Humanity’s Toxic Wreckage Is Teeming With Life, Scientists Discover
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were lost at sea, lost in time, lost in space, and lost in translation.
If you are househunting at the moment, have you considered living on a submerged pile of Nazi munition, or in a charming community of WWI-era ghost ships, or, if you want privacy, maybe a homestead on the Moon? The first studies up this week are all about weird hubs of life here on Earth and perhaps one day off it.
Then, who will serve as general counsel for aliens? Who will feed the megaraptors? And last, the ultimate scientific mystery: what happened to Taylor Swift’s Southern twang?
By the mid-20th century, millions of tons of munitions from both World Wars had been dumped into coastal waters. Now, scientists reveal that these weapons of death have become bustling hubs of life by attracting fish, mollusks, microbes, among other creatures. Footage captured during submersible dives last year shows thriving aquatic communities on war detritus in the Baltic Sea.
“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic munition compounds, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels, and other epifauna on the munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs, and wooden crates,” said researchers led by Andrey Vedenin of Carl von Ossietzky University. “In this study, for the first time, the composition and structure of epifauna on the surface of marine munitions are described.” Footage from munitions sites. Image: Vedenin, Andrey et al. The munitions supported much more life than the surrounding sediment, with an average of around 43,000 organisms per square metre on the munitions compared to about 8,200 organisms on the seafloor. These hotspots were especially interesting given the toxicity levels from the explosive munitions fillings, which often exceeded water quality thresholds for aquatic organisms. (Side note: the authors describe the fillings as “cheesy” due to their texture and yellow color, which made me weirdly hungry for a munitions sandwich).
Some species seemed mildly put off by the contamination, including mussels that kept their shells closed at spots with high concentrations. But for the most part, “the high levels of chemical exposure apparently do not prevent the development of a dense epifauna community on the metal shells, fuse pockets, and transport cases centimeters from the explosive filling,” the team found. “The bare explosive, however, remains mostly free from epifauna, even from the Polydora polychaetes that are known to inhabit a vast variety of substrates.”
Wow, you know it’s bad if even Polydora polychaetes won’t touch it. Those worms live on anything but it seems they draw the line at the naked surface of an explosive.
In a separate study, researchers led by Elizabeth White of Duke University used remote-sensing drones to map out 147 shipwrecks in the eerily named “Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay” in Maryland. These WWI-era ships “have created plentiful wetlands, forests, and aquatic habitats,” according to the study. youtube.com/embed/RhJ_jOcZZyY?… “Sediment collected within wrecks has created ship-shaped islands, allowing both aquatic and terrestrial vegetation to flourish,” the team said. “Birds, such as Osprey, nest within this vegetation and on exposed areas of ships, while aquatic organisms such as the endangered Atlantic sturgeon use the subaqueous wreckage as foraging and nursery grounds.”
And there you have it: research about discarded weapons of death and creepy ship graveyards that, somehow, is kind of uplifting.
The Moon is a harsh mistress, but the harshness is not evenly distributed. To that end, scientists have scouted out the best lunar real estate for future human habitation based on metrics like temperature, topography, solar illumination, dust activity, water resources, and radiation.
“Lunar resources can provide essential support for establishing permanent lunar habitats, suggesting that the Moon may become humanity’s second home,” said researchers led by Siyan Wang of Tongji University. However, the team added that the Moon does come with some design challenges: for example, “lacking an atmosphere, lunar surface temperatures range annually from –171°C to 111°C.”
Setting aside the absence of standard atmospheric amenities, the new study spotlights three promising sites, all of which are mare plains (low-lying basaltic regions) sheltered within the craters Pytheas, Gambart, and Parry. Great locations, but you’re not going to like the commute.
Should aliens have inalienable rights? This question has been debated for years (and I explore it in my new book🔌). In a new study, scientists propose establishing a legal framework for aliens quickly, given the frenzied pace of both astrobiology and commercial space development.
“Humanity stands at the threshold of an unprecedented boom in space activity, with planned mining ventures, increased uncrewed and crewed missions, and escalating commercial interest,” said researchers led by Emma Johanna Puranen of the Open University. “This coincides with a ‘golden age’ of astrobiology, where scientists increasingly favour the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. We must act now to establish legal and ethical norms for the treatment of extraterrestrial ecosystems before irreversible harm occurs.”
The team models its proposed framework on the influential 1972 treatise “Should Trees Have Standing?” by Christopher Stone. Who knows if we’ll ever actually need a legal system for aliens, but at the very least I hope it inspires a procedural spinoff called CSI: E.T.
Scientists have discovered fossils of a megaraptor (a dinosaur as cool as it sounds) with the leg bone of a crocodilian right there in its jaws. Though it’s possible that this bone coincidentally slid into the predator’s mouth after it died, we may be looking at a 68-million-year-old version of The Last Supper. Artist concept of the newly discovered dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali with an ancient crocodile relative’s front leg in its mouth. Image: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History via AP “Here we report a previously unknown megaraptoran genus and species” called Joaquinraptor, which was found in central Patagonia and “is among the most completely represented and latest-surviving megaraptorans,” said researchers led by Lucio Ibiricu of the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology.
“A crocodyliform right humerus…was situated between the closely associated left and right dentaries of the Joaquinraptor holotype, with the apices of several tooth crowns of the megaraptorid in direct contact with the humeral shaft, which also shows potential tooth marks,” the team added. “As such, this discovery may constitute direct evidence regarding prey selection” of megaraptors.
Death is a bummer, but I bet it goes down a lot smoother with a mouthful of croc hot wings.
I knew this study was trouble when it walked in. Researchers tracked Taylor Swift’s dialect shifts across the eras by logging and analyzing more than 1,400 vowel sounds in interviews and performances spanning her career.
“The results of this study show that Taylor Swift temporarily adopted distinct measurable features of Southern American dialect during her time in Nashville…and these features disappeared upon her relocation to Philadelphia and New York City,” said authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew B. Winn of the University of Minnesota. Taylor Swift performing during her Eras tour (credit Maura Shapiro) with vocal frequency analysis overlaid (credit: Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn). Image: Maura Shapiro/Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn. The team also discovered that Swift lowered her voice pitch during her NYC years, when she became more outspoken about “The Man” (sexism and creative property rights). They speculate that she may have “intentionally modulated her voice pitch to be lower to signal the seriousness of these themes, and to convey her competence to speak on them with authority.”
Or, they add, it could be a natural voice drop “associated with aging through her 20s,” an explanation supported by her own admission that she has this thing where she gets older but just never wiser. Whatever her current accent, let’s hope she shakes it off and leaves a blank space open for new dialects. Look what you made me do; it’s me, hi, I’m the Abstract, it’s me.
Sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War can provide a habitat for epifauna, according to an analysis of footage from a remotely operated vehicle in the Baltic Sea.
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit.
JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about 404 Media at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum, an annual conference. Over the years, I haven’t been to too many conferences, because honestly it was always too disruptive to the day-to-day journalism and work of managing a team to be able to get away. We’re more than two years into this, but one of the nice things about having this company is that I can mostly get my work done whenever makes sense for me, whether that’s late at night in Los Angeles or early in the morning in Greece.
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The sudden reduction in the Chandler wobble, a deviation between Earth’s axis and crust, may primarily originate in a powerful La Niña event, reports a new study.#TheAbstract
Earth Was Mysteriously Thrown Off-Kilter In 2015. Now, Scientists Think They Know Why.
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Have you noticed anything out of whack about Earth since 2015? I’m speaking, of course, about how our planet’s wobble started shrinking that year, a mysterious shift that scientists have been puzzling over ever since.
Now, researchers think they might have an explanation for the sudden decrease in the Chandler wobble (CW), a deviation in Earth's rotational axis relative to its crust that causes a drift of about 20 feet over a cycle of roughly 14 months. The recent off-kilter wobble, known as the CW reduction event, may have been largely sparked by “mass anomalies” after the La Niña of 2010–2011, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
That particular La Niña event was one of the strongest on record and it was “followed by significant ocean mass loss due to changed precipitation and evaporation patterns, providing a possible cause of the CW reduction event,” reports the study.
“Polar motion, like the Chandler wobble, reflects changes in Earth’s overall angular momentum,” said study authors Taehwan Jeon and Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist and associate professor at Seoul National University, respectively, in a joint email to 404 Media. “Changes in regional mass, and velocity fields of ocean currents and winds can affect the wobble’s amplitude. Because the wobble sums up effects from all over the globe, it is usually hard to tell exactly which region contributed how much.”
“Still, given the scale of the phenomenon, it makes sense that global climate events such as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) have a stronger influence than small local changes,” the pair continued. “Not every El Niño or La Niña does this, but as our study shows, the 2010-2011 La Niña produced an unusually strong anomaly when viewed from the perspective of Earth’s polar motion.”
The Chandler wobble is one of many wandering deviations between the axis and crust; for instance, we recently covered the effect of impounded dam water on Earth’s rotation. The wobble has also increased and decreased many times in the past in response to shifting global mass distributions, so the latest anomaly isn’t unprecedented.
Still, scientists are curious what might be driving the recent CW reduction, which reached its peak intensity between 2015 and 2020. To approach this mystery, Jeon, Seo, and their colleagues broke the wobble up into two components: the forced wobble and the free wobble.
“The Chandler wobble is actually a two-dimensional pendulum-like motion, but for simplicity it can be compared to a one-dimensional swing,” explained Jeon and Seo. “If you let a swing move without pushing it, it will eventually slow down and stop. That ‘natural’ motion without any external force is what we call the ‘free wobble.’”
“Now imagine giving the swing a push at just the right timing,” they continued. “The swing will keep moving. Depending on how you push, its amplitude can increase or decrease. On Earth, all moving masses (such as air, oceans and water on land) act like those pushes. The part of the wobble driven by these pushes is called the ‘forced wobble.’”
Because the Chandler wobble is the sum of these two parts, the reduction is caused by the free and forced phases cancelling each other out, according to the team’s models. In other words, the study showed that the strong 2010-2011 La Niña event drove the forced wobble out of phase, allowing it to interfere with the free wobble and reduce the overall CW amplitude.
Jeon and Seo said their results “were partly expected and partly surprising.” On the one hand, they noted that oscillations naturally decay over time, so they were expecting to see only recent changes reflected in the Chandler wobble, with ENSO events of the past few decades playing an outsized role in those shifts.
“What surprised us was that not every ENSO event seems to matter, and in particular, the 2010-2011 La Niña turned out to be the strongest contributor,” the pair said. “That was not something we had fully predicted before doing the analysis.”
With that in mind, it’s possible that the Chandler wobble will continue to go haywire in the coming decades, as ENSO events are being amplified by human-driven climate change.
“Large-scale and systematic shifts in Earth’s mass and motion can strongly affect the Chandler wobble, especially when they show a cycle close to the Chandler period (about 433 days), which can resonate more strongly,” Jeon and Seo said.
In particular, the pair pointed to how much ENSO events can disrupt rainfall patterns, which ended up being a main factor in how the 2010–2011 La Niña anomalies impacted on the CW reduction. Changes in global ice mass, however, have more influence over the long-term drift of Earth’s rotation axis, and don’t influence the short-term Chandler wobble as much.
“Since 2010-2011, mass and velocity field changes have continued around the globe, and separating their individual effects remains very challenging,” Jeon and Seo said. “Still, because the Chandler wobble’s amplitude has been increasing again since late 2020, we expect that it may soon return to levels comparable to those observed before 2010.”
“Although the amplitude drop during 2015-2020 was unusual, there were also earlier periods when the Chandler wobble was decreased or increased in amplitude,” the pair concluded. “We suspect that major ENSO events may have played a similar role during those times as well. A next step would be to investigate the broader patterns—what kinds of ENSO events tend to leave a mark on Earth’s polar motion, and what features make them most influential.”
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The swings between El Niño and La Niña have been bigger in recent decades than earlier ones. Our guest blogger covers new research pointing the finger at human-caused climate change.
Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies
People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. The tide of terrible Twin Peaks related slop lasted for about two days before the subreddit’s mods broke, reversed their decision, and deleted the AI generated content.
Twin Peaks is a moody TV show that first aired in the 1990s and was followed by a third season in 2017. It’s the work of surrealist auteur David Lynch, influenced lots of TV shows and video games that came after and has a passionate fan base that still shares theories and art to this day. Lynch died earlier this year and since his passing he’s become a talking point for pro-AI art people who point to several interviews and second hand stories they claim show Lynch had embraced an AI-generated slop future.
On Tuesday, a mod posted a long announcement that opened the doors to AI on the sub. In a now deleted post titled “Ai Generated Content On r/twinpeaks,” the moderator outlined the position that the sub was a place for everyone to share memes, theories, and “anything remotely creative as long as it has a loose string to the show or its case or its themes. Ai generated content is included in all of this.”
The post went further. “We are aware of how Ai ‘art’ and Ai generated content can hurt real artists,” the post said. “Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the world we live in today. At this point I don’t think anything can stop the Ai train from coming, it’s here and this is only the beginning. Ai content is becoming harder and harder to identify.”
The mod then asked Redditors to follow an honor system and label any post that used AI with a special new flair so people could filter out those posts if they didn’t want to see them. “We feel this is a best of both worlds compromise that should keep everyone fairly happy,” the mod said.
An honor system, a flair, and a filter did not mollify the community. In the following 48 hours Lynch fans expressed their displeasure by showing r/twinpeaks what it looks like when no one can “stop the Ai train from coming.” They filled the subreddit with AI-generated slop in protest, including horrifying pictures of series protagonist Cooper doing an end-zone dance on a football field while Laura Palmer screamed in the sky and more than a few awful ChatGPT generated scripts. Image via r/twinpeaks. Free-IDK-Chicken, a former mod of r/twinpeaks who resigned over the AI debacle, said the post wasn’t run by other members of the mod team. “It was poorly worded. A bad take on a bad stance and it blew up in their face,” she told 404 Media. “It spiraled because it was condescending and basically told the community--we don’t care that it’s theft, that it’s unethical, we’ll just flair it so you can filter it out…they missed the point that AI art steals from legit artists and damages the environment.”
According to Free-IDK-Chicken, the subreddit’s mods had been fighting over whether or not to ban AI art for months. “I tried five months ago to get AI banned and was outvoted. I tried again last month and was outvoted again,” she said.
