, and reading apps connect readers with titles. Data about books, not the books themselves. That hasn't changed.”

ISBNdb removed the landing page for “Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs” on July 28. “It was part of exploring demand, and we've chosen to pivot away from that direction. Our main ISBNdb (book metadata API) services are unaffected and running as usual,” the site says.

ISBNdb replied to 404 Media's request for comment about the removed pages with the same note that's now on the homepage. The company has not replied to 404 Media's previous attempts to reach it for comment.

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text, and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse. The article also suggested that book authors who might be opposed to this use of their work could just write with manipulating and sabotaging AI models in mind.

404 Media spoke to booksellers and saw reports online detailing a sudden uptick in sales recently. “It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.”

“Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” one of ISBNdb’s now-removed pages said. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.”

In January, book authors filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, revealing internal documents that showed Anthropic planned to obtain and scan millions of printed books and destroy them in the process. An investigation by the Washington Post found that Anthropic was buying books from a company called Better World Books, one of several marketplaces where libraries, retailers, and individuals sell books.

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Emanuel Maiberg contributed reporting to this story.

The Receipt is the New License: Physical Books Sourcing for AI Training - ISBNDB Blog

In 2025, a federal judge handed down one of the most consequential copyright rulings in AI history. Anthropic (Claude AI) had purchased and physically

^{Val Giordano (ISBNDB Blog)}

404 Media

2026-07-31 12:47:39

A Hidden 'Dark Dimension' Could Rewrite Our Understanding of the Universe

Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study.

The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most mass in the universe, and dark energy, the term for whatever is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

The idea arose from string theory, a decades-old framework that suggests the universe contains many dimensions beyond the four dimensions that we can perceive as humans—time, and three-dimensional space. In a series of studies published over the past several years, a group of string theory experts have suggested that one of these dimensions could simultaneously govern dark matter and dark energy, and that this dimension changes over time.

“The question was whether or not this extra dimension is frozen or can evolve,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor in the physics department at Harvard University and an author on these studies, including the newest preprint, in a call with 404 Media. “The fifth dimension is somehow related to the value of dark energy, so it's natural that when the value of the extra dimension changes, the value of dark energy also changes.”

When Vafa and his colleagues started to develop this idea, the conventional wisdom was that dark energy had a fixed value, according to the standard model of cosmology, a well-corroborated set of assumptions that explains most laws and phenomena in the universe.

“We were scrutinized by our colleagues for predicting that string theory requires dark energy to change, whereas dark energy looks constant,” said Vafa. “This is not good for our field because you are predicting string theory is inconsistent with observation.”

But the assumption that dark energy has a fixed value, a central tenet of the standard model, has been challenged by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a major survey of the universe based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which released its first results in 2025.

To the surprise of many scientists, the DESI release hinted that the value of dark energy may shift over time, a discovery that was in line with predictions of a dark dimension put forward by Vafa’s team.

“We didn't write a model to fit the data, but rather we had a model based on theory,” said Vafa. “Now that fits the data automatically. That is why I believe in it. It's easy to write a model after you know the data to try to fit it somehow. This is not what we did.”

“Our model is still the best model, as far as I know, that fits the DESI results,” he added.

In their newest preprint, which is currently in the process of peer review, Vafa and his colleagues expand on the workings of this possible dark dimension in light of the DESI data. According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are “compactified” into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range.

This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, it’s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension.

“We are using the extra dimension to our benefit to explain what dark matter is,” Vafa said. “We don't need to introduce a new particle or particles. We are just saying it's the usual gravity.”

As this dark dimension evolves, so does the mass of these dark matter particles in that realm; Vafa’s team predicts they are becoming lighter. Likewise, the value of dark energy weakens over time. In this way, dark matter and dark energy—long thought to be likely unrelated—arise from the properties of the same extra dark dimension.

It’s a trippy and esoteric concept, and it may soon be put to the test. If a dark dimension does exist, then it should manifest as tiny deviations in Newton's gravitational force at micrometer scales. A team at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna is currently designing an experiment to test this idea, which could yield results in the coming years.

Moreover, if dark matter particles are just gravitons that wandered into a dark dimension, then there should be some subtle observational hints of “a fifth force” in the dark sector. For example, scientists plan to test the hypothesis by closely watching the movements of stars in interacting galaxies, which are held together by dark matter halos, to search for a dark fifth force.

When the galaxies come near each other, “the visible matter attracts the visible matter of the other galaxy, and dark matter of one also attracts the dark matter of the other galaxy as well,” Vafa explained. “But there's extra force between the dark matter compared to the visible matter because of this fifth force, so you get a more attractive force pulling the dark matter towards each other more than the visible part.”

“There are multiple fronts where things can come together,” he concluded. “Of course, the most exciting would be the confluence of all of these together, that somehow they agree. That would be really remarkable.”

The Dark Dimension and the Swampland

Motivated by principles from the Swampland program, which characterize requirements for a consistent UV completion of quantum gravity, combined with observational data, we are led to a unique corner of the quantum gravity landscape.

^arXiv.org

404 Media

2026-07-30 14:34:29

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button

LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post “seems like AI slop,” according to 404 Media’s own tests.

If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen users posting blatantly AI-generated missives. Often these posts take some sort of news event, and opine on how this relates to thought leadership, or some other LinkedIn brainrot term. It’s also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term “AI slop” and not, say, “It seems this was generated with AI.”

Here’s what the button looks like, available when a user clicks on the three dots at the top of a post:
The pulldown menu on LinkedIn including the "Seems like AI slop" option
I scrolled for about six seconds before finding a post that sure looked like AI slop, based on the gratuitous spacing between single sentences, lists of takeaways, emoji use, and “X is not Y” sentence construction. When I clicked the “seems like AI slop button,” LinkedIn told me, “Thanks for letting us know. Your feedback helps improve the feed.” It then hid the post itself.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that AI detection service Pangram estimated 41 percent of long form posts and 30 percent of short form posts on LinkedIn are likely AI generated. (Disclosure: Pangram previously ran an advertisement on 404 Media.)

If you Google “linkedin AI” or similar, there are a ton of guides — some on LinkedIn itself — telling people how to use AI to write their LinkedIn posts.

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests
An AI detection company found that amount of AI content that users actually see in their day-to-day browsing is shockingly high.
404 MediaJason Koebler

There is of course some irony in that LinkedIn itself has generative AI features. Its AI-powered writing assistant helps people “share personalized suggestions for your profile, to help you stand out and get noticed,” according to LinkedIn’s website.

After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, wrote their own post about the button. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise. Here are a few more changes to keep it that way,” he wrote.

The button in part will help LinkedIn tune its own models for identifying AI slop. “We are ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content. This will reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network,” the post said. “We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.”

Srinivasan also said LinkedIn is removing the AI-powered “enhance your post” feature with another that “proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.”

When previously asked for comment about the Pangram report, LinkedIn said it was taking steps to crack down on AI slop, and referred us to a policy change it made in May designed to disincentivize slop: “Professionals come to LinkedIn to hear from real people and their unique insights and perspectives. We actively work to reduce low quality, automated or generic content, and while AI can be used to beat the blank page problem, our focus is on surfacing professional conversations that help people advance their careers.”

Update: this piece has been updated to include a post from LinkedIn.

Keeping conversations real on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is taking steps to reduce low-value, generic content and comments, creating an ecosystem where more dynamic, authentic conversations can grow.

^{Laura Lorenzetti (www.linkedin.com)}

404 Media

2026-07-29 17:42:19

“Clapping Is a First Amendment Right:” An Interview With the Person Arrested for Clapping at a Data Center Meeting

Last Wednesday, Lux Claridge planned to speak out against a proposed 1,000 acre data center in their town of Emporia, Kansas. They left in handcuffs after a city commissioner ordered them arrested for clapping.

“It was annoying,” Claridge told 404 Media. “So what happened was I clapped for the previous speaker. She hadn't even gotten back to her seat before I stopped clapping. My wife was on the way up to the podium. The time for my wife's speech hadn't even been reset yet [...] you see the 51 seconds remaining from the previous speaker. So I don't know what I was disrupting exactly, but I was not clapping the entire time.”
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The big topic in Emporia, a town of 20,000 people, is the proposed Flint Hills Digital Campus — a massive data center that would eat up prairie land near Claridge’s home. There’s been several zoning and city commission meetings about the project and Claridge has been there for many of them.

“They’re talking about a gigawatt facility and our local power facility pushes out maybe a gigawatt on a monthly basis, which is something I brought up on my first speech, June 3, I was like, ‘Where are we getting this power from? Because Wolf Creek’s not going to do it,’” they said. Wolf Creek is a local nuclear power plant. “We’re talking millions of homes of power, that’s how much energy we’re talking about here. It’s not thousands, it’s millions.”

Claridge is not opposed to data centers outright, but they do think the current Flint Hills Digital Campus is a terrible idea. They planned to restate their position at the city commission meeting last week where they were arrested. “I was going to basically just call them out on all the potential lies that seem to be surrounding this. It was the week before [...] The news broke that Gary Pinkston, the developer behind this, under sworn testimony in his bankruptcy case, said has no idea what the digital campus project is. He has no interest in it,” Claridge said. “He said the Kanza Park [the LLC behind the project] is his daughter's thing.”

An open letter to the community from Pinkston appeared in both the Emporia Gazette and on the website for the Flint Hills Digital Campus. In the bankruptcy hearing, Pinkston’s creditors asked him if he’d written the letter. “And he said no. And he said he couldn't tell us who did write it. And we're like, ‘Hold on, what's going on?’” Claridge said. “So I had like four points of, you know, kind of catching them in some inconsistencies and asking them about it. You know, who is this Gary guy? Does he work for this or not?”

During the meeting, the commission warned the crowd to stop clapping multiple times, but Claridge walked into the room after the warnings. “We continued to clap, though eventually it started moving to snapping fingers, all beatnik style,” Claridge said. “I did that a little bit too, but in total, I clapped for 13 speeches. I snapped five times, and there were three warnings, a final warning. Then I finally got arrested.”

On the recording you can hear commissioner Monica Duncan tell the police chief to toss out the next person who claps. Claridge had just finished their clapping for a speaker. Their wife was at the podium. “He instead just walks right up to me, tells me to get out, and then, well, you saw what happened. I went to the floor.”

In footage of the meeting published on social media and Emporia’s city commission page, Claridge tells the cops they have a first amendment right to speak. The police ask them to leave and Claridge tells them to “drag me out.”

“I felt like I had a right to be there to voice my concerns,” Claridge said. “I am fully of the notion that clapping is a First Amendment right that I have. I can exercise that as long as I'm not disrupting, and I still argue that I was not disrupting at all. But I basically told them that you know, yeah, I have a right to speak. I'm here to speak. I have a right to clap, and if you want me out, you're going to have to drag me out. And I just stood firm and, well, sat firm and said ‘drag me out’ a couple of times so they knew for sure what I was about.”

They said that the police charged them with disorderly conduct and came back two hours later to add interfering with a law enforcement officer. Emporia PD has refused to share a copy of Claridge’s arrest report with 404 Media, saying it “could interfere with ongoing investigative efforts.”

Claridge said their wife crowdsourced a bail fund from the local community and they were out of jail about eight hours after they’d entered. “They told me my court date was September 10 in the morning,” Claridge said. “Thankfully, while I was in jail, a family friend who's also an attorney texted me and said: ‘Hey, I think you might have some legal trouble coming up in the future. I would be happy to represent you.’ So I do have a lawyer. He seems pretty gung ho about all this, and so I'm really excited to see how this all shakes out in the court.”

The charges haven’t stopped Claridge from talking about the data center — they’ve been commenting on news stories about Emporia and the arrest on social media. “This is a First Amendment thing so you bet your butt I’m going to be speaking out and talking,” they said.

The arrest is a strange twist of fate. Claridge said they’d had a good relationship with the commission before this. “Monica was actually my quote unquote ‘favorite person’ on the commission, as loosely as I can use that word. So I was very shocked when it was her that probably ordered the arrest,” Claridge said.

The city had even invited Claridge and their wife on a fact finding mission to Pryor, Oklahoma in June. Pryor is home to a massive data center campus that hosts clients like Google and DuPont so Emporia and some of its citizens went to learn how Pryor was feeling about it. Claridge filmed portions of the trip and uploaded them to YouTube.

“I was really impressed with what I saw in Pyror, Oklahoma. I saw all the ad valorem taxes go into things like schools and fire department upgrades. Like the town was wonderful down there, and they brag about how they don't take any state or federal money for their school system. It's all paid by the data center, and I think that's brilliant,” Claridge said. “I would love to see something like that if we can make the benefits outweigh the costs. So you know, do your due diligence. Look into what's being done, what's being promised, and if you don't like it, you know you can always petition and restructure your government or recall your government. That's basically what we're working on now. We got three petitions in the works to try to restructure the city commission into more of a city council situation.”

Claridge isn’t against data centers as a rule, they just want to make sure it’s done right. But the oddities around the bankrupt developer, the current plan to use 1,000 acres of prairie land, and the combative attitude of the city commission are problems. Claridge pointed out that there are already large tracts of land zoned industrial with buildings that have been empty for 20 years. “We have all these properties already ready to go, even in an industrial park four where they want to extend this park. But instead, they just want to build brand new buildings on prairie lands and lands that are like really in people's backyards,” they said.

There’s another meeting in August and Claridge said that the arrest won’t stop them from attending. “From my perspective, these are my representatives and they’re beholden to me and my fellow community members and so I’m definitely going to go and try to make my voice heard,” they said.

Claridge also said they plan to give a speech in the near future, but they haven’t worked out the details. “And I've heard that a lot of people are planning on coming and being goofy, you know, or a standing ovation or different gestures or whatever,” they said. “They really just make fun of the commission for being so upset over clapping.”

Pryor Data Center QA with mayor

Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.

^{Lux Claridge (YouTube)}

404 Media

2026-07-29 14:50:31

Podcast: Flock Came to My Town. Here’s What I Did

We start this week with Matthew’s experience of what happened when Flock came to his small town. It’s a microcosm of what is happening all across the United States. After the break, Sam tells us about a bunch of no phone Luddite events. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why anti-Flock influencers making up BS are bad, actually.
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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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• ⁠Our New FOIA Forum! 7/30, 1PM ET⁠
• ⁠What Happened When Flock Came to My Town⁠
• ⁠Being a Luddite Is Fun Again⁠
• ⁠The Rise of Anti-Flock Influencers Who Make Things Up for Clout⁠

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 …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-07-29 14:03:50

Data Centers Are Easy to Build. Powering Them Is Complicated, Slow, and Expensive

On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data center disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers. The incident points to a larger problem with the compute warehouses fueling the AI boom: It’s physically and economically impossible to build power infrastructure fast enough to meet the demands of AI data centers and when problems occur, everyone will pay the price.

AI requires massive amounts of computer hardware to scale. That hardware is housed in data centers, and data centers demand shocking amounts of electricity. More data centers mean more demand on the grid which raises the costs of energy for everyone. This is one of the reasons people hate data centers and have begun to fight their construction.

To bypass the issue of grid demand, many data center builders have promised to power the buildings themselves. The problem with that plan is that it’s easy to build a warehouse full of GPUs. Building power plants and transmission lines to power those warehouses will take years and cost billions more than the data centers. A skilled and efficient builder can complete a data center construction in under a year. Building new energy generation to meet that data center's power needs could take a decade.

Take the humble transmission line — the long conductive cable is one of the most fundamental parts of the power grid. It moves energy from one place to another. “There is a lot that goes into planning, siting, designing and building a new transmission line,” Suzanne Glatz, an energy consultant and co-author of a John Hopkins report on the effect of data centers on the power grid, told 404 Media. “Even rebuilding a line can run into issues and cause delays. For all the reasons, planning a new greenfield line [a common type of transmission line] is likely to take 7-8 years from the date it is approved, but it can take 10 years or longer.”

There are a lot of reasons for this. “Every transmission line will have some unique aspects about it, from the geography, the voltage level, the length, the communities it touches (including the viewshed), environmental impacts, the points it interconnects to existing lines and substations, the reason it is needed as well as what are the alternatives,” Glatz said.

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There are problems with other key pieces of the grid as well. Building out electricity to meet demand requires the construction of new transformers — a device that takes energy from power plants and helps distribute it to people’s homes. The power industry was struggling to build enough transformers to meet demand before the data center boom. It’s gotten worse as data centers have increased demand and tariffs have made them more expensive to build. “Large power transformers can take 1-2 years from order, but have hit longer times and major logistical challenges with delivery. Poles/towers also can long lead items, though not on par with large power transformers,” Glatz said. “All of this is likely compounded by other issues like tariffs.”