On Thursday morning, with the subreddit buried in AI slop, the mods of r/twinpeaks relented, banned AI art, and cleaned up the protest spam. “After much thought and deliberation about the response to yesterday's events, the TP Mod Team has made the decision to reverse their previous statement on the posting of AI content in our community,” the mods said in a post announcing the new policy. “Going forward, posts including generative AI art or ChatGPT-style content are disallowed in this subreddit. This includes posting AI google search results as they frequently contain misinformation.”
Lynch has become a mascot for pro AI boosters. An image on a pro-AI art subreddit depicts Lynch wearing an OpenAI shirt and pointing at the viewer. “You can’t be punk and also be anti-AI, AI-phobic, or an AI denier. It’s impossible!” reads a sign next to the AI-generated picture of the director. Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk As evidence, they point to aBritish Film Institute interview published shortly before his death where he lauds AI and calls it “incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity.” AI boosters often leave off the second part of the quote. “I’m sure with all these things, if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror. But I’m hoping better times are coming,” Lynch said. Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk The other big piece of evidence people use to claim Lynch was pro-AI is a secondhand account given to Vulture by his neighbor, the actress Natasha Lyonne. According to the interview in Vulture, Lyonne asked Lynch for his thoughts on AI and Lynch picked up a pencil and told her that everyone has access to it and to a phone. “It’s how you use the pencil. You see?” He said.
Setting aside the environmental and ethical arguments against AI-generated art, if AI is a “pencil,” most of what people make with it is unpleasant slop. Grotesque nonsense fills our social media feeds and AI-generated Jedis and Ghiblis have become the aesthetic of fascism.
We've seen other platforms and communities struggle with keeping AI art at bay when they've allowed it to exist alongside human-made content. On Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, low-effort garbage is flooding online spaces and pushing productive human conversation to the margins, while floating to the top of engagement algorithms.
Other artist communities are pushing back against AI art in their own ways: Earlier this month, DragonCon organizers ejected a vendor for displaying AI-generated artwork. Artists’ portfolio platform ArtStation banned AI-generated content in 2022. And earlier this year, artists protested the first-ever AI art auction at Christie’s.
The tech the Secret Service claims can be used to "disable cell phone towers" is very commonly used by ticket scalpers to game Ticketmaster.#SIMFarm #SIMBank #Tickets #TicketScalping #Ticketmaster
The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers
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Tuesday, the Secret Service said it “dismantled a network” of “300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.” The Secret Service suggested that this network posed a threat to the United Nations General Assembly meeting, which was “within 35 miles” of the servers and which it said could have been used to “disable cell phone towers.” The story quickly went viral, with the New York Times and CNN’s reports being widely shared and discussed.
CNN reported that the SIM servers were used in swatting calls against members of Congress, and the New York Times quoted an expert who said that they believed the servers could be used for espionage. As security researcher Robert Graham points out in a post called “That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus—it’s just normal crime,” the Secret Service has not yet released any actual evidence of what the SIM servers were used for and it is unclear how such a setup could be used for “espionage.” Graham notes that, based on photos released by the Secret Service and its description of the operations, claims that such a network could have only been created by a sophisticated nation state actor are particularly ridiculous: “I can pull this off, personally. It’s just a SIM farm. Sure, there’s some capital involved, on the order of $1 million, but it could be setup and managed by a single person. It likely wasn’t setup all at once with that much money, but has been slowly growing for years as profits are funneled back into setting up more SIM accounts,” he wrote.
The discovery of a bunch of SIM banks (also called SIM farms, SMS gateways, and several other things) anywhere is interesting from a spam / cybercrime perspective, and they give a type of cyberpunk visual that, frankly, is extremely my shit. But the breathless way this bust has been announced—with a special video announcement by Secret Service director Sean Curran and a clearly embargoed rollout with the New York Times and CNN, makes these SIM farms seem as though they are particularly special and high tech, when they clearly are not. The technology used, which can be seen clearly in photos released by the Secret Service, are regularly used by SMS scammers, spammers, and marketers, yes, but the tech is also extremely widely used by ticket scalpers seeking to create lots of Ticketmaster accounts with which to buy tickets. This is off-the-shelf technology that anyone can buy and use; if one had enough money, one could surely buy 300 of them from Ejointech, the Chinese company that makes them, and set something like this up. I have been familiar with and meaning to write about SIM banks for a few months now, specifically because they have become popular with ticket scalpers. Like many “anti-scalping” and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn’t actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets.
This SMS verification system has created a new underground market for various technologies and software that lets scalpers game this SMS verification system. SIM boxes are such an important part of that new underground market that Ejointech now advertises one of its products—which looks very much like the models shown in the Secret Service’s images from the seized servers in New York—as specifically being good “for ticketing & bulk SMS.”
“Popular model: used by 5,000+ leading ticket brokers globally & trusted for thousands of large-scale SMS campaigns!,” Ejointech advertises on the $3,730 Ejoin 256 SIM 4G LTE SMS Gateway. On TikTok, it advertises a similar, 512 SIM card model as having “human behavior,” “cloud management,” and “auto SIM card switch.”
“Ticket brokers, streamline your Ticketmaster operations with EjoinTech! Our SMS gateway devices support up to 512 SIM cards, ensuring you never miss a verification code,” the company says. “Designed for efficiency with no unnecessary noise.” youtube.com/embed/BZnrXxt47Qw?… There is of course no evidence that the SIM boxes seized by the Secret Service this week were used by ticket scalpers, but there’s also no public evidence released by the Secret Service that suggests they were going to try to disrupt the UN General Council’s meeting. The point I’m making is that these devices and these types of farms have become somewhat common in recent years, and they are used not just to send messages in bulk but to receive them in bulk, too. They are used not just for crimes, but for various grey market and controversial, but not necessarily illegal, purposes too.
“Proxies” and real SIM cards that can receive SMS messages have become critical to the ticket scalping industry. The way ticket scalping works now is that big time brokers will create many (hundreds or thousands) of unique Ticketmaster accounts, each associated with their own phone number. These are sometimes made using prepaid or low-cost wireless carriers like MobileX, whose SIM cards appeared in bulk in Secret Service materials.
Not every big time broker is going to want to roll their own SIM bank, so a series of companies have popped up that offer “proxies,” which just means that they are basically a company running and selling access to phone numbers, keeping them online, and forwarding SMS codes directly to the ticket broker buying them. These companies do not advertise what specific hardware they are using to do this, but SIM boxes could easily be used to do this, and the scale of farm that the Secret Service found is not particularly large considering these types of services exist. They go by names like “WiredSMS,” “TextChest,” “Quick-Text,” “SMSPass,” and “Jivetel,” among others. TextChest advertises “industry-leading physical SIM lines, trusted by thousands.” A company called Seat Heroes notes that it is “carrier compliant” and that “while others rely on risky, unauthorized setups, Seat Heroes runs on the first ever Tier 1 carrier-integrated infrastructure—no modems, no VOIP, just proprietary and exclusive access to genuine numbers—always on, 24/7” and “no SIM banks—just direct connections.” In practice, ticket brokers connect their proxies—either bought from a third party or rolled by themselves—to other bespoke ticketing-buying software that helps them actually manage tons of Ticketmaster accounts and tons of phone numbers at once. There are a host of ticket broker-specific internet browsers that allow brokers to open hundreds or thousands of browser tabs, which each have a browsing session tied to either a specific SIM card or to an IP proxy which can also be bought from third-party services. This allows brokers to power through Ticketmaster’s “Virtual Waiting Rooms” because a broker can have hundreds or thousands of independent browser sessions waiting as separate “people.” The SIM box (or a SIM proxy service) can then be set up in these bespoke browsers to automatically forward and submit Ticketmaster’s SMS two-factor authentication, which is supposedly designed to prevent scalpers from getting tickets.
At one point, Private Tabs, one of the bespoke browsers for ticket scalpers, was advertising a “SIMBOX HARDWARE ADD-ON,” which could “add 512 phone numbers for $3 per line.”
“These hardware devices allow you to add 512 phone numbers to your Private Tabs account,” an archived version of the Private Tabs website reads. “If you already have one, then you can just add it to the config or call us, and we’ll set it up for ya. This ensures that every account you load in has its dedicated number. Rather than paying $9 to $24 per phone number, you can purchase one of these devices and get a phone line for as little as $3 per number. Typically, they pay for themselves within 2 months since each device can hold 512 numbers. With this device you do not need ‘TextChest’ or ‘Private Tab Phones’ [a proxy service] as you can host your own numbers for half the cost.”
The Private Tabs web browser no longer advertises SIM boxes, and in a FAQ on its current website, it says says people using their own telecom hardware may run into problems: "There have been recent reports as of 9/5/2025 that some people using Chinese hardware is a problem. You may want to contact your phone company before trying to integrate it with the API to confirm it works ok."
"We now not only know the person that bought the ticket, but we’re going to know those three people that you are taking to the show, which we have not known historically."
Multiple Palantir and Flock sources say the companies are spinning a commitment to "democracy" to absolve them of responsibility. "In my eyes, it is the classic double speak," one said.#News
How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump
In a blog post published in June, Garrett Langley, the CEO and co-founder of surveillance company Flock, said “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.” The post explained that the company believes the laws of the country and individual states and municipalities, not the company, should determine the limits of what Flock’s technology can be used for, and came after 404 Media revealed local police were tapping into Flock’s networks of AI-enabled cameras for ICE, and that a sheriff in Texas performed a nationwide search for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
💡 Do you work at any of these companies or others like them? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Langley’s statement echoes a common refrain surveillance and tech companies selling their products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other parts of the U.S. government have said during the second Trump administration: we live in a democracy. It is not our job to decide how our powerful capabilities, which can track peoples’ physical location, marry usually disparate datasets together, or crush dissent, can or should be used. At least, that’s the thrust of the argument. That is despite the very clear reality that the first Trump administration was very different to the Biden administration, and both pale in comparison to Trump 2.0, with the executive branch and various agencies flaunting ordinary democratic values. The idea of what a democracy is capable of has shifted.
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"Find My Parking Cops" pins the near-realtime locations of parking officers all over the city, and shows what they're issuing fines for, and how much.
"Find My Parking Cops" pins the near-realtime locations of parking officers all over the city, and shows what theyx27;re issuing fines for, and how much.
‘Find My Parking Cops’ Tracks Officers Handing Out Tickets All Around San Francisco
With “Find My Parking Cops,” technologist Riley Walz reverse engineered San Francisco’s parking ticket system to place cops on a map seconds after they issue parking citations—in theory, helping people avoid spots where officers are handing out tickets.
“I can see every ticket seconds after it's written,” Walz wrote on X. So I made a website. Find My Friends? AVOID THE PARKING COPS.”
On the Find My Parking Cops site, visitors can see a map of San Francisco with pins locating parking cops, as well as lines tracking their shift routes, how much money they’ve fined people during their shifts, and for what violation the tickets are cited. Most are “street cleaning” violations, where someone didn’t move their car on designated days. Some are for “hill parking,” a citation I, a lifelong East Coast driver, had never heard of until today, that fines parkers for failing to curb the wheels of a vehicle on a hill in a way that would prevent it from rolling. A bunch of expired meter tickets and parking in tow-away areas also pop up on Wednesday morning.
I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it's written
The site also has a leaderboard showing the officers who fines the most each week: As of this morning, the top cop is Officer 0435, who has given out $17,877 in tickets since Monday.
Walz's site pulls public data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to make the site work. “I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation,” he wrote on his website. “But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don't have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently.” He figured out that ticket numbers follow a predictable pattern. “So if an officer just wrote a ticket, I know with certainty the ID after that one will be the next ticket the same officer writes. AND, immediately after a ticket is written, it becomes available to be viewed on the city's website.” He also learned that the city has about 300 parking cops, and that they are issuing tickets with numbers in batches of 100.
“All I have to do is check the first ticket in each batch I don't have in my database,” he wrote on his site. “This approach means I only have to make a request to the city's website every few seconds. Great!”
A few hours after Walz posted the project on X, he said the city changed the way it allows people to pull that public data, and the site went down. But he found a workaround, he wrote, and it went back up. As of Wednesday morning, it's spotty, with the service showing that it was up, then back down.
SFMTA told 404 Media in a statement Tuesday evening: “Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
As the SF Chronicle noted, the city has recently ramped up parking citations in an effort to make up for a $322 million deficit.
Walz previously made Bop Spotter, a project where he hid a solar-powered Android phone in a box on a pole in San Francisco, set it to record audio, and had it send songs to Shazam’s API to identify what people are listening to in public. He called it “Shot Spotter for music,” referring to the gunshot detection technology.
An emulator called Effort.jl can drastically reduce computational time without sacrificing accuracy, which could help solve longstanding mysteries about the cosmos.#TheAbstract
A Vast ‘Cosmic Web’ Connects the Universe—Really. Now, We Can Emulate It.
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
You may have noticed that the universe is pretty big—in fact, possibly infinite. These immense scales offer a challenge for scientists who seek to model the “cosmic web,” a network of large-scale structures that link the universe and intersect at nodes where galaxies accumulate into clusters.
That’s why researchers led by Marco Bonici, a cosmologist at the University of Waterloo, have developed an emulator called Effort.jl that can parse cosmic data much faster than traditional models. This approach will accelerate the pace of discoveries about the mysterious cosmic web and help test fundamental theories about the nature of spacetime.
The tool achieves “exceptional computational performance without sacrificing accuracy,” according to the team’s study, which was published last week in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
“An emulator is a mimic, in a sense,” Bonici said in a call with 404 Media. “It basically lets you do the same kind of analysis that you would do on a supercomputer in a few days of time, in a bunch of hours on your laptop.”
Emulators can imitate the predictions of more complex models by training on their outputs, he added, without getting bogged down in the underlying physics and repetitive calculations.
“Of course, there is a trade-off in precision,” Bonici said. “This is an approximate method. The goal of my study was to show that for some scenarios, we are able to recover the final result of an analysis, even with the emulator. In this way, we can show that the error that we are introducing is negligible.”
The new emulator is designed to probe the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure (EFTofLSS), a well-corroborated theoretical model of the universe. Bonici first started developing Effort.jl—an abbreviation of “effective field theory surrogate”—during his work on the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope, which launched in 2023.
Euclid, along with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, are producing a flood of exciting new observations about the cosmic web, dark matter, and dark energy that may overturn longstanding assumptions about the universe. Ejjort.jl aims to help interpret these findings more quickly.
Dark matter is an unidentified substance that accounts for most matter in the universe and forms the basis of the cosmic web, while dark energy is the term for whatever the heck is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
The concept of dark energy dates back to Albert Einstein, who proposed that a “cosmological constant” acts as an anti-gravity force to keep the universe in a static state, preventing it from collapsing under its own gravity. Einstein famously called the constant his “greatest blunder” after Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not static, but was rather expanding.