In the absence of easy, scalable, electricity solutions, things are getting weird. A company called FTAI wants to use repurposed jet engines to power data centers. The company is already in the business of refurbishing busted engines for commercial jets, but sees powering data centers as a growth market. “The accelerating demand from AI hyperscalers has created an urgent need for immediate power solutions. We believe FTAI Power will be a critical partner for the AI economy, which requires unparalleled amounts of electricity faster and in a more flexible format,” FTAI chief operating officer David Moreno told Construct Connect News.

One of the fast short-term solutions for powering data centers is to bypass the power grid altogether and generate energy on site. That’s what Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary wants to do in Box Canyon, Utah. But there are a lot of problems with this too. These self-powered data centers are relying on gas turbines. But those aren’t fast either. “The lead time for new gas turbines have been cited as up to five years in discussions in the PJM area,” Glatz said.

When gas turbines do come online, there are major problems. Elon Musk’s xAI operates an enormous Colossus 2 data center in Tennessee that runs on 59 natural gas turbines. This has allowed the data center to run without taxing the local grid but comes at the cost of pumping pollutants into the air at an astonishing scale.

Most of these turbines are across state lines in Mississippi, are operating without public permits and are destroying the air quality of people who live near them. Some of the gas turbines weren’t disclosed. A lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center told Reuters the turbines are a violation of the Clean Air Act. It may not matter. On July 27, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced that power plants that exclusively keep data centers online won’t be subject to the Clean Air Act.

O’Leary’s data center would consume nine gigawatts of power, more than double Utah’s current rate of power consumption. The current plan is to pull gas from the nearby Ruby Pipeline to keep the lights on which could raise carbon emissions in the state by 64%. Utah’s governor said that the data center should never fully run on natural gas and that nuclear, solar, and wind must eventually carry the energy load.

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404 MediaJason Koebler

Solar and wind face the same transformer and transmission line problems as more traditional forms of power generation. Tech companies are betting big on nuclear power, but time is against them there too. Meta, Amazon, and Google are all working on nuclear-powered solutions to their energy problem. Microsoft wants to bring Three Mile Island back online but the timeline keeps getting pushed back. Many of these tech companies are betting on some kind of technological breakthrough that will make nuclear power safer, faster, and more scalable. It hasn’t happened yet and startups working on solutions like small modular reactors have been saying they’re five years away from a breakthrough for the past decade. Nuclear power is hard and the cost of a mistake is catastrophic. Tech companies are even attempting to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants but it remains to be seen if that’s safe or effective.

The energy infrastructure stopgap hasn’t stopped tech companies and speculators from building data centers. Every new computing warehouse drives up the demand for electricity, which spikes costs for people that live nearby. Officials in Henrico County, Virginia, which has 37 data centers, recently told government employees that the electricity bill for government and school facilities will increase by 25% and asked public servants and teachers to help them keep costs down.

Glatz said things could get worse. “In the coming years, PJM is showing a shortfall that could lead to outages for customers. One solution that we have advocated for is that data centers that connect but do not arrange for new generation, will be subject to curtailment first before other customers,” she said. “That likely means that data centers will power their operations with less efficient emergency backup generation, if that is the case. Either way, based on the load growth projections and the supply commitments, there is a thinning margin of reserve supply which will increase the risk of not enough generation in coming years, the risk being highest on the more extreme days when demand is highest.” In the U.S. and around the world, those extreme days are becoming more frequent and dangerous.

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants

Tech companies are betting big on nuclear energy to meet AIs massive power demands and they're using that AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-28 17:27:01

‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone

In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday.

The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison.

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‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-28 16:07:52

'I Would Never Do This To You:' Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials

On July 20, Jacob Petrosky stood in front of the Casa Grande, Arizona City Council during a public comment session and made an announcement.

“I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”

He said he’d already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children's vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, “so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family,” he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to “protect” officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city.

After laying out his plan and its benefits for the government officials before him, Petrosky revealed that it was all satire. “I would never do this to you,” he said to the council members. “Could I? Probably. But I wouldn't because it's wrong. Just like what you guys are doing to us is wrong.”

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Petrosky told me he never expected or intended to be the face of opposition to Flock cameras in his small town. And the clip, which has since gone viral on social media, only shows one angle of one moment that’s part of a much longer fight.

Casa Grande City Council unanimously approved a 10 year, $10 million contract with Flock last year, and since then, Petrosky has spoken against the partnership several times at city council meetings. “You know, I'm actually a little bit embarrassed by the video. I did not feel good about it,” he told me. “The looks... You don't get to see the looks on [council members’] faces. They didn't understand it was satire in the beginning until the end, and the looks on their faces were like, we hate you and we're gonna get you. They were not happy, they were very upset.”

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My small town in South Carolina will soon have more Flock cameras than police officers.
404 MediaMatthew Gault

Casa Grande City Council members did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Petrosky said he’s not trying to be “a troll,” but after asking the council to consider the invasion of privacy they were inflicting on constituents, including asking them to consider putting Flock data behind a warrant, his patience was wearing thin. “So it didn't feel great, but I wanted it to sink in,” he said. “I'm not looking to go viral. I don't want to be an online personality, but what I really just want is maybe just a little bit of privacy.”

Petrosky said he first noticed Flock cameras going up in Casa Grande last year. It wasn’t until then that he started getting civically involved. “I registered to vote this year. I'm very transparent about that. I could care less about city council or politics or any of that. I'm very much a nerd,” he said. “They did this deal last year, and then all of a sudden, like 200 cameras appeared in our city, pretty much almost overnight. It was really crazy. In fact, they deployed them so quickly that it freaked me out.” He realized that he couldn’t enter or leave his neighborhood on a paved road without being tracked on a Flock camera.

Petrosky launched a website, DeFlockCG, along with a petition that asks Casa Grande residents to voice specific demands, from limited third-party access to camera data and repercussions for abuse of the system, to removal of Flock from the city altogether. Almost 900 people have signed the petition so far.

Local news outlet Pinal Central reported earlier this month that a public records request revealed that the city has installed about 140 of the planned 200 cameras as of late June, with half being license plate reader cameras while the other half are pan-tilt-zoom cameras.

The city’s website about its Safe Cities Initiative says that in addition to assisting in solving crimes and increasing transparency for the public, the initiative and cameras are intended to “prevent crime before it occurs.” The website only mentions Flock in reference to using the Flock OS system to connect cameras and technologies, but links to a “transparency portal” and how to register privately-owned cameras into the network go directly to Flock’s own web pages. On Flock’s website highlighting the Casa Grande partnership, the company quotes Casa Grande Police Chief Mark McCrory: "In the past, investigators relied on slow, manual efforts to gather video evidence. Now, with registered cameras securely integrated into our Real Time Information Center, we can access vital footage faster—turning information into actionable intelligence when it matters most."

Flock ‘Objects to Our Removing Their Equipment’: Emails Reveal Why a Town Put Bags Over Its Flock Cameras
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404 MediaJason Koebler

In May, Casa Grande City Council voted unanimously to give police access to elementary school cameras through the Flock partnership.

Last week, a 404 Media investigation revealed that police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people with specific characteristics, like “heavy-set male with a black and white hat” or “person on skateboard,” and these searches sometimes reference people’s race or signs of their political affiliation.

Several cities and small communities around the country have canceled their contracts with Flock, citing privacy concerns and the potential for abuse. Petrosky said he primarily wants the city to require a warrant for accessing the data collected by cameras.

Petrosky knows his “announcement” at the council meeting was absurd, but the absurdity was the point. “It's incredibly stupid, and then it's also just incredibly inappropriate. The thought of tracking and associating them with their children and their spouses and all of it,” he said. He would prefer to keep to himself, and doesn’t relish these moments in front of the council, the entire town, the police department, and now, the whole internet. “Never in my wildest imagination would I ever be in a position like this. I don't want to be famous. I just want this to go away. I want these things to at least just be put behind a warrant.”

Map shows cities that have rejected, deactivated Flock cameras

Cities across the US are rejecting Flock license plate readers, canceling contracts, and deactivating systems over privacy fears.

^{Amanda Greenwood (Newsweek)}

404 Media

2026-07-28 14:53:59

Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a ‘Witch Hunt’

Substack contributors are rejecting the company’s decision to flag AI generated writing on the newsletter publishing platform, with several creators saying the new AI detection features are a “witch hunt.” Some Substack users who use AI to help them write or edit articles say the new policy unfairly discriminates against them, while other users who don’t use AI in their writing at all are worried that Substack will mistakenly flag their writing as being AI generated and tarnish their reputation.

“I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI, I could do it again if I wanted to,” Mack Collier, who has a small Substack called Backstage Pass, wrote. “My output would fall, my posts would be less structured, and it would be more obvious that they needed a good editor. Using AI improves the overall quality of my writing. That’s why I use it.”

“These detectors are notoriously, wildly inaccurate,” Alice Lemee, a ghostwriter and digital writing coach, said in a video she made about Substack’s new AI detection features. “All it takes is one false accusation for a writer to have their reputation almost irreversibly tarnished.”

Substack announced the AI detection features on Tuesday in a post from CEO Christ Best, who said that “It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet” and that “when content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices.”

Best explained that Substack has partnered with the AI detection tool Pangram, which is now built in to Substack and allows any user to scan a piece of writing. Pangram then produces a percentage-based score determining how much of the writing was AI or human generated. (Disclosure: Pangram previously bought an ad on 404 Media). We’ve covered research from Pangram, or research that relies on its AI detector before, showing how AI generated writing is flooding every corner of the internet.

As we’ve previously reported, AI detectors are not perfect, and Pangram itself is not immune to labeling human content as being AI, and labeling AI as human. Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, recently told us that the company is constantly working on minimizing errors, and that it estimates its false positive rate at roughly one in 10,000.

“We have now built the mirror image. Pangram is a real machine, trained on vast amounts of text to make a probabilistic guess, and we have pointed it at your writing to work out whether a person is hidden inside,” Sam Illingworth, a professor and the author of Slow AI, said on his Substack in a post titled “Substack’s AI Detector and the Return of the Witch Hunt.” “To decide if there is a human on the other end, Substack asks a machine.”

Substack also added a way for users to add a “How I make this” statement, where they can explain their writing process and disclose if they use AI.

“We’re not against people using AI to assist their work, and we think people should be free to choose which tools they use to express themselves,” Best said. “Some on the platform are human-writing maximalists, others are publicly exploring the frontier of using AI tools while sweating the details to make work they stand behind. We use AI all the time at Substack to write software, do research, and build product features like clipping, translations, and more. But people should know what they’re getting.”

“I think the best way for Substack to address this is to invite further dialogue,” Illingworth told me. “I actually really like the new feature that lets authors tell their readers how they construct their newsletters using AI, and this is the kind of dialogue they should encourage rather than ascribing a score that we know to be incorrect. My worry is that not only do these AI detectors generate false flags for non-native English speakers and neurodiverse writers, but they also remove any opportunity for dialogue because they start from a position of suspicion. Whereas what we need to be doing is developing opportunities for trust between readers and authors.”

"The tools we've introduced today are intended to increase transparency and give readers more context, not to prohibit or penalize AI-assisted writing. They do not impact discovery on the platform,” a Substack spokesperson told me. “We're also encouraging Substack publishers to add a ‘How I make this’ statement, where they can explain their process directly, including how they use (or don't use) AI, and set expectations for readers. Creators can disable detection on their posts pre- and post-publication, as well as report and remove scans on their own work that they believe are mistaken. Find more information on how the features work here.”

Substack’s attempt to detect and label AI generated content was also celebrated by many readers who are exhausted by AI slop and other internet platforms that can’t or don’t want to label it. I just published story about how there is so much unlabeled AI slop on Spotify that people are now creating their own sites to detect and label it without the company’s help.

But the backlash from some Substack users shows that companies can’t just flip a switch if they want to ban or give users the ability to filter out AI content from their feeds. As the flood of AI writing and images we see online and the real world every day makes clear, generating slop is easy. What we’re going to do about it is still an unsolved problem.

America Has a Pangram Problem

AI-detection tools are getting better. But they still aren’t good enough.

^{Matteo Wong (The Atlantic)}

404 Media

2026-07-28 14:06:28

Apple’s iMessage Scanning Flagged a Video of My Friend's Dog as Nudity

In a video my friend’s dog is laying on her back, her little paws in the air, while my friend rubs the dog’s chest. You can see most of the dog — who I’m not naming for very important privacy reasons — from her head to her belly. On closer inspection, you’ll notice the picture includes some dog nipples.

Apple’s iMessage thought this video was so inappropriate that it flagged the video as potentially containing nudity and blurred it. When someone else received the video over iMessage, the app displayed the message “This may be sensitive.” They had to purposefully tap to reveal the video of a dog laying on her back being petted.

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Apple’s iMessage Scanning Flagged a Video of My Friend's Dog as Nudity

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-27 23:43:57

Wikimedia Waits Until After Its Massive Conference to Say It Won’t Voluntarily Recognize Union

The Wikimedia Foundation waited until the days following its largest worldwide conference to issue a statement saying it would not voluntarily recognize a union of its workers.

Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested voluntary recognition of their union. Wiki Workers United said that it had secured a “supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.” A group of more than 1,100 Wikipedia editors have also signed a letter of support for the union.

On Monday, just days after the massive Wikimania Conference concluded in Paris, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it would not voluntarily recognize the union and said the union would have to conduct a vote as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

“The Foundation’s responsibility is to ensure that they can make their own choice freely,” the foundation wrote in the statement. “So that every eligible employee has an equal voice, we believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.”

“We have heard a range of views from staff, including concerns from those who have felt pressured to support union efforts and those who are confused by the unionization process,” the foundation added in a frequently asked questions section. “We have also seen a misunderstanding around what the union can do for global staff and Wikimedia movement communities.”

The Wikimedia Foundation’s statement and its frequently asked questions section is full of very carefully-worded language that is common among companies and organizations that have fought against unionization. For example, the FAQ includes a long section about the benefits that Wikimedia Foundation already offers its staff, and the statement suggests that there is a “wide range of views on unionization” among employees.

Wikipedians immediately took issue with the timing of the statement and the language of it. On a talk page discussing the statement, the Wikimedia Foundation is getting hammered for the timing of the statement and the statement itself.

“What a shameful decision to tie the process to the willingness of Trump-controlled NLRB. Everyone involved in denying the voluntary recognition should resign in disgrace or be driven out,” one editor wrote.

“The fact that this response came exactly 1 day after Wikimania shows that you are afraid of being confronted,” another wrote.

“This is an extremely disappointing statement. It says that ‘Foundation leadership respects the right of staff to unionize, if they choose to do so. That decision rests with them.’ But that decision has been made - by a supermajority of US-based staff. The only thing standing between the US WWU and recognition is WMF executive leadership, who could recognize the union today if they cared to,” a third wrote.

“As a U.S. trained labor lawyer and past organizer with WWU, this statement, alongside the WMF’s public facing community post reek of union-busting disinformation. What’s critical for the community to know is that a supermajority of the workers already did vote by signing a card. This ‘extra step’ is just a delay tactic that employers are advised to do when they don’t want a union,” a fourth wrote. “These WMF workers have already been extremely brave by expressly affirming their commitment to a union. Years of efforts to get this accomplished. This is not some rash decision by them. Moreover, the community supports their union too! It literally makes no sense as to why WMF thought this was the right decision here in this critical moment.”

At Wikimania in Paris, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer Bernadette Meehan was asked about voluntarily recognizing the union. Meehan said “our focus is on executing and helping the core organizing team execute a great event. We will respond to that particular request when we have a chance to review it.”

“We are supportive and we support employees’ right to unionize. The context is complicated because we operate in multiple different places,” she added. “We respect the right if it is the majority will of eligible staffers to unionize.”

The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wikimedia Foundation Statement on US unionization request – Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation responds to the Communication Workers of America's (CWA) request for unionization.

^{Wikimedia Foundation}

404 Media

2026-07-27 22:56:07

Person Opposing Data Center Arrested for Clapping at City Meeting

Police arrested a high school physics teacher for clapping during a city council meeting last Wednesday. Teacher Lux Claridge went to a meeting of the Emporia, Kansas City Commission on July 22 with their spouse and brother. All three were there to speak out against a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on 1,000 acres of rural land in Emporia. They left the meeting in handcuffs, dragged out by police on the orders of a city commissioner.

Emporia PD denied 404 Media’s request for a copy of Claridge’s arrest report. “The requested record is part of an active criminal investigation. As such, it is considered a criminal investigative record,” Emporia PD told 404 Media. “At this time, the Emporia Police Department is denying your request, as disclosure of the requested report could interfere with ongoing investigative efforts. Therefore, the record will not be released.” 404 Media has formally appealed this decision.
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The Emporia City Council met on July 22 and planned to vote on zoning ordinances that would pave the way for the massive Flint Hills Digital Campus data center. Dozens of people from Emporia showed up to speak out against the project. The meeting went on almost five hours — much of it over community concerns about the data center. The small room where the council met could only fit around 30 people. Others waited to speak in a hallway outside or in two nearby overflow rooms.