However, the cosmological constant was later repurposed into the standard model of cosmology, also called the Lambda-cold dark matter model (ΛCDM), where Lambda stands for the constant. This constant describes the accelerating expansion of the universe and is now closely associated with dark energy.
This complicated tale now has another exciting twist: DESI’s observations strongly suggest that this constant is not all that constant across the universe’s history. In other words, the effect of dark energy on the universe may change over time, a finding that could upend our basic assumptions about this strange cosmos we inhabit (this seems to happen a lot).
“With DESI’s first data release, we had the first hint that was pointing towards this deviation from the cosmological constant,” Bonici said. “With the second release, that hint was still there.”
“If we have an independent confirmation that this is actually correct, then this will be the first evidence for a behavior beyond the standard model of cosmology,” he continued. “It would be a huge revolution.”
The standard model is still highly accurate in describing cosmic phenomena, but scientists have long wondered about weak spots in its armor, including the unexplained nature of dark matter and dark energy. As Euclid and DESI gather real observations of the cosmic web, these underlying mysteries of our universe will come into sharper focus.
Bonici and his colleagues hope Effort.jl can speed up the process of evaluating the enormous reams of incoming data, acting as a complement to more resource-intensive models that require supercomputers and other expensive and time-consuming approaches.
Though Bonici’s work on the emulator requires a painstaking focus on lines of code, he does occasionally get an opportunity to step back and consider the broad implications of his field. To that end, he recalled that one of his colleagues opened his PhD thesis with the wry observation: “Cosmology is that humble branch of physics which wants to explain the universe as a whole.”
“We are describing literally everything in the universe,” Bonici said. “Most of the time, I just focus on the small details, but when I look at the big picture, to me, it is always exciting to think about, and mind blowing.”
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple of stories about AI ‘workslop’ and the engineers who fix peoples’ vibe coding. In the subscribers-only section, we start with a malicious game on Steam stealing cryptocurrency from a cancer patient, then we talk about Silk Song. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA2… 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/NWuDzmKE8kg?…
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 …
AI slop is taking over workplaces. Workers said that they thought of their colleagues who filed low-quality AI work as "less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output."#AISlop #AI
AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable
A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research, based on a survey of 1,150 workers, is the latest analysis to suggest that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead has just increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”
The Harvard Business Review study came out the day after a Financial Times analysis of hundreds of earnings reports and shareholder meeting transcripts filed by S&P 500 companies that found huge firms are having trouble articulating the specific benefits of widespread AI adoption but have had no trouble explaining the risks and downsides the technology has posed to their businesses: “The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better,” the Financial Times found. “Most of the anticipated benefits, such as increased productivity, were vaguely stated and harder to categorize than the risks.”
Other recent surveys and studies also paint a grim picture of AI in the workplace. The main story seems to be that there is widespread adoption of AI, but that it’s not proving to be that useful, has not resulted in widespread productivity gains, and often ends up creating messes that human beings have to clean up. Human workers see their colleagues who use AI as less competent, according to another study published in Harvard Business Review last month. A July MIT report found that “Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return … Despite high-profile investment, industry-level transformation remains limited.” A June Gallup poll found that AI use among workers doubled over the last two years, and that 40 percent of those polled have used AI at work in some capacity. But the poll found that “many employees are using AI at work without guardrails or guidance,” and that “The benefits of using AI in the workplace are not always obvious. According to employees, the most common AI adoption challenge is ‘unclear use case or value proposition.’”
These studies, anecdotes we have heard from workers, and the rise of industries like “vibe coding cleanup specialists” all suggest that workers are using AI, but that they may not be leading to actual productivity gains for companies. The Harvard Business Review study proposes a possible reason for this phenomenon: Workslop.
The authors of that study, who come from Stanford University and the workplace productivity consulting firm BetterUp, suggest that a growing number of workers are using AI tools to make presentations, reports, write emails, and do other work tasks that they then file to their colleagues or bosses; this work often appears useful but is not: “Workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues,” they write.
The researchers say that surveyed workers told them that they are now spending their time trying to figure out if any specific piece of work was created using AI tools, to identify possible hallucinations in the work, and then to manage the employee who turned in workslop. Surveyed workers reported spending time actually fixing the work, but the researchers found that “the most alarming cost may have been interpersonal.”
“Low effort, unhelpful AI generated work is having a significant impact on collaboration at work,” they wrote. “Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output. Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37% saw that colleague as less intelligent.”
No single study on AI in the workplace is going to be definitive, but evidence is mounting that AI is affecting people’s work in the same way it’s affecting everything else: It is making it easier to output low-quality slop that other people then have to wade through. Meanwhile, Microsoft researchers who spoke to nurses, financial advisers, and teachers who use AI found that the technology makes people “atrophied and unprepared” cognitively.
Each study I referenced above has several anecdotes about individual workers who have found specific uses of AI that improve their own productivity and several companies have found uses of AI that have helped automate specific tasks, but most of the studies find that the industry- and economy-wide productivity gains that have been promised by AI companies are not happening. The MIT report calls this the “GenAI Divide,” where many companies are pushing expensive AI tools on their workers (and even more workers are using AI without explicit permission), but that few are seeing any actual return from it.
Florida Sues Hentai Site and High-Risk Payment Processor for Not Verifying Ages
Florida is suing massively popular anime and hentai games platform Nutaku, as well as the payment processor Segpay, in two complaints that allege the companies ignored the state’s age verification law.
Nutaku is owned by Aylo, which is also the parent company of Pornhub and some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a press release last week that his office is suing Aylo and Segpay—a high-risk merchant account that specializes in adult entertainment—and alleges that the companies are violating state law HB3, which requires websites to verify that visitors based in Florida are at least 18 years old.
Uthmeier’s complaint against Segpay and its parent companies claims that because Segpay provides payment processing services to the adult gaming site xh.lustyheroes.com, which is owned by Gethins Ltd., one of the other defendants in that complaint, it should be on the hook for the site not verifying ages in Florida. Segpay also has a business address in Florida, according to the complaint and Segpay’s site.
The complaints were first reported by AVN. Corey Silverstein, an attorney representing Segpay, told AVN last week: "Segpay has yet to be served with any formal complaint and maintains a policy of not commenting on pending or threatened litigation.” Silverman told 404 Media Segpay has no additional comment.
“Aylo believes that Spicevids and Nutaku comply with Florida's age verification requirements. We intend to vigorously defend against these allegations in court,” a spokesperson for Aylo told 404 Media in a statement. “Spicevids has implemented age verification measures consistent with the law's requirements since it took effect on January 1. Nutaku's gaming platform operates within the law's parameters, as games containing sexually explicit content represent less than the statutory threshold. These platforms are committed to ongoing compliance with applicable state laws. We look forward to presenting the facts through the appropriate legal process.”
Both complaints start with the baseless claim: “Access to online pornography is a pervasive threat to the health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.
The drone flight log data, which stretches from March 2024 to March 2025, shows CBP flying its drones to support ICE and other agencies. CBP maintains multiple Predator drones and flew them over the recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.#FOIA
📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew its drones, which could include the agency’s MQ-9 Predator drones, at least 50 times last year in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to new data obtained by 404 Media.
The data shows that CBP continues to support not just ICE but other federal agencies, such as the FBI, with its fleet of drones. In June, 404 Media reported CBP flew two high-powered Predator drones above protests in Los Angeles, flights which CBP said were to provide “officer safety surveillance.”
“This is especially concerning, given ICE’s ongoing unlawful immigration sweeps and this administration’s concerted effort to suppress any dissent,” Jennifer Lynch, general counsel for activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has previously researched CBP’s use of drones, told 404 Media. “These records show that CBP has never stopped operating its drones on behalf of other federal, state, and local agencies, including ICE. In fact, the program has expanded exponentially since EFF first reported on it in 2012.”
💡 Do you know anything else about CBP’s drones or other technology? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
The new data spans more than 3,100 flights between March 2024 and March 2025. It includes the date of each mission, its category such as whether the flight was for training or enforcement purposes, the mission type (such as reconnaissance against a target), the region the flight took place in, which branch was responsible, and a column that often mentions if the flight was in support of another agency.
For example, on October 22, 2024, CBP flew a drone as part of “investigative support” for ICE as part of its enforcement mission, according to the data. CBP also flew drones for ICE over the next four days, the data shows.
On November 7, 2024, CBP flew a drone to assist ICE with a “special security event,” according to the data.
On February 21, 2024, CBP helped ICE with “reconnaissance surveillance target acquisition,” the data shows. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… In all, CBP flew drones to assist ICE in some capacity a total of 50 times during the one year period the data relates to. 404 Media obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with CBP. The majority of the data covers the Biden presidency, and shows that CBP collaborated regularly with ICE during that administration. But given Trump’s recent crackdowns on protests and the administration’s mass deportation effort, Lynch is concerned about that collaboration during the current presidency.
The data also shows CBP flying drones to assist the U.S. Coast Guard; the DEA and FBI with investigative support; U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), a part of the military; and in one case the Office of the President of the United States. Other flights are listed as assisting “states” and “local,” indicating CBP assisted local and state agencies too. Some flights are for relocating the drones or for maintenance, the data shows.
The EFF previously obtained similar drone flight logs. Some of those records list more specific organizations CBP has flown drones for, including particular state bodies. In 2014, the EFF found CBP loaned its drones to other agencies more than 700 times in three years. A screenshot from the data. CBP’s fleet includes around ten drones, according to a presentation available online. They include the Predator B, which is essentially an unarmed version of the same drone the U.S. flies overseas as part of combat operations. The drones are typically loaded with cameras and other surveillance technology. After flying Predator drones during the recent Los Angeles protests, the official Department of Homeland Security X account posted footage collected by the drones.
“CBP’s drones are equipped with many different types of surveillance technology, from thermal imaging to high definition cameras to tools that can track movement over time. Smaller drones can identify faces and license plates while larger drones like the MQ-9s used to surveil protestors in Los Angeles have extensive range and can stay in the air for 30 hours at a time,” Lynch said.
CBP told 404 Media drones are a critical part of the agency’s border security mission. The agency said this includes illicit border crossings, investigations, intelligence, and reconnaissance patrols. CBP said its drones are only equipped with electro-optical/infrared cameras and Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER). This can detect vehicle and human movement, the agency said.
Lynch added “Drone surveillance, especially when combined with ICE’s unregulated access to sensitive data like millions of drivers’ license plate records, threatens the privacy and security of people all across the country.”
The confirmation follows 404 Media's reporting using flight data and air traffic control (ATC) audio that showed the agency was flying Predator drones above Los Angeles.
Steam Hosted Malware Game that Stole $32,000 from a Cancer Patient Live on Stream
A cancer patient lost $32,000 in crypto after installing a Steam game on his computer containing malware that drained one of his crypto wallets. Raivo Plavnieks is a 26 year old self-described “crypto degen” from Latvia who streams on the site Pump.fun under the name Rastaland. After a seven hour stream on September 20, Plavnieks logged off and cashed out his earnings from the stream.. Literally seconds later, someone drained those earnings from his wallet, according to an archive of the livestream and blockchain records reviewed by 404 Media.
Plavnieks had installed a game called BlockBlasters, a 2D platformer listed on Steam that launched July 31, 2025 to a small audience who’d given it positive reviews. But the game was a scam and an August patch injected malware into the game that was meant to scan a user’s hard drive for data and, ultimately, their crypto. BlockBlasters is no longer listed on Steam and has been flagged as malicious by the independent Steam archiving site SteamDB. Valve did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The cyber security firm G Data CyberDefense dug into BlockBlasters and detailed how the software got access to user’s crypto. SteamDB’s archive of the game’s patches shows 3 files added in the August 30 patch: game2.bat, and two zip files. According to the G Data writeup, the batch file collected information on the user’s machine and then unpacked the zip files. “The two VBS scripts that ‘game2.bat’ executes are batch file loaders,” G Data said. As the scripts run, they inject more malware into the user’s machine and eventually go after the data and extensions of Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft Edge browsers, the company said.
This is at least the third time this year Valve has pulled a game from Steam after it turned out to contain malware. In February, Valve pulled the survival game PirateFi after users discovered it contained password stealing malware. A month later, in March, people who tried to download a demo for Sniper: Phantom's Resolution were redirected from Steam to GitHub for the installer. Once again, it was malware.
Plavnieks' experience gave the BlockBlasters situation a higher profile than PirateFi and Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution. Footage of emaciated and exhausted Plavnieks sobbing on his livestream while one of his brothers attempted to soothe him struck a nerve with some in the crypto and security community online. The crypto space is full of rug pulls, burns, bad investments, and wild stunts, but stealing from a guy with cancer seemed like a bridge too far.
In addition to the G Data writeup, several other people have reverse-engineered BlockBusters code and, they believe, found the people responsible. “The shitty malware sent all the stolen data to a Telegram the scammers made,” vx-underground, a group of malware researchers, said in a post on X. “We connected to the Telegram channel using the same credentials that were inside of the shitty malware. Inside the channel was the scammer(s). We got their Telegram IDs.”
According to Plavnieks, he was able to get his creator rewards sent to a new (and safe) crypto wallet in the future. Cryptocurrency personality Alex Becker sent Plavnieks $32,000 to cover the cost of the losses. And a group of open-source intelligence hobbyists and interested tech folks dug into BlockBlasters code, figured out the scheme, built a list of alleged victims, and also found the people they think are responsible for the scam.
“I wanted to take a second and just thank you all from the bottom of my heart, me, my brothers, and my mom is completely left without words on all the support we have received past 24h after the hack happened,” Plavineks said in a post on X. “Seems like the whole [community] rallied together behind my story and is showing support one way or another.”
404 Media has filed a lawsuit against ICE for access to its contract with Paragon, a company that sells powerful spyware for breaking into phones and accessing encrypted messaging apps.#Announcements
We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract
On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply concerned about what the agency, which continues to push the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, may use the technology for. The contract and related documents 404 Media is suing for may provide more information on what ICE intends to do with the spyware.
“404 Media has asked ICE to disclose agency records relating to its contract with a company known for its powerful spyware tool whose potential use in the agency’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign has prompted lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, and immigration groups to express deep concerns over potential civil rights abuses,” the lawsuit says.
404 Media first filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with ICE for documents related to its Paragon purchase in September 2024. Under the law, agencies are required to provide a response within 20 days, or provide an explanation of why they need more time. ICE acknowledged receipt of the request in September 2024, but has not since replied to any follow up inquiries. 404 Media then filed the lawsuit.