The overwhelming majority of Emporia’s residents did not want it. There was a strict two minute time limit on public comments and the commissioners repeatedly warned people in the room not to clap or make noise. Attendees clapped anyway, though usually quickly and politely. Again, there were not many people in the room and it was not a rowdy meeting.

But the clapping upset the commissioners. “It was very clear at the beginning that everyone was given their two minutes and we’re trying to be respectful of that. Snapping, clapping, rude comments or anything, and we’ll ask you to leave. You’ve been finally warned and we’re done,” city commissioner Monica Duncan said about 50 minutes into the meeting.

Claridge clapped a few minutes later as a speaker finished and their spouse—Jessica Danford—took the podium.

“Chief, will you take the next person out who claps or anything? Please.” Duncan said. “Sorry, I’m done.”

Emporia’s police chief approached Claridge and asked them to leave. “I have a right to speak,” they said.

“Come on,” the police said.

“Drag me out,” Claridge said. “Drag me out.”Then the police physically raised Claridge up, handcuffed them, and dragged them out. They were later charged with disorderly conduct and interference with police.

Danford panicked as she watched police arrest Claridge. “Take a breath,” Emporia mayor Becky Smith said.“That’s my spouse down there,” Danford said.

“I know. I know. Take a breath,” Smith said.“Please don’t hurt them,” Danford said.

“Let him stay!” People begin to shout in the room.“They can all leave,” commissioner Duncan said, pointing her finger at the room. Then the commissioners shut down the camera feed for the meeting. It resumed about 10 minutes later. Danford was back at the podium and delivered her prepared remarks speaking out against the data center.

A few minutes later, Claridge’s brother David — who is running for state representative — took the podium. “I really look forward to making life hard for you when I get to the statehouse,” he said. “Because you removed my older sibling against their constitutional first amendment rights. This is ridiculous. I have never seen politicians so abundantly terrible at their PR. It is insane. You had someone from the opposition removed for clapping because they enjoyed a speech another member made.”

David told 404 Media that they were angry when police removed his brother. “I was enraged and had to consistently remind myself that a felony battery charge would disqualify me from office,” David told 404 Media. “I don't understand how the commission could think it was a good idea when they are already being so heavily scrutinized. I'm running for office obviously, and I cannot imagine how they thought this political theater would paint them as anything other than a mustache twirling fascist.”

At the end of the evening the commissioners voted 5 - 0 to approve the data center zoning measure.

Emporia, Kansas is like many other towns and cities that are fighting against data centers. It’s small, with a population of around 20,000, and the details around the data center development are shrouded in mystery. The Flint Hills Digital Campus is supposedly the brainchild of developer Gary Pinkston. He penned an op-ed published in the local paper the Emporia Gazette about the importance of the data center for the future of the area. The op-ed was also posted on the website for the Flint HIlls Digital Campus.

Pinkston has also recently declared federal bankruptcy and in public testimony revealed by related to that, he told his creditors that he wasn't involved with the Flint Hills Digital Campus at all. It was, he said, his daughter’s project. “I did not write this,” Pinkston told his creditors when questioned about the op-ed. The Flint HIlls Digital Campus website is now offline. The Emporia Gazette published recordings from Pinkston’s bankruptcy hearing on July 20, two days before an Emporia City Commission meeting where police arrested Claridge.

The police posted a comment about the incident on Facebook. “During the course of the meeting, several individuals in attendance were issued verbal warnings by the City Commission regarding disruptive conduct that was interrupting the proceedings,” the Emporia Police Department said in a statement on Facebook. “One individual, Lux Claridge [...] continued this behavior and was directed to leave the meeting. Claridge did not comply with law enforcement's efforts to remove [them] from the premises, requiring officers to physically carry [them] out of the meeting.”

According to Emporia PD, Claridge was booked at the Lyon County Jail on charges of interference with law enforcement and disorderly conduct. “The Emporia Police Department remains committed to ensuring public meetings are conducted safely and in an orderly manner, while also respecting the rights of all citizens to participate in the civic process,” it said in its Facebook statement.

Emporia Police Department

On July 22, 2026, the Emporia City Commission held its regularly scheduled meeting. During the course of the meeting, several individuals in attendance were issued verbal warnings by the City...

^{www.facebook.com}

404 Media

2026-07-27 14:52:02

This Man Bought Phone Location Data from Around the World (with Mike Yeagley)

This week Joseph talks to Mike Yeagley. As you’ll hear, he is a very interesting guy. He introduced parts of the government to the whole idea of commercially sourced location data. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying the data, and showing what could be done with it. It’s a fascinating conversation.
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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.
youtube.com/embed/rN4nxD59Fyk?…
- How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."

^{Byron Tau (WIRED)}

404 Media

2026-07-27 13:48:42

Tons of Peoples’ Claude Chats and Creations are Exposed on Google

Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see.

The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

💡
Do you work at Anthropic? 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.

Like other chatbots, Claude lets people share their conversations with others by creating a publicly accessible link of the chat. People may do this to send the full text of a conversation to their friends or coworkers in a group chat, for example. But they may not realize Google is also surfacing these links in search results, making them available to essentially anyone.

One Google dork — a super specific search that is useful for finding particular webpages or files — surfaced Claude chats, according to this post on the Claude subreddit. At the time of writing, that Google dork appears to have been mitigated. No results appeared when 404 Media tested it, on both Google and DuckDuckGo. The post said some of the surfaced chats included API keys, login credentials, and personal information like names, addresses, and phone numbers.
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Claude also offers Artifacts, which are interactive work spaces for trying out vibe-coded apps or other tools. A Google dork for surfacing them is still working at the time of writing.

The data exposure is similar to one that impacted OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year, in which nearly 100,00 ChatGPT conversations were searchable on Google. A researcher was able to scrape those exposed chats, meaning that even if Google or Anthropic works to remove the Claude search results, third parties may have already grabbed their content. And it is still possible to view exposed chats even if they’re removed from Google results if you have the direct link itself.

Forbes reported the same thing happened with Claude last year too.

Claude users can change their privacy and sharing settings to make their chats no longer publicly accessible.

Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google

A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-27 13:25:34

Spotify's AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop

Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview with GQ in May, after sharing an image of herself posing with Drake on Instagram, Slime Dot directly denied accusations that she was an “AI artist,” saying “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ originally credulously published the interview and said it was “debunking the AI rumors.” Eventually, GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.”

This confusion could have been avoided if Spotify had done what many of its users and critics have been begging it to do since AI music generators like Suno and Udio made it trivial to flood the internet with AI music. Spotify could flag Slime Dot and other AI-generated music on its platform as such. Other platforms, like YouTube, already do this.

Since Spotify doesn’t do that, users can visit SoullessMusic.com, a database for “AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody.” There, Slime Dot is listed as “almost certainly AI” based on an analysis of three of the tracks and the fact that Slime Dot released such a large number of tracks in a short period of time. Alternatively, users could go to SlopTracker, where they can upload files or copy/paste links to Spotify tracks to run them through a tool which will tell them, with varying degrees of confidence, whether a song was AI-generated or not. SlopTracker found that Slime Dot’s track “Fully” was 95 percent likely to be AI generated by Suno.

“I didn't know what's AI and what's not,” Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, told me. “And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there's loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist's look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.”

Last year, I wrote a story about an exceptionally bad example of what Fulton is talking about. A scammer used Spotify to publish AI-generated music under the name of a real, dead musician, seemingly in an attempt to syphon money from his popularity via streams. After I published that story I heard from several (living) artists who said the same thing happened to them. A similar case involving a Danish jazz musician was covered by Danish publications in April.

Another reader recently told me about a popular Spotify artist that was publishing hours of Iranian jazz every week. The channel, Qajar Jazz, which popped up in December of last year, has 29,579 monthly listeners, gained more popularity after the start of the U.S. war with Iran and the channel making vague allusions to resilience and preserving culture in video descriptions and comments on YouTube. Unlike Spotify, Qajar Jazz videos on YouTube are labeled as being AI-generated in the fine print, though it’s unclear if the channel tagged itself as such or if YouTube did. Both SoullessMusic and SlopTracker detect it as being AI generated.

Qajar Jazz did not respond to a request for comment.

Many of the YouTube comments on Qajar Jazz videos indicate that people think the music is made by real people. In addition to creating a database of AI generated music on Spotify, SoullessMusic also collects social media posts from people who say they were similarly tricked by AI generated music. Some posts are from musicians who lament the fact that they are now competing with algorithms that can produce thousands of tracks with no effort, and others are from artists whose music was directly ripped off by AI artists.

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A post shared by 𝓘𝓼𝓪𝓫𝓮𝓵 (@isabel_music_official)

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A post shared by UMAW (@weareumaw)

Fulton said he started looking around on GitHub for open source AI music detection tools, and ended up building a new, open source detector that relies on open source models called SONICS, the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, and other open data sets. SoullessMusic also scans a track’s metadata for any tags that might tie it back to a specific AI music generator, and Fulton says he also has a script that scans Wikipedia for existing entries on an artist. Users can submit tracks from Spotify to the site they suspect are AI generated, and Fulton reviews them manually before adding them to the database. Despite all of this, he admits the system is not perfect.

Both Soulless Music and SlopTracker use AI and other automated tools to detect AI music. As we’ve written previously, using AI detectors to detect AI content is an inherently flawed process that can lead to false positives. When I asked him how he handles cases of false positives, Fulton said “it's not ideal when that happens, but it's going to happen because it's still quite tricky to check what's AI and what’s not.”

Spotify’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to label AI-generated music makes it impossible to track how much money its making on the platform. Last year, the company announced that it would it would AI disclosures on AI generated music, but I haven’t seen it on any of the dozens of tracks I reviewed for this story. Udio and Sudo both include inaudible digital watermarking in their generation, which in theory could make it easy for Spotify to tag these tracks.

"We're employing a layered approach that combines enforcement, artist controls and greater transparency," a Spotify spokesperson told me after this article was first published. "Over the past year, we've introduced policies targeting harmful AI-related behaviors like spam, impersonation and deceptive content, alongside new tools that give artists more control and listeners more context. These include Verified by Spotify, which helps listeners identify authentic artist profiles; AI Credits, where artists disclose when and how AI was used in creating their music, with tens of thousands of AI credit disclosures now being submitted each day; and Artist Profile Protection, which gives artists more control over what appears on their profiles. We are continuing to build on these efforts.”

Spotify also pointed me to several tracks it had flagged as AI on the mobile app, like Better Times by Mike Mana.

Soulless music attempts to quantify that number based on publicly available streaming data. The small number of AI artists tracked on SoullessMusic generate an estimated $5.7 million a year, with the most popular AI artist, mikeeysmind, generating $1.5 million annually alone. In April, Deezer, a Spotify competitor that attempts to tag all AI-generated music on its platform, said 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI generated. SlopTracker, which attempts to track AI generated music on Spotify that is featured on official Spotify-curated playlists, that those artists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could be making the music instead.

Deezer: AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new uploaded music - Deezer Newsroom

As the only streaming platform tagging AI-generated music, Deezer now reveals that nearly 75,000 AI-tracks are uploaded every day

^{Maribel Khouwes (Deezer Newsroom)}

404 Media

2026-07-27 10:00:04

Being a Luddite Is Fun Again

I’m marching across Lower Manhattan in the middle of a heatwave with a friendly mob of Luddite gnomes, and there isn’t a phone in sight.

It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in the streets while chanting anti-Big Tech slogans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march, urging the confused spectators recording us to put away their pocket rectangles and join us in our sweaty, phone-less revelry. The gnomes are headed West, towards Washington Square Park, where they plan to carry out a public show trial for OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. It’s the fourth iteration of a theatrical protest event they call “S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E,” which stands for “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience.”

This time, the protest isn’t a one-off. It’s part of the “Summer of Ludd,” a week-long festival of free public events organized and advertised entirely off of tech platforms and social media. The Summer of Ludd doesn’t have a website, but you can call a phone number to get a run-down of the events happening each day around the city. The schedule includes everything from an “offline rizz” workshop designed to help you ditch dating apps, a phone-free rave called “Let’s Get Off Together,” internet piracy 101 skill-shares, and an outdoor play that retells the story of the original Luddites. I found out about the Summer of Ludd from a local event mailing list calledNYC Off Tech, but other folks I met throughout the week learned about it from posters wheat-pasted around their neighborhoods, paper event guides distributed to bookstores and coffee shops, or just word-of-mouth from friends.

Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun.

“Google knows next to nothing / My mom knows everything!” the gnomes chant as they hand out gnome hats to random bystanders and implore them to put away their phones. The hats, I’m told, are a reference to aDutch anarchist group from the 1970s known for their impish culture-jamming and absurd carnival humor. It’s also “just kinda silly,” one of the organizer gnomes explains to me.

At the front of the march, two gnomes carry a giant cardboard smartphone labeled “ChatGPT,” which lists off thevariouswell-documentedsocial ills caused by chatbot tools. “Even if it gives us rabies / we will free the iPad babies,” the gnomes continue chanting as they set the smartphone effigy down on a grassy knoll, next to a soapbox that will be used as a witness stand. The crowd is all-ages, but skews heavily Gen-Z — consistent with recent polls showing thatyoung people have become some of Big Tech’s fiercest critics.

Images courtesy Janus Rose

One by one, witnesses take the stand to accuse Altman of numerous crimes perpetrated by OpenAI — from training models on artists’ work, to inducing AI psychosis, to accelerating the climate crisis with polluting and power-hungry AI datacenters. “I used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I’m starting a war on AI,” one young person says from atop the soapbox, receiving cheers of approval. “These companies want you to think that you’re dumb, but that is a lie. Everyone here is smart. Everyone here is creative,” says another witness, describing how tech companies design AI tools and social media apps to make people dependent on them — making them feel helpless, alienated, and addicted to the endless scroll. The crowd roars its unanimous verdict in unison (“GUILTY!”) and everyone begins joyfully stomping on the giant cardboard GPT phone. Leading them is a gnome “executioner” holding a hammer that bears the phrase “Enoch Made Them / Enoch Shall Break Them” — an homage to the original 19^th Century Luddites, who named the hammers they famously used to smash factory machines after the guy who made both the machines and the hammers.

It’s tempting to compare the spectacle to something from the days of Occupy Wall Street. But what sets the Summer of Ludd apart from what one might expect of a Luddite protest is its lack of cynicism and an overwhelming abundance of raw, anarchic joy. Far from the distorted caricature of Luddites as curmudgeonly, puritanical tsk-tsk’ers, the new Luddites attract people to their movement through playfulness and participation. Instead of shaming others for too much screen time, they use public events to make their points for them, demonstrating organically and in real-time that the “indispensable” tech we’ve organized our lives around is not so indispensable after all.

I first met the Luddites a week earlier in Tompkins Square Park, for a press conference hosted by their official spokesperson: a puppet made of garbage.

I joined a small group of journalists sitting in plastic chairs and directing questions at the puppet, who is named Gowanus, after the famously putrid Brooklyn canal where the parts of its patchwork body were found. Gowanus is the Luddites’ “media spokespuppet,” a stand-in created to maintain the organizers’ anonymity while interfacing with digital media platforms and their operatives—including me.

As one might imagine, the Luddites are very averse to any kind of social media. Smartphones are verboten, and they ask every journalist present to sign a “Terms of Service” agreement on a comically long brown paper scroll, which states that nothing we capture may be used to make “short-form video content” like TikToks or Instagram Reels. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I kept my phone stowed away and used nothing but my Hobonichi notebook, a pen, and a small voice memo recorder to do my reporting for this article.

“We are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech,” Gowanus told the group of journalists as they dutifully scribbled notes. “All our events are free, and defy any sort of transactionalism or consumption. We’re trying to dispel that transactional element and get people to participate and create the events themselves. That is what the Summer of Ludd is all about.”

On my train ride home, I pondered the irony of being a journalist covering an event series designed to resist digital capture and consumption. When I reached my subway stop, I noticed an ad for the second-hand online marketplace Backmarket, showing a pink Nintendo Game Boy with the text “AB > AI.” Someone drew a heart next to it in black sharpie marker—an anonymous mark of approval that felt like the opposite of the subway ads for the “Friend” AI device that were widely and virally defaced last year.

Almost reflexively, I took a picture of the ad with my phone and posted it to BlueSky with the caption: “Hatred of AI now reaching the level of cultural consensus that becomes attractive to advertisers.” I woke up the next morning to thousands and thousands of interactions, many from people delighted to see their anti-AI sentiment vaguely reflected in a subway ad for overpriced second-hand goods. This made me think about the classic political trap, where capitalists co-opt social movements by channeling their radical potential into harmless forms of aesthetic consumption and feckless identity politics.