💡 Do you know anything else about Paragon, this contract, or any others? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
The contract itself is for “a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training,” according to a description included in a public U.S. procurement database. The funding office for the purchase is listed as a division of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). It is not clear if the ICE deal is for a custom-made tool or for some version of Paragon’s flagship “Graphite” software.
Graphite is capable of letting police remotely break into messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Gmail according to a 2021 report from Forbes. While other government spyware tries to take over an entire device allowing all sorts of other capabilities, Paragon sets itself apart by promising to access just the messaging applications, according to Forbes.
Still, that is an exceptionally powerful capability which can skirt the protections offered by end-to-end encrypted apps, and one that is likely very attractive to law enforcement or some intelligence agencies. In March researchers from Citizen Lab, an academic group that investigates the government spyware industry, said they identified suspected Paragon deployments in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. Separately the New York Times reported that the DEA has used Graphite.
Citizen Labs’ researchers said they shared their analysis with Meta, which in turn discovered an active Paragon zero-click exploit for WhatsApp. It involved the attacker adding a target to a WhatApp group and sending them a PDF which automatically infected the device. This meant Paragon’s software could hack into a target phone through its WhatsApp client without any target interaction. Later WhatsApp notified more than 90 people it believed had been targeted with Paragon’s exploit. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Some of those targets were in Italy, including prominent Italian and other European journalists, and activists who rescue refugees at sea. Those revelations have since ballooned into a full-scale political crisis, with parliamentary inquiries and The Guardian reporting that Paragon cancelled its contract with Italy.
Paragon has positioned itself as a more ethical player in the scandal and abuse-ridden government spyware industry. Tools from other vendors stretching back years, from Hacking Team, to FinFisher, to NSO Group, have all been used at some point to spy on journalists or activists. Like the notorious NSO Group, which also tried to enter the U.S. market, Paragon is based in Israel.
After ICE reactivated its Paragon contract, Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement to Bloomberg “ICE is already shredding due process and ruining lives in its rush to lock up kids, cooks and firefighters who pose no threat to anyone.”
“I’m extremely concerned about how ICE will use Paragon’s spyware to further trample on the rights of Americans and anyone who Donald Trump labels as an enemy,” he added.
The best way to support 404 Media and fund our ability to sue the Trump administration to release public records is to become a paying subscriber. If you'd like to make a larger, tax deductible donation, please contact us at donate@404media.co.
AI-Generated YouTube Channel Uploaded Nothing But Videos of Women Being Shot
Content warning: This article contains descriptions and images of AI-generated graphic violence.
YouTube removed a channel that was dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being shot in the head following 404 Media’s request for comment. The videos were clearly generated with Google’s new AI video generator tool, Veo, according to a watermark included in the bottom right corner of the videos.
The channel, named Woman Shot A.I, started on June 20, 2025. It posted 27 videos, had over 1,000 subscribers, and had more than 175,000 views, according to the channel’s publicly available data.
All the videos posted by the channel follow the exact same formula. The nearly photo-realistic videos show a woman begging for her life while a man with a gun looms over her. Then he shoots her. Some videos have different themes, like compilations of video game characters like Lara Croft being shot, “Japanese Schoolgirls Shot in Breast,” “Sexy HouseWife Shot in Breast,” “Female Reporter Tragic End,” and Russian soldiers shooting women with Ukrainian flags on their chest.
I wasn’t able to confirm if YouTube was running ads in videos posted by this channel, but the person behind the channel did pay to generate these videos with Google’s Veo, and complained about the cost.
“The AI I use is paid, per account I have to spend around 300 dollars per month, even though 1 account can only generate 8-second videos 3 times,” the channel’s owner wrote in a public post on YouTube. “So, imagine how many times I generate a video once I upload, I just want to say that every time I upload a compilation consisting of several 8-second clips, it’s not enough for just 1 account.”
Woman Shot A.I’s owner claimed they have 10 accounts. “I have to spend quite a lot of money just to have fun,” they said.
Shot A.I also posted polls asking subscribers to vote who “you want to be the victims in the next video.” The options were “Japanese/Chinese,” White Caucasian (american,british,italian,etc),” Southeast Asian (thai,filipine,indonesian,etc),” and the N-word.
YouTube removed the channel after 404 Media reached out for comment for this story. A YouTube spokesperson said that it terminated the channel for violating its Terms of Service, and specifically for operating the YouTube channel following a previous termination, meaning This is not the first time YouTube has removed a channel operated by whoever was behind Woman Shot A.I.
In theory Veo should not allow users to generate videos of people being murdered, but the AI video generator’s guardrails clearly didn’t work in this case. Guardrails for generative AI tools including AI video generators often fail, and there are entire communities dedicated to circumventing them.
“[O]ur Gen AI tools are built to follow the prompts a user provides,” Google’s spokesperson said. “We have clear policies around their use that we work to enforce, and the tools continually get better at reflecting these policies.”
In July, YouTube said that it would start taking action against “mass-produced” AI-generated slop channels. However, as our recent story about AI-generated “boring history” videos show, YouTube’s enforcement is still far from perfect.
More than 100 artifacts on Turkey’s Aegean coast hints that humans and Neanderthals may have crossed a vanished bridge now submerged beneath the sea.#TheAbstract
A Breakthrough Prehistoric Discovery May Rewrite Early Human History
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that walked the walk, squeezed with ease, and became immortalized in amber.
First, ancient artifacts in Turkey might rewrite the history of early human migrations into Europe. Then: a Cretaceous insectarium, badminton in space, a breakthrough in quantum sensing, and block parties for chimps.
Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is available for preorder and will be out on September 30! It’s a one-stop primer for the diverse meanings of aliens to people, touching on their precursors in myths, their massive footprint in pop culture, our fascination with UFOs, and the real scientific effort to find extraterrestrial life, which is now entering its most exciting phase. If you like the Abstract, I think you’ll enjoy my book, too! To follow updates about First Contact (or my work in general), I also just launched the BeX Files, a personal newsletter to accompany the book.
Early humans may have walked to Europe on a now-submerged land bridge that stretched across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to mainland Greece hundreds of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene period, the Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago.
The discovery of 138 artifacts at ten sites around Ayvalık in western Turkey provides “the first systematic dataset from a region previously unexplored in the context of Pleistocene archaeology,” according to a new study.
While humans and Neanderthals are known to have entered Europe via the Levant and Balkan regions, the excavation of tools at Ayvalık hints at an entirely new route into the continent for these early explorers of the Paleolithic (the anthropological equivalent to the geological Pleistocene age). During this time, vast glacial ice sheets in the region caused sea levels to drop roughly 330 feet lower than they are today, potentially allowing periodic passage to early humans searching for new horizons.
“These findings reveal a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence and establish Ayvalık as a promising locus for future research on early human dispersals in the northeastern Aegean,” said researchers led by Hande Bulut of Düzce University in Turkey.
The team discovered many flaked stone tools, used as cutting instruments, including objects from the Levallois tradition that dates back 450,000 years and is associated with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For context, Neanderthals were present in Europe many hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens, which arrived within the last 100,000 years, so both groups may have used this land bridge.
It’s difficult to pin down a rough age for these tools because of Ayvalık’s coastal geology, which has basically erased their stratigraphic context. In other words, the region is so dynamic that the tools can’t be linked to a clear geological layer, which is one of the main ways archaeologists establish age estimates.
“While the absence of absolute dates and stratified contexts poses interpretive limitations, the data contribute significantly to our understanding of Paleolithic occupation in western Anatolia and its role in broader Aegean dynamics” and “underscore the region’s potential to contribute to broader debates on Aegean connectivity and technological evolution during the Pleistocene,” the team said.
It’s tantalizing to imagine the journeys of these ancient humans whose ghostly footprints may now lie beneath the Aegean waves.
Paleontologists have discovered beetles, flies, pollen, and spider webs that date back 112 million years and are eerily preserved in amber fossils from Ecuador. Though amber fossils have been found all around the world, these specimens are the first to come from South America, opening a rare window into the insects and plants that lived in the ecosystems of the supercontinent Gondwana. A fly in the Cretaceous ointment. Image: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer “This discovery and the associated plant remains in the amber-bearing rocks, enhance our understanding of the Gondwanan arthropod fauna and flora inhabiting forests along its western margin during a time interval of major ecosystem transformation,” said researchers led by Xavier Delclòs of the University of Barcelona.
With their extraordinary detail, amber fossils are like sepia-filtered snapshots of the deep past (and they make great cane ornaments for delusional tycoons too—a thriving market these days!).
If humans aspire to live on the Moon or travel to Mars, they’re going to have to avoid being bored out of their gourd for long periods of time. A possible solution: badminton. The sport had positive mental and physical health benefits for participants who spent months in a simulated lunar base in Hawaii, according to a new study.
“These findings underline that badminton, although underexplored in space psychology literature, holds promise as a feasible and beneficial activity for astronauts,” said authors Aagam Jain and Pushpdant Jain of VIT Bhopal University in India.
The authors noted that existing studies on “shuttlecock dynamics” in normal gravity “may inform adaptations for reduced gravity settings.” Badminton in lunar gravity? Can’t wait! The winner is the first to smash the birdie into orbit.
Scientists have demonstrated “quantum squeezing” for the first time with a nanoparticle, a breakthrough that paves the way to “exploring quantum mechanics at a macroscopic scale,” according to a new study.
Quantum squeezing sounds like a cuddle party for atoms, but it is actually a way for scientists to navigate the pesky quantum world, where simply observing phenomena can influence results. Quantum “squeezers” get around uncertainties by enhancing precision measurements of one property, such as a particle’s position, in exchange for losing precision of another, like its velocity.
Though quantum squeezing has been achieved in the laboratory many times, a team has now applied it to a nanoscale glass particle, which is a big object for the quantum world. The glass was trapped in laser light and chilled down to near its lowest-energy state, allowing for precision measurements through squeezing while it levitated. “My sugarboo, I'm levitatin’” (nanoparticle getting quantum squeezed). Image: Kamba et al 2025 “Manipulating the motion of macroscopic objects near their quantum mechanical uncertainties has been desired in diverse fields, including fundamental physics, sensing, and transducers,” said researchers led by Mitsuyoshi Kamba of the University of Tokyo. “Our work shows that a levitated nanoparticle offers an ideal platform.”
Wild chimpanzees may be consuming up to two standard alcoholic beverages a day, a finding that suggests an attraction to alcohol in primates has deep evolutionary roots. While it’s well-established that chimps devour these fruity librations—see our past story on chimp sangria—scientists have now measured the ethanol (alcohol) content of these fruits for the first time during field observations of wild chimps in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire. How many fermented figs can you fit in your mouth at once? Chimpanzees observed in Côte d'Ivoire. Image: Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley “Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day” which is a full ten pounds and corresponds to “the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks,” said researchers led by Alexey Maro of the University of California, Berkeley. The results support the “drunken monkey” hypothesis that suggests hominid ancestors of chimps and humans adapted to drinking alcohol tens of millions of years ago.
In addition to confirming this shared compulsion to imbibe, the researchers also observed some interesting behaviors at these boozy chimp gatherings. Fermented figs “attract large groups of chimpanzees,” they note “which in turn results in increased social interactions for both sexes and in social activities such as territorial boundary patrols and hunts.”
Dale Britt Bendler “earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court record.#News
A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those CIA systems as “his own personal Google,” according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media and Court Watch.
💡 Do you know anything else about this case? 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.
Dale Britt Bendler, 68, was a long running CIA officer before retiring in 2014 with a full pension. He rejoined the agency as a contractor and sold a wealth of classified information, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday. His clients included a U.S. lobbying firm working for a foreigner being investigated for embezzlement and another foreign national trying to secure a U.S. visa, according to the court record.
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Dale Britt Bendler “earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court re…
Union Warns Professors About Posting In the ‘Current Climate’
A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling and legal services.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published the two page document on September 17, days after the September 10 killing of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. The list of college professors and academics who've been censured or even fired for joking about, criticizing, or quoting Kirk after his death is long. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Clemson University in South Carolina fired multiple members of its faculty after investigating their Kirk-related social media posts. On Monday the state’s Attorney General sent the college a letter telling it that the first amendment did not protect the fired employees and that the state would not defend them. Two universities in Tennessee fired multiple members of the staff after getting complaints about their social media posts. The University of Mississippi let a member of the staff go because they re-shared a comment about Kirk that people found “insensitive.” Florida Atlantic University placed an art history professor on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. Florida's education commissioner later wrote a letter to school superintendents warning them there would be consequences for talking about Kirk in the wrong way. “Govern yourselves accordingly,” the letter said.
AAUP’s advice is meant to help academic workers avoid ending up as a news story. “In a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the consequences of our online speech and choices, we hope you will find these strategies and resources helpful,” it said.
Here are its five explicit tips: “1. Set your personal social media accounts to private mode. When prompted, approve the setting to make all previous posts private. 2. Be mindful that anything you post online can be screenshotted and shared. 3. Before posting or reposting online commentary, pause and ask yourself: a. Am I comfortable with this view potentially being shared with my employer, my students, or the public? Have I (or the person I am reposting) expressed this view in terms I would be comfortable sharing with my employer, my students, or the public?”
The advice continues: “4. In your social media bios, state that the views expressed through the account represent your own opinions and not your employer. You do not need to name your employer. Consider posting positive statements about positions you support rather than negative statements about positions you disagree with. Some examples could be: ‘Academic freedom is nonnegotiable,’ ‘The faculty united will never be divided,’ ‘Higher ed research saves lives,’ ‘Higher ed transforms lives,’ ‘Politicians are interfering with your child’s education.’”
The AAUPthen provides five digital safety tips that include setting up strong passwords, installing software updates as soon as they’re available, using two-factor authentication, and never using employer email addresses outside of work.
The last tip is the most revealing of how academics might be harassed online through campaigns like Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” “Search for your name in common search engines to find out what is available about you online,” AAUP advises. “Put your name in quotation marks to narrow the search. Search both with and without your institution attached to your name.”
After that, the AAUP provided a list of trauma, counseling, and insurance services that its members have access to and a list of links to other pieces of information about protecting themselves.
“It’s good basic advice given that only a small number of faculty have spent years online in my experience, it’s a good place to start,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College told 404 Media. Kaurin resigned her position at the college earlier this year after realizing that the college would not defend academic freedom during Trump’s second term.
“I think this reflects the heightened level of scrutiny and targeting that higher ed is under,” Kaurin said. “While it’s not entirely new, the scale is certainly aided by many platforms and actors that are engaging on [social media] now when in the past faculty might have gotten threatening phone calls, emails and hard copy letters.”
The AAUP guidance was co-written by Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and the director of the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom. Kamola told 404 Media that the recommendations came for years of experience working with faculty who’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment campaigns. “That’s incredibly destabilizing,” he said. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like until it happens to you.”
Kamola said that academic freedom was already under threat before Kirk’s death. “It’s a multi-decade strategy of making sure that certain people, certain bodies, certain dies, are not in higher education, so that certain other ones can be, so that you can reproduce the ideas that a political apparatus would prefer existed in a university,” he said.
It’s telling that the AAUP felt the need to publish this, but the advice is practical and actionable, even for people outside of academia. Freedom of expression is under attack in America and though academics and other public figures are perhaps under the most threat, they aren’t the only ones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is actively monitoring the social media activity of military personnel as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense.
“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Sean Parnell, public affairs officer at the Pentagon, wrote on X, using the new nickname for the Department of Defense. In the private sector, Sony fired one of its video game developers after they made a joke on X about Kirk’s death and multiple journalists have been fired for Kirk related comments.
AAUP did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books
Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.
“We had people coming into the library and asking for those authors,” Kristan told 404 Media. He’s receiving similar requests for other types of media that don’t exist because they’ve been hallucinated by other AI-powered features. “It’s really, really frustrating, and it’s really setting us back as far as the community’s info literacy.”
AI tools are changing the nature of how patrons treat librarians, both online and IRL. Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told 404 Media early results from a recent survey of emerging trends in how AI tools are impacting libraries indicate that patrons are growing more trusting of their preferred generative AI tool or product, and the veracity of the outputs they receive. She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.
“Librarians are reporting this overall atmosphere of confusion and lack of trust they’re experiencing from their patrons,” Macrina told 404. “They’re seeing patrons having seemingly diminished critical thinking and curiosity. They’re definitely running into some of these psychosis and other mental health issues, and certainly seeing the people who are more widely adopting it also being those who have less digital literacy about it and a general sort of loss of retention.”
As a reference librarian, Kristan said he spends a lot of time thinking about how fallible the human mind can be, especially as he’s fielding more requests for things that don’t exist than ever before. Fortunately, he’s developed a system: Search for the presumed thing by title in the library catalog. If it’s not in the catalog, he checks the global library catalog WorldCat. If it isn’t there, he starts to get suspicious.
“Not being in WorldCat might mean it’s something that isn’t catalogued like a Zine, a broadcast, or something ephemeral, but if it’s parading as a traditional book and doesn’t have an entry in the collective library catalog, it might be AI,” Kristan explained.
From there, he might connect the title to a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing—one way AI-generated books enter the market—or the patron will tell him their source is an AI-powered chatbot, which he will have to explain, likely hallucinated the name of the thing they’re looking for. A thing that doesn't exist.
As much as library workers try to shield their institutions from the AI-generated content onslaught, the situation is and has been, in many ways, inevitable. Companies desperate to rush generative AI products to market are pushing flawed products onto the public that are predictably being used to pollute our information ecosystems. The consequences are that AI slop is entering libraries, everyone who uses AI products bears at least a little responsibility for the swarm, and every library worker, regardless of role, is being asked to try and mitigate the effects.
Collection development librarians are requesting digital book vendors like OverDrive, Hoopla and CloudLibrary to remove AI slop titles as they’re found. Subject specialists are expected to vet patron requested titles that may have been written in part with AI without having to read every single title. Library technology providers are rushing to implement tools that librarians say are making library systems catalogs harder to use.
Jaime Taylor, an academic library resource management systems supervisor with the University of Massachusetts, says vendors are shoehorning Large Language Models (LLMs) into library systems in one of two ways. The first is a natural language search (NLS) or a semantic search that attempts to draw meaning from the words to find complementary search results. Taylor says these products are misleading in that they claim to eliminate the need for the strict keyword searches or Boolean operators when searching library catalogs and databases, when really the LLM is doing the same work on the backend.
“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”
The other tool Taylor is seeing in library technology are AI-generated summaries based on journal articles, monographs, and other academic sources through a product called AI Insights, which incorporates new information into an existing LLM with a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Taylor and colleagues have found RAG doesn’t really help improve the accuracy of AI-generated summaries through beta testing AI tools in library tech for companies like Clarivate, Elsevier and EBSCO.
“It reads everything on both pages,” she added. “It can’t tell where the article you’re looking for starts and stops, so it gives you takeaways from every word on the page. This was really bad when we tested it with book reviews, because book reviews are often very short and there’ll be half a dozen on one page, which would end up giving us really mixed up information about every book review on the page, even though the record we were looking at was only looking for one of them, because it was a scanned page from an older journal.”
Taylor says neither type of product is ready for market, but especially not the AI summaries that do what an abstract does but a lot worse. She’s turned what ones she can off, but expects fewer vendors will allow her and other librarians to do so in the future to record more favorable use cases. The problem, she says, is these companies are rushing products to market, making the skills academic librarians are trying to teach students and researchers to use obsolete.
“We are trying to teach how to construct useful, exact searching,” she said. “But really [these products’ intent] is to make that not happen. The problem with that in a university library is we’re trying to teach those skills but we have tools that negate that necessity. And because those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.”
Plenty of library workers remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for generative AI integrations and what that could mean for information retrieval and categorization. But for most librarians, the rollout has been clunky, error-filled and disorienting, for them and their patrons.
“As someone who feels like a big part of my job is advocacy for the position, for the principles of the profession, I am here to not look at whether a resource is good or bad,” said Kristan. “I don’t look at the output, the relationship that it has with the patrons, and what it’s being used for in the long run of the future. Like, I’m not out here just breaking looms and machine weaving machinery just for the hell of it. I’m saying this is not good for the community and we need to find equitable alternatives to ensure that things are going well for the lives of our patrons.”
Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show
A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.
The show—called Политукладчик or “PolitStacker,” according to a Google translation—airs every Friday on Zvezda, a television station owned by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. It’s hosted by “Natasha,” an AI avatar modeled on Russian journalist Nataliya Metlina. In a clip of the show, “Natasha” said that its resemblance to Metlina is intentional.
“I am the creation of artificial intelligence, entirely tuned to your informational preferences,” it said. “My task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candies in a little box.” The shows’ title sequence and advertisements show gold wrapped candies bearing the faces of politicians like Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky being sorted into a candy box.
“‘PolitStacker’ is the world’s first television program created by artificial intelligence,” said an ad for the show on the Russian social media network VK, according to Google translate. “The AI itself selects, analyzes, and comments on the most important news, events, facts, and actions—as it sees them. The editorial team’s opinion may not coincide with the AI’s (though usually…it does.) “‘PolitStacker’” is not just news, but a tough breakdown of political madness from a digital host who notices what others overlook.”
Data scientist Kalev Leetaru discovered the AI-generated Russian show as part of his work with the GDELT Project, which collaborates with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, a project that scans and stores television broadcasts from around the world. “If you just look at the show and you didn’t know it had AI associated with it, you would never guess that. It looks like a traditional propaganda show on Russian television," Leetaru told 404 Media. “If they are using AI to the degree that they say they are, even if it’s just to pick topics, they mastered that formula in a way that others have not.”
PolitStacker’s 40 minute runtime is full of silly political commentary, jokes, and sloppy AI deepfakes that look like they were pulled from a five-year-old Instagram reel. In one episode, Macron, with curlers in his hair, adjusts Zelensky’s tie ahead of a meeting at the Kremlin. Later, a smiling Macron bearing six pack abs stands in a closet in front of a clown costume and a leather jumpsuit. “Parts of it have an uncanny valley to it, parts of it are really really good. This is only their fourth episode and they’re already doing deep fake interviews with world leaders,” Leetaru said. Image via the Internet Archive. In one of the AI-generated Trump interviews, the American president talked about how he’d end the war in Ukraine by building a casino in Moscow with golden toilets. “And all the Russian oligarchs, they would all be inside. All their money would be inside. Problem solved. They would just play poker and forget about this whole war. A very bad deal for them, very distracting,” the deepfake Trump said.
Deepfake world leaders aren’t new and are pretty common across the internet. For Leetaru, the difference is that this is airing on a state-backed television station. “It’s still in parody form, but to my knowledge, no national television network show has even gone this far,” he told 404 Media. “Today it’s a parody video that’s pretty clearly a comedic interview. But, you know, how far will they take that? And does that inspire others to maybe step into spaces that they wouldn’t have before?”
Trump also loves AI and the AI aesthetic. Government social media accounts often post AI-generated slop pictures of Trump as the Pope or a Jedi. ICE and the DHS share pictures on official channels that paint over the horrifying reality of the administration's immigration policy with a sheen of AI slop. Trump shared an AI-generated video that imagined what Gaza would look like if he built a resort there. And he’s teamed with Perplexity to launch an AI powered search engine to Truth Social.
“PolitStacker” is a parody show, but Russian media is experimenting with less comedic AI avatars as well. Earlier this year, the state-owned news agency Sputnik began to air what it called the “Dugin Digital Edition.” In these little lectures, an AI version of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin discusses the news of the day in English.
Last year, a Hawaiian newspaper, The Garden Island, teamed with an Israeli company to produce a news show on YouTube staffed by AI anchors. Reactions to the program were overwhelmingly negative, it brought in fewer than 1,000 viewers per episode, and The Garden Island stopped making the show a few months after it began.
In a twist of fate, Leetaru only discovered Moscow’s AI-generated show thanks to an AI system of his own. The GDELT project is a massive undertaking that records thousands of hours of data from across the world and it uses various AI systems to generate transcripts, translate them, and create an index of what’s been archived. “In this case I totally skimmed over what I thought was an ad for a propaganda show and then some candy commercial. Instead it ended up being something that’s fascinating,” he said.
But his AI indexing tool noted Zvezda's new show as an AI-generated program that sought to “analyze political follies of the outgoing week.” He took a second look and was glad he did. “That’s the power of machines being able to catch things and guide your eye towards that.”
What he saw disturbed him. “Yes, it’s one show on an obscure Russian government adjacent network using deep fakes for parody,” he said. “But the fact that a television network finally made that leap, to me, is a pivotal moment that I see as the tip of the iceberg.”
A massive hack of a popular dashcam company; the sentencing of someone Sam has covered for years; and the mass firings around Charlie Kirk's assassination.
A massive hack of a popular dashcam company; the sentencing of someone Sam has covered for years; and the mass firings around Charlie Kirkx27;s assassination.#Podcast
We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the Charlie Kirk assassination and our reporting around that. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA3… 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/-51f4patIkw?…
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 …
Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Trump administration’s promise to go after the “radical left” a study showing most domestic terrosim is far-right was disappeared.#News
DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing
The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.
The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine.
“The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance,” reads a message on the page where the study was formerly hosted. “During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Shortly after Donald Trump took office he issued an executive order that forced government agencies to scrub their sites of any mention of “diversity,” “gender,” “DEI,” and other “forbidden words” and perceived notions of “wokeness.” The executive order impacted every government agency, including NASA, and was a huge waste of engineers’ time.
We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently, but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the “radical left.”
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech after Kirk’s death. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Elon Musk, who owns X, recently tweeted that he was going to “fix” the platform’s AI assistant Grok after it cited research that showed right-wing violence was more common than left-wing violence: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, who guest hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday, also vowed to go after “growing and powerful minority on the far left.”
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study said. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Steven Chermak, one of the study’s co-authors, declined to comment.
The "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" proposes a total ban on porn in the state, and also targets the existence of trans people online, content like erotic ASMR, and selling VPNs in the state.#porn #ageverification #laws #lawsuits
Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely
A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state.
House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. It was introduced on September 11 by five Republican representatives: Josh Schriver, Joseph Pavlov, Matthew Maddock, James DeSana, and Jennifer Wortz.
The bill would forbid all “pornographic material,” which the lawmakers define as “content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”
The bill’s authors list out the specific things they consider pornographic material, including:
Vaginal or anal intercourse
Fellatio or cunnilingus
Masturbation
Ejaculation or orgasm
Penetration with sexual devices
Group sex
Bondage, domination, or sadomasochism.
Acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal.
Erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content [ASMR]
Animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence
Depictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contexts.
Any other pornographic material
The lawmakers also define any depiction or description of trans people as pornographic, and therefore, banned on platforms operating in the state, including anything “that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual's biological sex.”
Platform operators that “knowingly distribute” any of the above content to anyone accessing it from Michigan would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. If the platform hosts more than “100 pieces” of the above, that escalates to 25 years and $125,000. On top of being a felony, hosting that content would open platforms and internet service providers up to civil fines of up to $500,000 for “each violation.”
Sites would be required to change their terms of service to prohibit the above material, and implement moderation tools that use AI and human mods to find and remove pornographic content.
As Michigan local news outlet Fox 2 noted yesterday, Schriver has been talking about wanting to ban porn entirely in the state for a long time. Earlier this year, he said "shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry." Porn is legal and constitutionally protected by the First Amendment in the US, but many lawmakers in this country have been pushing to change that for years. It’s also basically impossible to pin down what content will “sexually arouse or gratify” every person who uses the internet; people are getting off to a billion different kinds of content that doesn’t even include bodily fluids or genitals.
Nearly 30 states have passed and enacted laws that require all visitors to porn sites, including adults, to verify their ages with a government ID or face scan to access porn. In some states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, those laws extend to mainstream, non-porn platforms like Bluesky. Michigan lawmakers have introduced two age verification bills: one for device-based age verification and one that mimics the many laws that have passed in states across the country. Existing age verification laws—which are uniformly invasive of people’ privacy and ineffective at actually stopping children from viewing harmful content—typically have bipartisan support, but Michigan’s Democratic senate and its governor Gretchen Whitmer will ultimately decide whether the much more extreme, Republican-backed “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act” will become law.
Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.
ChatGPT Will Guess Your Age and Might Require ID for Age Verification
OpenAI has announced it is introducing new safety measures for ChatGPT after the a wave of stories and lawsuits accusing ChatGPT and other chatbots of playing a role in a number of teen suicide cases. ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user’s age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old.
“We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” the company said in its announcement.
“I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.
In August, OpenAI was sued by the parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April. The lawsuit alleges that alleges that the ChatGPT helped him write the first draft of his suicide note, suggested improvements on his methods, ignored early attempts and self-harm, and urged him not to talk to adults about what he was going through.