How can the neo-Luddites resist these inevitable attempts at co-optation? Can Luddism generate mass-appeal beyond Y2K aesthetic Tiktok trends, where Gen-Z’ers marvel at flip phones, iPods, and other retro tech as a kind of performative false-nostalgia? And how do you build a successful movement while eschewing the most common (albeit flawed) tools of mass-communication?

The Digital Packrat Manifesto
DRM and big tech’s war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.
404 MediaJanus Rose

Members of the Luddite Renaissance—as the loose-knit, anonymous collective that organized the Summer of Ludd refer to themselves—attempt to answer these questions in “The Event is the Medium,” a zine manifesto referencing the famous Marshall McLuhan quote which, naturally, is only available in physical paper format (The Luddites humbly request that none of their work be uploaded to social media). The central idea is utilizing public space to run events that get people to experience—and directly participate in—what Luddism has to offer in 2026, instead of just yelling at people on a street corner.

What should these Events entail? This is where the Luddites become intentionally vague—not for lack of answers, but as a defense mechanism designed to make the Event unpredictable and unmonetizable. If social media’s role is to consume and metabolize human existence into an endless scroll of bite-sized, short-form video content, then the Event’s purpose is to bring people together in ways that defy categorization and documentation. Like the “Happenings” of 1960s performance artist Allan Kaprow, they can be anything and everything—as long as they are free, participatory, and never, ever boring.

“The Event may seem nebulous and surreal to you; this is on purpose,” the Luddites write in their zine manifesto. “DIY shows, teach-ins, art fairs, all come with a preconceived notion of what will happen. This causes people to act in a ritualized or transactional way. Any way that you can break through the monotony of ‘coolness’ to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount.”

In other words: If the event is the medium, the message is that being a Luddite is fun again.

I returned to Tompkins Square several times over the next week. Throughout the Summer of Ludd festivities, the Luddites had transformed the formerly-bohemian Lower East Side hangout into a kind of town square. They camped out at the park each day, providing free food, zines, and plenty of ways to plug in to the various happenings throughout the city. Basically, if you wanted to find out what the Luddites are all about, you had to meet them here, in person.

Images courtesy Summer of Ludd

Somewhere in the large crowd that had gathered for the gnome protest, I ran into Motherboard founder and fellow low-tech appreciator Alex Pasternak, along with “extremely online” journalist Taylor Lorenz, whorecently told WIRED that her screen time averages 17 hours a day. Also present was Reverend Billy, leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, whose corporate exorcisms and culture-jamming theatrics have been a staple of NYC protests since the 90s.

“Chronically online culture has become something we’re attached to, even as activists,” Bucky, one of the Luddite organizers, told a crowd of gnomes in the park, just prior to the million-gnome march. “Our consumer habits are tracked, analyzed, and sold back to us. Every time we seek fun in our little light-boxes, we feed a beast which surveils us, which exploits our time and our imagination, and which lines the pockets of big psycho assholes like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesson, and Tim Cook.”

“I want my attention back!” someone shouts in response. The crowd cheers in agreement.

Bucky mentions the 2012 Arab Spring uprisings as a pivotal example of how Silicon Valley extended this capture to the realm of activism. In the heyday of Twitter, tech companies and most of the Western press pushed a narrative that social media platforms were helping liberate people around the world from oppressive regimes. Thanks to these platforms and their beneficent corporate overlords, the argument went, the techno-utopian dream of the 90s internet would be realized, and dictators would crumble under the power of free information and free markets.

Others likeEvgeny Morozov argued that this framing was not only naïve and wrong, but allowed companies like Twitter and Facebook to advance their ambitions and establish themselves as centralized social infrastructure under the guise of do-gooder tech saviorism. At the same time, the ad-powered surveillance networks built by social media enabled governments to crack down on dissidents like never before, paving the way for things like facial recognition, algorithmic manipulation, and discriminatory digital ID laws.

But there was another explanation for the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that had little to do with tech.

“The reason hundreds of thousands of people went to Tahrir Square is because a million people lived within ten miles of it. That is public space, and public space is where politics happens,” said Bucky. “Public space is the new social media. Running an event is the new activist infographic on an Instagram story.”

You’re Invited: 404 Media’s Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!
We’re celebrating with TWO NIGHTS of good times: A live taping of the podcast, and a party the following night! Paid 404 Media subscribers get free and discounted access. Details below.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

With hatred of big tech and AI hitting the mainstream, it makes a lot of sense that something like the Summer of Ludd would emerge in this particular moment. Everywhere I go, there is an overwhelming sense that the Silicon Valley experiment is on its last legs. The companies that once aimed to make good products and postured as democracy-loving and progressive now open ally themselves with fascists, actively enshittify the internet with slop, and force-feed us annoying AI features that nobody wants. In response, the new Luddites seek not to abandon technology entirely, but build new infrastructure that embraces proximity and in-person human relationships, instead of alienation and doom-scrolling.

“This is an activism of the moment,” internet culture theorist and media professor Douglas Rushkoff, who was also present for the Luddite gnome march, told 404 Media. “Even if the whole thing is ending, even if we’ve already lost, we’re gonna go and party. We’re gonna go down having fun. And if we can have a good enough party in face-to-face, non-technological, non-digital interaction, we will seduce the world like Abby Hoffman never could.”

As the person who coined the rise of “viral” media back in the 90s, Rushkoff has been paying attention to tech backlash trends longer than most. His 2016 book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” captures a pivotal moment where public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began to sour, as companies like Google and Facebook disrupted public infrastructure and reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in their image.

Over the next decade, the tech companies did away with their vaguely progressive, ‘Don’t Be Evil’ public image, and young people who came of age in the aftermath increasingly found themselves attracted to tech backlash and the neo-Luddite movement as a reflection of their lived reality.

“The extent of the skinner box that this generation is living in is more extreme. We adapted to it as best we could, but they were born inside of it,” said Rushkoff. “Their hearts and their somatic sensibilities have been intentionally disrupted and stymied since they were born. And so they’re a good case study to show that whatever that part of us is, it will seek expression eventually.”

Bleak job prospects and a visibly collapsing climate further explain why some of the biggest moments of Big Tech backlash in recent months have come from Gen-Z—like the series of viral videos showing graduates booing tech CEOs for praising AI during their commencement speeches. But the Luddites are quick to point out that their movement is multi-generational, and their goals for the Summer of Ludd can’t be realized through the medium of news headlines and viral online attention.

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’
A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, “AI SUCKS!”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

So, what am I doing here? Why am I writing this article, attempting to capture the essence of a movement and an event that—by its very nature and stated intention—refuses to be captured? Maybe it’s because journalism is best when it acts as a cultural placeholder, a blurry indication that something happened here, and perhaps will keep happening in the future. It’s also a kind of beacon for others to find—an indication that the “inevitable” future tech companies keep threatening us with is perhaps not so inevitable, and that humans aren’t so hopeless at finding each other and creating new ways to live.

“Part of the concept is: You had to be there,” Rushkoff told me. “It’s like oh, Earth? You had to be there. Life? You had to be there.”

You just had to be there.

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, "AI SUCKS!"

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404 Media

2026-07-25 10:00:43

Scientists Uncover Lost ‘Golden Age’ of Languages That Ended 1,000 Years Ago

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual magic.

First, scientists have uncovered a “golden age” of languages that flourished for millennia before fading into our dark age of linguistic extinction. Then, Alan Turing’s erotica, the search for the first exomoon, and the cave of the Old Ancestors.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

The silence of long-lost languages

Blasi, Damián et al. The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene. Science.

Some 3,000 years ago, a “golden age” of languages dawned around the world, resulting in the proliferation of tens of thousands of tongues over the next 2,000 years. But over the past millennia, we have entered a dark age of linguistic diversity, driven by the rise of “behemoth languages” that have pushed others into extinction.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that reconstructed humanity’s linguistic diversity since the dawn of agriculture, which emerged about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.

The global human population before agriculture is estimated to have been between 4.4 and seven million people. Modern hunter-gatherer societies can act as rough proxies for the likely distribution, sizes, and linguistic diversity of these preagricultural populations. With that in mind, researchers led by Damián Blasi of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona developed a model based on 171 hunter-gatherer groups, which suggested that humans spoke about 4,500 to 6,000 languages before the dawn of agriculture. That’s fewer than the 7,500 that are spoken today, but still a lot considering how few people there were on Earth at the time.