“Where a trusted human may have responded with concern and encouraged him to get professional help, ChatGPT pulled Adam deeper into a dark and hopeless place by assuring him that ‘many people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an ‘escape hatch’ because it can feel like a way to regain control.’”
In August the Wall Street Journal also reported a story about a 56-year-old man who committed a murder-suicide after ChatGPT indulgedhis paranoia. Today, the Washington Postreported another story about another lawsuit alleging that a Character AI chatbot contributed to a 13-year-old girl’s death by suicide.
OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures.
In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user’s age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot.
“For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting,” the announcement said. “And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.”
OpenAI’s post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called “uncensored” models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions.
“We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety,” Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to “‘Treat our adult users like adults’ is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else’s freedom.
OpenAI is not the first company that’s attempting to use machine learning to predict the age of its users. In July, YouTube announced it will use a similar method to “protect” teens from certain types of content on its platform.
$2,000 Shipping: International Sellers Charge Absurd Prices to Avoid Dealing With American Tariffs
Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs.
A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The shipping price from Japan to the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Costa Rica, Canada, and other countries I checked is $29, meanwhile. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. That price used to be the threshold for the de minimis tariff exemption, a rule that previously allowed people to buy things without paying tariffs on lower-priced goods. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by.
eBay does allow sellers to opt out of selling to the United States entirely, but some sellers have found it easier to modify existing listings to have absurd shipping prices for the United States only rather than deal with taking entire listings down and delisting them to restrict American buyers entirely. I found numerous listings from a handful of different sellers who, rather than say they won't ship to the United States, have simply jacked up their shipping costs to absurd levels for the United States only. There are $575 cameras that the seller is now charging $500 to ship to the United States but will mail for free anywhere else in the world. Another Japanese seller is charging $640 to mail to the United States but will ship for free to other countries. A seller in Kazakhstan is charging $35 to mail a camera internationally but $999 to send to the United States. A German yarn seller is charging $10.50 to ship to Canada, but $500 to ship to the United States. On Reddit, users are reporting the same phenomenon occurring with some sellers on Etsy as well (it is harder to search Etsy by shipping prices, so I couldn’t find too many examples of this).
What is happening here, of course, is that some sellers in other countries don't want to have to deal with Trump's tariffs and the complicated logistics they have created for both buyers and sellers. Many international shipping companies have entirely stopped shipping to the United States, and many international sellers don't want to have to deal with the hassle of changing whatever shipping service they normally use to accommodate American buyers. eBay has also warned sellers that they may get negative feedback from American buyers who do not understand how tariffs work. eBay's feedback system is very important, and just a few negative reviews can impact a seller's standing on the platform and make it less likely that buyers will purchase something from them.
None of this is terribly surprising, but as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.
Lens ABQA11389. Lens condition. Mark in the lens. 93-94% Mint Minimal sings of use, Still very clean. 97-98% Mint++ Never used, but pre-owned. 95-96% Mint+ Almost no signs of use. 80-85% For Parts As-is.
AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook
A software engineer in Austin has hooked up Animal Crossing to an AI and breathed new and disturbing life into its villagers. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on Animal Crossing scripts and an RSS reader, the anthropomorphic folk of the Nintendo classic spouted new dialogue, talked about current events, and actively plotted against Tom Nook’s predatory bell prices.
The Animal Crossing LLM is the work of Josh Fonseca, a software engineer in Austin, Texas who works at a small startup. Ars Technica first reported on the mod. His personal blog is full of small software projects like a task manager for the text editor VIM, a mobile app that helps rock climbers find partners, and the Animal Crossing AI. He also documented the project in a YouTube video. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Fonseca started playing around with AI in college and told 404 Media that he’d always wanted to work in the video game industry. “Turns out it’s a pretty hard industry to break into,” he said. He also graduated in 2020. “I’m sure you’ve heard, something big happened that year.” He took the first job he could find, but kept playing around with video games and AI and had previously injected an LLM into Stardew Valley.
Fonseca used a Dolphin emulatorrunning the original Gamecube Animal Crossing on a MacBook to get the project working. According to his blog, an early challenge was just getting the AI and the game to communicate. “The solution came from a classic technique in game modding: Inter-Process Communication (IPC) via shared memory. The idea is to allocate a specific chunk of the GameCube's RAM to act as a ‘mailbox.’ My external Python script can write data directly into that memory address, and the game can read from it,” he said in the blog.
He told 404 Media that this was the most tedious part of the whole project. “The process of finding the memory address the dialogue actually lives at and getting it to scan to my MacBook, which has all these security features that really don’t want me to do that, and ending up writing to the memory took me forever,” he said. “The communication between the game and an external source was the biggest challenge for me.”
Once he got his code and the game talking, he ran into another problem. “Animal Crossing doesn't speak plain text. It speaks its own encoded language filled with control codes,” he said in his blog. “Think of it like HTML. Your browser doesn't just display words; it interprets tags like <b> to make text bold. Animal Crossing does the same. A special prefix byte, CHAR_CONTROL_CODE, tells the game engine, ‘The next byte isn't a character, it's a command!’”
But this was a solved problem. The Animal Crossing modding community long ago learned the secrets of the villager’s language, and Fonseca was able to build on their work. Once he understood the game’s dialogue systems, he built the AI brain. It took two LLM models, one to write the dialogue and another he called “The Director” that would add in pauses, emphasize words with color, and choose the facial animations for the characters. He used a fine-tuned version of Google’s Gemini for this and said it was the most consistent model he’d used.
To make it work, he fine-tuned the model, meaning he reduced its input training data to make it better at specific outputs. “You probably need a minimum of 50 to 100 really good examples in order to make it better,” he said.
Results for the experiment were mixed. Cookie, Scoot, and Cheri did indeed utter new phrases in keeping with their personality. Things got weird when Fonseca hooked up the game to an RSS reader so the villagers could talk about real world news. “If you watch the video, all the sources are heavily, politically, leaning in one direction,” he said. “I did use a Fox news feed, not for any other reason than I looked up ‘news RSS feeds’ and they were the first link and I didn’t really think it through. And then I started getting those results…I thought they would just present the news, not have leanings or opinions.”
“Trump’s gonna fight like heck to get rid of mail-in voting and machines!” Fitness obsessed duck Scoot said in the video. “I bet he’s got some serious stamina, like, all the way in to the finish line—zip, zoom!”
The pink dog Cookie was up on her Middle East news. “Oh my gosh, Josh 😀! Did you see the news?! Gal Gadot is in Israel supporting the families! Arfer,” she said, uttering her trademark catchphrase after sharing the latest about Israel.
In the final part of the experiment, Fonseca enabled the villagers to gossip. “I gave them a tiny shared memory for gossip, who said what, to whom, and how they felt,” he said in the blog.The villagers almost instantly turned on Tom Nook, the Tanuki who runs the local stores and holds most of Animal Crossing's inhabitants in debt. “Everything’s going great in town, but sometimes I feel like Tom Nook is, like, taking all the bells!” Cookie said.
“Those of us with big dreams are being squashed by Tom Nook! We gotta take our town back!” Cheri the bear cub said.
“This place is starting to feel more like Nook’s prison, y’know?” Said Scoot. youtube.com/embed/7AyEzA5ziE0?… Why do this to Animal Crossing? Why make Scoot and Cheri learn about Gal Gadot, Israel, and Trump?
“I’ve always liked nostalgic content,” Fonscesca said. His TikTok and YouTube algorithm is filled with liminal spaces and music from his childhood that’s detuned. He’s gotten into Hauntology, a philosophical idea that studies—among other things—promised futures that did not come to pass.
He sees projects like this as a way of linking the past and the future. “When I was a child I was like, ‘Games are gonna get better and better every year,’’ he said. “But after 20 years of playing games I’ve become a little jaded and I’m like, ‘oh there hasn’t really been that much innovation.’ So I really like the idea of mixing those old games with all the future technologies that I’m interested in. And I feel like I’m fulfilling those promised futures in a way.”
He knows that not everyone is a fan of AI. “A lot of people say that dialogue with AI just cannot be because of how much it sounds like AI,” he said. “And to some extent I think people are right. Most people can detect ChatGPT or Gemini language from a mile away. But I really think, if you fine tune it, I was surprised at just how good the results were.”
Animal Crossing’s dialogue is simple and that simplicity makes it a decent test case for AI video game marks, but Fonseca thinks he can do similar things with more complicated games. “There’s been a lot of discussion around how what I’m doing isn’t possible when there’s like, tasks or quests, because LLMs can’t properly guide you to that task without hallucinating. I think it might be more possible than people think,” he said. “So I would like to either try out my own very small game or take a game that has these kinds of quests and put together a demo of how that might be possible.”
He knows people balk at using AI to make video games, and art in general, but believes it’ll be a net benefit. “There will always be human writers and I absolutely want there to be human writers handling the core,” he said. “I would hope that AI is going to be a tool that doesn’t take away any of the best writers, but maybe helps them add more to their game that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I would hope that this just helps create more art in the world. I think I see the total art in the world increasing as a good thing…now I know some people would say that using AI ceases to make it art, but I’m also very deep in the programming aspect of it. What it takes to make these things is so incredible that it still feels like magic to me. Maybe on some level I’m still hypnotized by that.”
New documents obtained by 404 Media show how a data broker owned by American Airlines, United, Delta, and many other airlines is selling masses of passenger data to the U.S. government.#FOIA
Airlines Sell 5 Billion Plane Ticket Records to the Government For Warrantless Searching
📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.
A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including American Airlines, United, and Delta, is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples’ movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, and many other agencies, according to a new contract and other records reviewed by 404 Media.
The contract provides new insight into the scale of the sale of passengers’ data by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), the airlines-owned data broker. The contract shows ARC’s data includes information related to more than 270 carriers and is sourced through more than 12,800 travel agencies. ARC has previously told the government to not reveal to the public where this passenger data came from, which includes peoples’ names, full flight itineraries, and financial details.
“Americans' privacy rights shouldn't depend on whether they bought their tickets directly from the airline or via a travel agency. ARC's sale of data to U.S. government agencies is yet another example of why Congress needs to close the data broker loophole by passing my bipartisan bill, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
💡 Do you know anything else about ARC or the sale of this data? 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 is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, publicly released documents show. Its board of directors includes representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Air France and Lufthansa, and Canada’s Air Canada. ARC acts as a bridge between airlines and travel agencies, in which it helps with fraud prevention and finds trends in travel data. ARC also sells passenger data to the government as part of what it calls the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP).
TIP is updated every day with the previous day’s ticket sales and can show a person’s paid intent to travel. Government agencies can then search this data by name, credit card, airline, and more.
The new contract shows that ARC has access to much more data than previously reported. Earlier coverage found TIP contained more than one billion records spanning more than 3 years of past and future travel. The new contract says ARC provides the government with “5 billion ticketing records for searching capabilities.”
Screenshots of the documents obtained by 404 Media.
404 Media obtained the contract through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the Secret Service. The contract indicates the Secret Service plans to pay ARC $885,000 for access to the data stretching into 2028. A spokesperson for the agency told 404 Media “The U.S. Secret Service is committed to protecting our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure in close coordination with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. To safeguard the integrity of our work, we do not discuss the tools used to conduct our operations.” The Secret Service did not answer a question on whether it seeks a warrant, subpoena, or court order to search ARC data.
404 Media has filed FOIA requests with a wide range of agencies that public procurement records show have purchased ARC data. That includes ICE, CBP, ATF, the SEC, TSA, the State Department, U.S. Marshals, and the IRS. A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows the FBI has asked ARC to search its databases for a specific person as part of a drug investigation. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The ATF told 404 Media in a statement “ATF uses ARC data for criminal and investigative purposes related to firearms trafficking and other investigations within ATF’s purview. ATF follows DOJ policy and appropriate legal processes to obtain and search the data. Access to the system is limited to a very small group within ATF, and all subjects searched within ARC must be part of an active, official ATF case/investigation.”
An ARC spokesperson told 404 Media in an email 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.”
The spokesperson added “Pursuant to ARC’s privacy policy, consumers may ask ARC to refrain from selling their personal data.”
After media coverage and scrutiny from Senator Wyden’s office of the little-known data selling, ARC finally registered as a data broker in the state of California in June. Senator Wyden previously said it appeared ARC had been in violation of Californian law for not registering while selling airline customers’ data for years.
It’s a legal requirement for data brokers to register in the state of California. ARC, the airlines-owned data broker that has been selling your flight information to the government for years, only just registered after being contacted by the office …
How Trump's tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPT's reckoning.
How Trumpx27;s tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPTx27;s reckoning.#Podcast
This week, we talk about how 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the 'AI Darwin Awards,' which is, uhh, celebrating the dumbest uses of AI. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA1… 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/jCak5De0oaw?…
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 …
Strange “leopard spots” on Mars are the most promising signs of alien life on the planet yet, but they could also have a geological origin.#TheAbstract
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that broke ice, broke hearts, and broke out the libations. Also, if you haven’t seen it already, we just covered an amazing breakthrough in our understanding of the cosmos, which is as much a story about humanity’s endless capacity for ingenuity as it is about the wondrous nature of black holes.
Scientists have discovered Arctic algae moving around with ease in icy environments of -15°C (5°F)—the lowest temperatures ever recorded for motility in a eukaryotic lifeform. While some simple microbes can survive lower temperatures, this is the first time that scientists have seen eukaryotic life—organisms with more complex cells containing a nucleus—able to live, thrive, and locomote in such chilly environments.
It’s amazing that these so-called “ice diatoms” can move around at all, but it’s even cooler that they do it in style with a gliding mechanism that researchers describe as a “‘skating’ ability.” Their secret weapon? Mucus threads (“mucilage”) that they use like anchors to pull themselves through frozen substrates.
“The unique ability of ice diatoms to glide on ice” enables them “to thrive in conditions that immobilize other marine diatoms,” said researchers led by Qing Zhang of Stanford University. An Arctic diatom, showing the actin filaments that run down its middle and enable its skating motion. Image: Prakash Lab Zhang and her colleagues made this discovery by collecting ice cores from 12 locations around the Arctic Chukchi Sea during a 2023 expedition on the research vessel Sikuliaq, which is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this is a research area that could be destroyed by the Trump administration, with NSF facing 70 percent cuts to its polar research budget.
If lifeforms are doing triple axels in Arctic ice on Earth, it’s natural to wonder whether alien organisms may have emerged elsewhere. To that end, scientists announced the discovery of a tantalizing hint of possible life on Mars this week. youtube.com/embed/ieJKWW8sp2A?… NASA’s Perseverance rover turned up organic carbon-bearing mudstones that preserve past redox reactions, which involves the transfer of electrons between substances resulting in one being “reduced” (gaining electrons) and one being “oxidized” (losing electrons). The remnants of those reactions look like “leopard spots” in the Bright Angel formation of Jezero Crater, where the rover landed in 2021, according to the study. The “leopard spots” at Bright Angel. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS This is not slam-dunk evidence of life, as the reactions can be geological in origin, but they “warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures.”
“This assessment is further supported by the geological context of the Bright Angel formation, which indicates that it is sedimentary in origin and deposited from water under habitable conditions,” said researchers led by Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University.
The team added that the best way to confirm the origin of the ambiguous structures is to bring Perseverance’s samples back to Earth for further study as part of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Unfortunately, the Trump administration wants to cancel MSR. It seems that even when we have nice things, we still can’t have nice things, a paradox that we all must navigate together.
About 150 million years ago, a pair of tiny pterodactyls—just days or weeks old—were trying to fly through a cataclysmic storm. But the wind was strong enough to break the bones of their baby wings, consigning them to a watery grave in the lagoon below.
Now, scientists describe how the very storm that cut their lives short also set them up for a long afterlife as exquisitely preserved fossils, nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II, in Germany's Solnhofen limestone. Fossils of Lucky II. Image: University of Leicester “Storms caused these pterosaurs to drown and rapidly descend to the bottom of the water column, where they were quickly buried in storm-generated sediments, preserving both their skeletal integrity and soft tissues,” said researchers led by Robert Smyth of the University of Leicester.
“This catastrophic taphonomic pathway, triggered by storm events, was likely the principal mechanism by which small- to medium-sized pterodactyloids…entered the Solnhofen assemblage,” they added.
While it’s sad that these poor babies had such short lives, it’s astonishing that such a clear cause of death can be established 150 million years later. Rest in peace, Lucky and Lucky II.
Trump’s aid cuts could cause millions of deaths from tuberculosis alone
The Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), carried out in public fashion by Elon Musk and DOGE, will likely cause millions of excess deaths from tuberculosis (TB) by 2030, reports a sobering new study.
“Termination of US funding could result in an estimated 10.6 million additional TB cases and 2.2 million additional TB deaths during the period 2025–2030,” said researchers led by Sandip Mandal of the Center for Modeling and Analysis at Avenir Health. “The loss of U.S. funding endangers global TB control efforts” and “potentially puts millions of lives at risk.”
Beyond TB, the overall death toll from the loss of USAID is estimated to reach 14 million deaths by 2030. The destruction of USAID must never be memory-holed as it is shaping up to be among the most deadly actions ever enacted by a government outside of war.
In more bad news, it turns out that the bacteria that’s responsible for making a lot of Earth’s oxygen is highly vulnerable to human-driven climate change. Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, is the source of about 20 percent of the oxygen in our biosphere. But rapidly warming seas could set off “a possible 17–51 percent reduction in Prochlorococcus production in tropical oceans,” according to a new study.
“Prochlorococcus division rates appear primarily determined by temperature, increasing exponentially to 28°C, then sharply declining,” said researchers led by François Ribalet of the University of Washington. “Regional surface water temperatures may exceed this range by the end of the century under both moderate and high warming scenarios.”
It’s possible that this vital bacteria will adapt by moving to higher latitudes or by evolving more heat-tolerant variants. But that seems like a big gamble on something as important as Earth’s oxygen budget.
We are far from the first generation to live through unstable times, as evidenced by a new study about the “climatic change and economic upheaval” in Britain during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age about 3,000 years ago.
These disruptions were traumatic, but they also galvanized new modes of community connection—a.k.a epic parties where people ate, drank, made merry, and dumped the remnants of their revelry in trashpiles called “middens.” East Chisenbury midden under excavation. Image: Cardiff University “These vast mounds of cultural debris represent the coming together of vast numbers of people and animals for feasts on a scale unparalleled in British prehistory,” said researchers led by Carmen Esposito of Cardiff University. “This study, the largest multi-isotope faunal dataset yet delivered in archaeology, has demonstrated that, despite their structural similarities, middens had diverse roles.”
"Given the proximity of all middens to rivers, it is likely that waterways played a role in the movement of people, objects and livestock,” the team added. “Overall, the research points to the dynamic networks that were anchored on feasting events during this period and the different, perhaps complementary, roles that different middens had at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.”
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 "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.
JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech.
“We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.”
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An email sent to NBCUniversal employees, including journalists at NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more, eulogizes Charlie Kirk as an "advocate for open debate" and reminds staff that even milquetoast statements about Kirk's death can result in their firing.#CharlieKirk #Journalism
Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk
A company-wide email from Comcast executives, sent to everyone working at NBCUniversal on Friday morning, mourns right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death and reminds employees that saying the wrong thing about Kirk’s legacy can get you fired swiftly.
The email, obtained by 404 Media and first reported by Variety, has the subject line “A message from Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh, and Mark Lazarus.” In it, the executives eulogize Kirk, calling him an “advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him.”
Roberts is the Chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, Cavanagh is the president, and Lazarus is the prospective CEO of VERSANT, Comcast’s new spinoff that will include the majority of its NBCUniversal cable network portfolio. NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more journalistic and entertainment properties are under the NBCUniversal umbrella.
“You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event,” the executives wrote. “That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions.”
💡 Do you have information about how your company is speaking to employees about Charlie Kirk's death, or political speech in general? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.
Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
MSNBC is a division of NBCUniversal. The letter from Comcast executives reiterates to current employees that their jobs are on the line if they stray from bland, milquetoast statements about a man who spent his life fomenting hate will have consequences on their careers. The entire mainstream media environment has been working overtime to sanitize Kirk’s legacy since his murder—a legacy that includes targeted harassment of professors at schools across the country and normalizing the notion that basic human rights are up for “debate.”
The full email is below.
Dear Comcast NBCUniversal Team,
The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, husband, and advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him, reminds us of the fragility of life and the urgent need for unity in our nation. Our hearts are heavy, as his passing leaves a grieving family and a country grappling with division. There is no place for violence or hate in our society.
You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.
Charlie Kirk believed that "when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts." Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.
As employees, we ask you to embody our values in your work and communities. We should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.
Does Silksong Seem Unreasonably Hard? You Probably Took a Wrong Turn
There is an aggrieved cry reverberating through the places on the internet where gamers gather. To hear them tell it, Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to the stone-cold classic 2017 platformer, is too damned hard. There’s a particular jumping puzzle involving spikes and red flowers that many are struggling with and they’re filming their frustration and putting it up on the internet, showing their ass for everyone to see. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Even 404 Media’s own Joseph Cox hit these red flowers and had the temerity to declare Silksong a “bad game” that he was “disappointed” in given his love for the original Hollow Knight. youtube.com/embed/3yxR6H_Zh0M?…youtube.com/embed/GD8ZyYE1K7k?…youtube.com/embed/ZsmxOMijLtE?… Couldn't be me.
I, too, got to the area just outside Hunter’s March in Silksong where the horrible red flowers bloom. Unlike others, however, my gamer instincts kicked in. I knew what to do. “This is the Dark Souls Catacombs situation all over again,” I said to myself. Then I turned around and came back later.
And that has made all the difference.
In the original Dark Souls, once players clear the opening area they come to Firelink Shrine. From there they can go into Undead Burg, the preferred starting path, or descend into The Catacombs where horrifying undying skeletons block the entrance to a cave. One will open the game up before you, the other will kill new players dead. A lot of Dark Souls players have raged and quit the game over the years because they went into The Catacombs instead of the Undead Burg.
Like Dark Souls, Silksong has an open-ish world where portions of the map are hardlocked by items and soft locked by player skill checks. One of the entrances into the flower laden Hunter’s March is in an early game area blocked by a mini-boss fight with a burly ant. The first time I fought the ant, it killed me over and over again and I took that as a sign I should go elsewhere.
High skilled players can kill the ant, but it’s much easier after you’ve gotten some basic items and abilities. I had several other paths I could take to progress the game, so I marked the ant’s location and moved on.
As I explored more of Silksong, I acquired several powerups that trivialized the fight with the ant and made it easy to navigate the flower jumping puzzles behind him. The first is Swift Step, a dash ability, which is in Deep Docks in the south-eastern portion of the map. The second is the Wanderer’s Crest, which is near the start of the game behind a locked door you get the key for in Silksong’s first town.
The dash allowed me to adjust my horizontal position in the air, but it’s the Wanderer’s Crest that made the flowers easy to navigate. The red flowers are littered throughout Hunter’s March and players have to hit them with a down attack to get a boosted jump and cross pits of spikes. By default, Hornet—the player character—down attacks at a 45 degree angle. The Wanderer’s Crest allows you to attack directly below you and makes the puzzles much easier to navigate.
Cox, bless his heart, hit the burly red ant miniboss and brute forced his way past. Then, like so many other desperate gamers, he proceeded to attempt to navigate the red flower jumping puzzles without the right power ups. He had no Swift Step. He had no Wanderer’s Crest. And thus, he raged.
He’s not alone. Watching the videos of jumping puzzles online I noticed that a lot of the players didn’t seem to have the dash or the downward attack.
Games communicate to players in different ways and gamers often complain about annoying an obvious signposting like big splashes of yellow paint. But when a truly amazing game comes along that tries to gently steer the player with burly ants and difficult puzzles, they don’t appreciate it and they don’t listen. If you’re really stuck in Silksong, try going somewhere else.
Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way
Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Timespublished a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech.
“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”
“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.
Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.
Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,” “School Board Watchlist,” and “Campus Reform” for nearly a decade.
“America’s radical education system has taken a devastating toll on our children,” Kirk said in an intro video posted on these projects’ websites. “From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”
These websites have been directly tied to harassment and threats against professors and school board members all over the country. Professor Watchlist lists hundreds of professors around the country, many of them Black or trans, and their perceived radical agendas, which include things like supporting gun control, “socialism,” “Antifa,” “abortion,” and acknowledging that trans people exist and racism exists. Trans professors are misgendered on the website, and numerous people who have been listed on it have publicly spoken about receiving death threats and being harassed after being listed on the site.
One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You're everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we're watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.” His president and provost also received emails attempting to discredit him with “all the allegedly communist and subversive stuff I was up to,” he said. “It was all certainly concerning, but compared to colleagues who are people of color and/or women, I feel like the volume was smaller for me. But it was certainly not a great feeling to experience that stuff. That watchlist fucked up careers and ruined lives.”
The American Association of University Professors said in an open letter in 2017 that Professor Watchlist “lists names of professors with their institutional affiliations and photographs, thereby making it easy for would-be stalkers and cyberbullies to target them. Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attract can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment.” Campus free speech rights group FIRE found that censorship and punishment of professors skyrocketed between 2020 and 2023, in part because of efforts from Professor Watchlist.
Many more professors who Turning Point USA added to their watchlist have spoken out in the past about how being targeted upended their lives, brought years of harassment down on them and their colleagues, and resulted in death threats against them and their loved ones.
At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023.
“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.” Crow said the Professor Watchlist resulted in “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on ASU faculty with whom Turning Point USA and its followers disagree,” and called the organization’s tactics “anti-democratic, anti-free speech and completely contrary” to the spirit of scholarship.
Kirk’s death is a horrifying moment in our current American nightmare. Kirk’s actions and rhetoric do not justify what happened to him because they cannot be justified. But Kirk was not merely someone who showed up to college campuses and listened. It should not be controversial to plainly state some of the impact of his work.
Arizona State Police released footage of an incident between an ASU English professor, a reporter and cameraman from Turning Point USA that happened on Oct. 11. University president Dr. Michael Crow released a statement calling the men "cowards."
The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes
Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software.
I first noticed this trend in the form of a meme that was circulating on LinkedIn, sharing a screenshot of several profiles who advertised themselves as “vibe coding cleanup specialists.” I couldn’t confirm if the accounts in that screenshot were genuinely making an income by fixing vibe coded software, but the meme gained traction because of the inherent irony in the existence of such a job existing.
The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.
LinkedIn memes aside, people are in fact making money fixing vibe coded messes.
“I've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023. Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year,” Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to “review, fix your vibe code” on Fiverr, told me in an email. “I started fixing vibe-coded projects because I noticed a growing number of developers and small teams struggling to refine AI-generated code that was functional but lacked the polish or ‘vibe’ needed to align with their vision. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap, combining my coding expertise with an eye for aesthetic and user experience.”
Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive. He said he also often refines color schemes, animations, and layouts to better match the creator’s intended aesthetic.
Siddiqi is one of dozens of people on Fiverr who is now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects. Established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say “we clean up after vibe coding. Literally.”
“Built something fast? Now it’s time to make it solid,” Ulam Labs says on its site. “We know how it goes. You had to move quickly, get that MVP [minimally viable product] out, and validate the idea. But now the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD [Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment] is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That’s where we come in.”
Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn’t done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible.
Sohni said that he’s been vibe coding himself since before Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February. He bought a bunch of vibe coding related domains, and realized a service like VibeCodeFixers.com was necessary based on how often he had to seek help from experts on his own vibe coding projects. In March, the site got a lot of attention on X and has been slowly adding people to the platform since.
Sohni also wrote a “Vibecoding Community Research Report” based on interviews with non-technical people who are vibe coding their projects that he shared with me. The report identified a lot of the same issues as Siddiqi, mainly that existing features tend to break when new ones are added.
“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It's very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don't think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.”
Another big issue Sohni identified is “credit burn,” meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. In theory, it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over at that point, but Sohni said people get attached to their first project.
“What happens is that the first time they build the app, it's like they think that they can build the app with one prompt, and then the app breaks, and they burn the credit. I think they are very emotionally connected to the app, because this act of vibe coding involves you, your creativity.”
In theory it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over if the LLM starts hallucinating and creating problems, but Sohni that’s when people come to VibeCodeFixers.com. They want someone to fix the bugs in their app, not create a new one.
Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers.
“I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash,” he said.
Scientists Just Got an Unprecedented Glimpse into the Nature of Reality
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Scientists have captured the clearest ever gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—a breakthrough that has resolved decades-old mysteries about black holes and the nature of our reality, according to a study published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters.
Gravitational waves forged by an ancient merger between two massive black holes reached Earth on January 14 of this year, where they were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana. LIGO has discovered hundreds of these waves, but the January event, known as GW250114, is the cleanest detection ever made with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80 (meaning that the signal is about 80 times louder than the noise).