The team then ran thousands of models predicting how languages diversified and evolved as humans adopted plant and animal domestication, a process that radically increased populations and complexified cultures. The predictions converged around a scenario in which linguistic diversity peaked around 2,000 years ago with possibly as many 75,000 tongues spoken worldwide.

“We uncovered a linguistic ‘golden age’ with tens of thousands of languages 3,000 to 1,000 years ago,” Blasi’s team said in the study.”In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia.”

The spread of colonialism over the past 500 years has accelerated language loss due to the ascent of behemoth languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi. But the new study suggests that linguistic diversity was already in decline starting at least 1,000 years ago due to the formation of smaller-scale multinational empires. Sadly, this trend of linguistic impoverishment has far-reaching consequences beyond language itself.

“Languages (and their histories) are regularly utilized as proxies for other units of culture because language is often transmitted and acquired along with other cultural traits, including marriage patterns, religious practices, kinship systems, or modes of social organization,” the team concluded. “Therefore, cultural variants with transmission dynamics similar to those of languages have also undergone a recent mass extinction.”

In other news…

The unfinished work of Alan Turing

Dillon, Sarah. “‘Pryce’s Buoy’: Alan Turing’s Autofictional Short Story.” The Review of English Studies.

Alan Turing, the famed British mathematician who helped break the Nazi enigma code, packed a mind-boggling list of accomplishments into his short life. A foundational figure in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing died at just 41 of cyanide poisoning in the wake of horrific persecution from the British government for what was then the crime of being a gay man.

In his spare time from dramatically changing the course of history, Turing also tried his hand at writing fiction, according to a new study about his erotic short story “Pryce’s Buoy.” The draft is an autofictional account of Turing’s affair with his young lover Arnold Murray, a relationship that ultimately forced Turing to endure a sentence of chemical castration to avoid prison in the 1950s.
Sarah Dillon with the handwritten draft of “Pryce’s Buoy.” Image: © King’s College, Cambridge
The draft is cut short before any sexual encounter between the characters—perhaps because Turing’s family censored it, or perhaps because Turing left it unfinished—though the tale is very clearly headed to the bedroom. Sarah Dillon of the University of Cambridge revisits the story in a new study that contextualizes it in the final years of Turing's life and links it directly to the works of gay writer Sir Angus Wilson by revealing that Turing copied many of Wilson’s stylistic choices.

“Wilson braved…dangers—he did not hide his homosexuality, and he did publish his work,” said Dillon in the study. “Turing did not hide his sexuality either, and although he did not publish his story, we cannot say whether this was through choice or because of the abrupt end to his life in June 1954.”

Turing’s life story is heartbreaking, but Dillon emphasized that “Pryce’s Buoy” is an expression of his playful, cheeky side, which persisted even in the midst of the immense injustice to which he was subjected.

That’s no moon—it’s an exosatellite

Hoy, Kevin et al. “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star.” Nature.

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit other stars, but nobody has clearly spotted an “exomoon” orbiting one of these exoplanets. Now, a team reports the discovery of a Jupiter-sized world that is orbiting a massive object called a brown dwarf that is, in turn, orbiting a star called CD-35 2722, which is about 73 light years from Earth.
Concept art of the CD-35 2722 system, with the brown dwarf in the foreground, orbited by an exosatellite. Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser
This might be the first known exomoon, but the system is so weird and novel that researchers aren’t quite sure that’s the right term. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called “failed stars” because they are about as big as a gas planet can get without igniting nuclear fusion in their cores and transforming into stars. Moons orbit planets, and brown dwarfs are somewhere in between a planet and a star, so the team went with the term “exosatellite.”

“Exoplanet satellites can be easily described as exomoons, but it is not clear if satellites of brown dwarf companions can be called the same, as the term lacks a formal definition,” said researchers led by Kevin Hoy of Diego Portales University. “Perhaps we are approaching the limit of language invented to describe the Solar System, which is entirely unlike CD-35 2722.”

This is why you should always bring a poet! Whether or not the giant exosatellite gets minted as the first exomoon, the discovery is an exciting example of how diverse star systems are increasingly coming into focus.

The cave of the Old Ancestors

Grono, Elle et al. “Phytoliths from Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai country (southeastern Australia) reveal the gathering of whole grasses for burning practices inside the cave.” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

For at least 25,000 years, the “Old Ancestors” of Aboriginal Australians gathered to burn grass and perform magic rituals within Cloggs Cave, a cavernous site several hundred miles east of Melbourne.

While the immense significance of the cave is well-known to the GunaiKurnai people of the region, as well as to generations of archaeologists, a new study has confirmed the deep roots of the site as a ritual setting for the Old Ancestors. Researchers led by Elle Grono of the Australian National University unearthed layers of “phytoliths,” which are mineral structures found in plant cells, to corroborate that the cave has been a site of magic and healing for 25,000 years.
GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett at the cave entrance of Cloggs Cave. Image: Jess Shapiro, courtesy of GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation
“Taken together, the archaeological features and multiple lines of archaeobotanical evidence at Cloggs Cave corroborates traditional GunaiKurnai knowledge and nineteenth century ethnography of ritual practices involving the use of plant resources, indicating that the cave was a special, secluded place used by mulla-mullung, powerful learned men and women, for the practice of magic, healing, cursing and spiritual practices,” said the team in their new study.

In our disorienting time of ephemeral reels and shortened attention spans, there’s inspiration in the incredible continuity of this storied cave, which has witnessed thousands of generations seeking solace in its confines.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

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2026-07-24 18:11:04

Behind the Blog: No Spoilers

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss astrology, Flock on the brain, The Odyssey, and more.

JASON: This week I wrote pretty much exclusively about Flock, and I am working on a few more articles about automated license plate readers that will probably go in the next week or so. I am well aware that there are other topics in the world, but, basically, there is now so much interest in the company and its practices that I am getting inundated with tips, story ideas, and sources, and it feels like I have to chase many of the leads I’m getting. There are only so many hours in the day, so this means some other things I want to cover are either falling by the wayside or will have to wait.

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Behind the Blog: No Spoilers

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404 Media

2026-07-23 21:41:29

A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript, Judge Says

A judge caught a court reporter making AI-generated errors in a court transcript, and put court reporters everywhere on notice for their use of AI.

In a memorandum decision concerning a case about a man who sold drugs to another man who overdosed and died, filed on July 23, Judge Paul Felix wrote in a footnote of the decision that a transcript contained errors that looked a lot like generative AI. The footnote was spotted by attorney Rob Freund on X.

“At one point in the transcript, a motion, presumably made by the State, is attributed to the trial court. At another point, an objection, presumably made by Williams, is attributed to the Bailiff. At yet another point, the State’s closing argument is attributed to the trial court,” judge Felix wrote. “These errors, among others not described herein, complicated but did not substantially impede our review of Williams’s appeal. Regardless, we remind the Court Reporter that this court relies on transcripts being true and accurate representations of the transcribed proceedings. Based upon the types of errors reviewed, it appears that generative artificial intelligence may have assisted with the preparation of this transcript. While AI can improve efficiency and be a productive tool for many professionals, it is incumbent upon those using such systems to proofread and ensure the accuracy of the generated product.”

In case after case after case, for the last few years, judges have been catching lawyers using AI in court filings. These situations are always messy and embarrassing for the attorneys — whose whole job it is to represent their clients to the best of their ability by citing existing case law and legal precedent, which AI routinely fucks up — and judges are becoming more outspoken about their frustrations. In May, judges in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division laid into several lawyers for more than 20 minutes after accusing one of them of using AI and the others of being too sloppy to catch it; the judges called the entire situation “striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening.” Lawyers, meanwhile, blame paralegals, head colds, and “rushing.”

But this is the first time a court reporter has been publicly put on notice for not catching AI-generated errors in transcripts, raising the specter of there being errors not just in court filings from attorneys but in the records of official proceedings of a trial. There are many apps and companies that offer AI-generated transcripts for court reporting, but transcriptionists and court reporters say their expertise as human listeners and skilled transcribers, especially since AI tends to guess instead of pausing to ask for a re-statement or resolve ambiguity before putting it into the court record, is still extremely valuable in the courtroom.

Corrected 7/24/26 8 a.m. EDT to change "stenographer" to "court reporter."

18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It

Lawyers blame IT, family emergencies, their own poor judgment, their assistants, illness, and more.

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