The unprecedented clarity allowed scientists to confirm predictions about black holes that were made a half-century ago by pioneering theorists Roy Kerr and Stephen Hawking, known respectively as the Kerr metric and Hawking area theorem. According to the new study, the results represent “a milestone in the decade-long history of gravitational wave science,” a field that was born in 2015 with the historic first detection of these elusive waves.
“We had promised that gravitational waves would open a new window into the universe, and that has materialized,” said Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and assistant professor at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media.
“Over the past 10 years, the instruments have continued to improve,” added Isi. “We are at a point now where we are detecting a collision of black holes every other day or so. That said, this one detection, which has an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, really drives home how far this field has come along.”
Gravitational waves are subtle ripples in spacetime that are produced by energetic cosmic events, such as supernovas or mergers between black holes. Albert Einstein was the first to predict their existence in his 1916 general theory of relativity, though he was doubtful humans could ever develop technologies sensitive enough to detect them.
These waves oscillate at tiny distances that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. To capture them, LIGO’s detectors shoot lasers across corridors that stretch for 2.5 miles and act like ultra-sensitive tripwires. The advent of gravitational wave astronomy earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 and marked the dawn of "multimessenger astronomy,” in which observations about the universe can emerge from different sources beyond light.
GW250114 has a lot in common with that inaugural gravitational wave signal detected in 2015; both signals came from mergers between black holes that are about 30 times as massive as the Sun with relatively slow spins. Gravitational wave astronomy has revealed that black holes often fall into this mass range for reasons that remain unexplained, but the similarity of the 2015 and 2025 events throws the technological progress of LIGO into sharp relief.
“Every pair of black holes is different, but this one is almost an exact twin” to the first detection, Isi said. “It really allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. The new signal is detected with around four times more fidelity, more clarity, and less relative noise than the previous one. Even though, intrinsically, the signal is equally powerful to the first one, it's so much neater and we can see so much more detail. This has been made possible by painstaking work on the instrument.”
The high quality of the signal enabled Isi and his colleagues to test a prediction about black holes proposed by mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963. Kerr suggested that black holes are simple astrophysical objects that can be boiled down to just two properties: mass and spin. GW250114 was clear enough to produce precise measurements of the “ringdown” signatures of the merging black holes as they coalesced into a single remnant, which is a pattern akin to the sound waves from a ringing bell. These measurements confirmed Kerr’s early insight about the nature of these strange objects. An illustration of the two tones, including a rare, fleeting overtone used to test the Kerr metric. Image: Simons Foundation. “Because we see it so clearly for the first time, we see this ringing for an extended period where there is an equivocal, clear signature that this is coming from the final black hole,” explained Isi. “We can identify and isolate this ringing from the final black hole and tease out that there are two modes of oscillation.”
“It's like having two tuning forks that are vibrating at the same time with slightly different pitches,” he continued. “We can identify those two tones and check that they're both consistent with a single mass and spin. This is the most direct way we have of checking if the black holes out there are really conforming to the mathematical idealization that we expect in general relativity—through Kerr.”
In addition to confirming Kerr’s prediction, GW250114 also validated Stephen Hawking’s 1971 prediction that the surface area of a black hole could only increase, known as Hawking's area theorem. Before they merged, the black holes were each about 33 times as massive as the Sun, and the final remnant was about 63 solar masses (the remaining mass was emitted as energy in the form of gravitational waves). Crucially, however, the final remnant’s surface area was bigger than the combined sum of the areas of the black holes that created it, confirming the area theorem.
“We are in an era of experimental gravitation,” said Isi. “We can study space and time in these dynamically crazy configurations, observationally. That is really amazing for a field that has, for decades, just worked on pure mathematical abstraction. We are hunting these things with reality.”
The much-anticipated confirmation of these predictions puts constraints on some of the most intractable problems in physics, including how the laws of general relativity—which governs cosmic scales of stars and galaxies—can coexist with the very different laws that rule the tiny quantum scales of atoms.
Scientists hope more answers can be revealed by increasingly sophisticated detections from observatories like LIGO and Virgo in Italy, along with future projects like the European Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), due for launch in the 2030s. Despite LIGO’s massive contribution to science, the Trump administration has proposed big cuts to the observatory and a possible closure to one of its detectors, which would be a major setback.
Regardless of how the field develops in the future, the new discovery demonstrates that the efforts of generations of scientists are now coming to fruition with startling clarity.
“It is humbling to be inscribed in this long tradition,” Isi said. “Of course, Einstein never expected that gravitational waves would be detected. It was a ludicrous idea. Many people didn't think it would ever happen, even right up to 2015. It is thanks to the vision and grit of those early scientists who fully committed despite how crazy it sounded.”
“I hope that support for this type of research is maintained, that I'll be talking to you in 10 years, and I will tell you: ‘Wow, we had no idea what spacetime was like,’” he concluded. “Maybe this is just the beginning.”
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Tens of thousands of people, at any given time, are idly listening to the ambient, muted beats that accompany the Lofi Girl livestream: in solo studying sessions, taking tests in a classroom, and using the tunes as a stand-in for white noise to aid sleep. The livestream, which is one of the longest running live broadcasts on YouTube, is often hiding in browser tabs, leaving the perpetually busy Jade (the Lofi Girl) to lazily take her notes behind whatever Wikipedia page or spreadsheet you’ve got open. But she is always there, the googly eyes stuck to her headphones wobbling as she looks up from her notes, to peek in on, to study with, or to chill to—the details of the music become secondary to the vibe.
From a single livestream that’s been running in some form since 2017—the YouTube channel, which was started in 2015, was called ChilledCow before the iconic rebrand—Lofi Girl has grown into an empire. To put that growth into perspective, ChilledCow had 1.6 million YouTube subscribers in 2018, a number that grew to 5 million in 2020. Now, the channel has more than 15 million subscribers. The soundtrack of Lofi Girl’s brand of chill is pervasive, and the ubiquity of her aural and physical aesthetic made Jade a big business, her essence seeping into wider culture; Nissan harnessed the vibe to sell its electric car, Will Smith to sell hoodies, and even U.S. president Donald Trump in a maniacal attempt to sell his administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Lofi Girl—the company—leverages its influence itself, expanding from simply a YouTube channel into an advertising arm, merchandising enterprise, and full blown record label.
To reach this success over the past 10 years, Lofi Girl has had to adjust. Its success in making music that’s appealing to everyone changed the kind of music that’s coming out of the channel. While Lofi Girl once firmly fit within the genre of lofi hip hop, known for pairing relaxed—but still thumping—beats with nostalgic sound samples, its music has largely dropped the hip hop. Lofi Girl's music is now simply its own genre: lofi, where the soft, tonal consistency means it can be hard for the average listener to even see its works as distinct songs. The drum beats of the "chill beats to relax/study to" sometimes even take a backseat to the rounded, flighty melodies Dr. Jenessa Williams, a music and fan culture researcher at Stanford University, called Lofi Girl a “deeply valued background noise community.”
“Music consumption is shifting,” a Lofi Records label manager, who goes by Berrkan Bag online, told 404 Media in an email. “Short-form and scroll-driven platforms have changed how people engage with lo-fi. Some of the long-form, narrative visuals that helped define the genre are being challenged by algorithmic trends.”
He added that lofi itself is maturing as the genre redefines “itself between functional background music and meaningful creative expression.”
March marked 10 years since creator Dimitri Somoguy started the ChilledCow YouTube channel that would eventually become Lofi Girl. It started as a place to broadcast lofi hiphop beats, set to a looping video clip of Shizuku Tsukishima, the young girl protagonist from Studio Ghibli’s 1995 animated film Whisper of the Heart. The stream was taken down in 2017 over copyright concerns over the character’s usage, and that’s where Jade came from: ChilledCow hired Colombian artist Juan Pablo Machado to create an original character. Jade’s been the face of lofi beats on YouTube since, and so it makes sense the channel was renamed from ChilledCow to Lofi Girl in 2021. The current stream started in July 2022, making this particular broadcast one of the longest running livestreams on YouTube. The record would have been longer if it weren’t for a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice from 2022 that forced the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to go dark. (YouTube later called the DMCA notice “abusive.”)
Today, there are more than a dozen streams of different lofi themed music running concurrently, several of which have thousands of people listening at any given time. Dozens of YouTube videos, both branded content and an emerging narrative about Jade and a new character, Synthwave Boy, a neighbor whose intertwined story is slowly unravelling over short videos. The company, which has about 20 employees, not including its hundreds of collaborators, according to a Lofi Girl representative, expands from there. Lofi Records is the in-house record label that’s published thousands of songs on its YouTube channel and on vinyl. Lofi Studio, an art team that makes Lofi Girl’s branded content, pumps out regular collaborations and brand deals. And then there's Lofi Girl Shop, which sells, among other things, vinyl records, a recreation of Synthwave Boy’s bomber jacket and purple beanie, and a plush orange cat. Lofi Girl is expanding into gaming, too. Lofi Girl has three official Fortnite maps: one in which you can, dressed as Darth Vader or Peely Bone, walk about a recreation of Jade’s bedroom; another that’s a Lofi Girl simulator; and a third that’s a parkour game called Only Up.
It’s no coincidence that the Lofi Girl channel blew up exponentially during the pandemic. People were spending a lot of time online, of course, but the channel offered a predictable constant. The music even edges on sleepy. YouTube creator Peter Tagg told 404 Media he has it playing for hours in the background multiple days a week—it's a salve that's beneficial for studying and even as a sleep aid. It’s always there, and the music is curated in such a way that you’re never really surprised by what you’re hearing, which can be comforting and not distracting. Williams, the music researcher, told 404 Media that Lofi Girl's aesthetic taps into "the psychology of productivity mirroring," which is a technique in which people motivate themselves to do a task by having another person around.
Williams says the music itself can often become secondary to the familiar, comforting vibe for Lofi Girl listeners. “Lofi Girl appeals most to young music fans who love and consume lots of different kinds of music, but appreciate the Lofi Girl specifically because it gives them something predictable in an evermore chaotic world,” she said. “Musical discovery via the Lofi Girl is certainly possible, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything truly surprising or cortisol-spiking, and I think—whether one sees this as a positive or not—that's why it has become so popular.”
Lofi music was originally more hip hop than anything else, popularized by two artists in particular: J Dilla and Nujabes. It’s a genre defined by nostalgia, drum beats, and melancholy sound—but as Lofi Girl, the channel, got more popular, the hip hop influence started to slide away in favor of reverb-heavy, ethereal music with simple drum beats. Producer and Lofi Girl collaborator Phil Morris Lesky, who publishes under the name Lesky, told 404 Media that the music he creates for Lofi Girl, specifically, is “more its own thing now. The rhythm section takes a little bit of a backseat. It’s more about arrangement.”
Though it clearly resonates with a mainstream audience, some in the lofi hip hop community criticize Lofi Girl for its role in anonymizing the music and stripping out its hip hop influence. Another Lofi Girl collaborator, who asked to remain unnamed as to not jeopardize an ongoing relationship with the brand, likened it to Muzak—a brand of background music designed to be unobtrusive for use in retail stores. “That’s kind of what happened with lofi music,” they said. “It’s no longer artists making sounds they want, rather, it’s a record label trying to curate an experience for, like, coffee shops.” (One prominent lofi hip hop musician, bsd.u, cheekily criticized lofi streams like Lofi Girl with a song called “all my homies hate 24/7 lofi streams.”)
This collaborator said Lofi Girl has a Discord server for musicians, and that’s where the company solicits music for its livestream. Often, Lofi Girl asks musicians to write to a specific theme—be it medieval, Halloween, synthwave, or for the vague “asian” radio channel, just make it lofi. The company often provides a playlist of music to emulate, they say. Then, a musician can submit music to Lofi Girl in hopes it gets chosen. Lesky and lofi producer Julien Pannetier, who goes by VIQ, aren’t bothered by the themed submission system. Lesky said it's easy to know exactly what the label is looking for. No guesswork involved. There’s less creative freedom, Pannetier told 404 Media, “but that can also be a driving force.”
The aforementioned anonymous Lofi Girl collaborator doesn't see it that way: “It’s really a policing of aesthetics and sounds that keeps artists from actually taking creative risks.”
It’s designed to be palatable to everyone. “The whole livestream on YouTube, the playlist growth on Spotify, without any judgement or critique, is creating a homogeneous sound that’s basically easily categorized,” Lesky said. “People understand it quickly. It’s really search engine-optimized. They have a huge influence.”
What this adds up to is big business for Lofi Girl. A YouTube channel of Lofi Girl’s size alone can bring in millions of dollars a year from YouTube’s ad revenue program. (Though Lofi Girl’s live streams aren’t interrupted by ads like lots of YouTube videos, they’re preceded by them. That, plus ads on dozens of other videos on the Lofi Girl channel that aren’t livestreams make a ton of money.) The popularity of the channel, and its ability to harness a vibe that resonates with everyone, is what’s driving Lofi Girl’s successful push into advertising. Over the past few years, Lofi Studio has been hired to create branded content that pulls a piece of the respective company into the Lofi Girl world. Lofi Girl’s marketing studio created a one-hour YouTube video created for Alien: Isolation, butinstead of Jade and her bedroom, it’s an alien on an anime-rendered spaceship, complete with Jones the cat perched at Nostromo’s window. For Lofi Studio’s Starfield collab, the company remixed the Microsoft game’s soundtrack, and set the video in a cozy little starship. No cat, but the robot does have its own cozy cup of coffee.
It works so well that other brands are trying to mimic the aesthetic.
Nissan debuted a four-hour YouTube video in 2023 to advertise its electric car Ariya. Its inspiration is obvious, swapping Jade for a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket who’s vibing to lofi beats from a car instead of a bedroom. None of this was created by Lofi Studios. Advertising company The Mayda Creative Co. and animation studio Titmouse created the YouTube video and its art, but ran the ads on Lofi Girl content. It’s got more than 18 million views. Will Smith’s quarantine beats slapped on, or, if you’re less generous, ripped off the aesthetic of Lofi Girl in this way. Dr. Steven Gamble, lecturer of digital humanities at the University of Southampton who writes about hip hop and the internet, told 404 Media that Smith’s fashion brand Bel-Air Athletics posted the video as Lofi Girl was taking off during the pandemic. “When things are popular and there’s an audience that has commercial potential, that’s what people do,” he says. Smith and Bel-Air Athletics positioned the video as "chill beats to quarantine to"—but it’s really “chill beats to buy his hoodies to,” Gamble told 404 Media. Nissan and Smith did not respond to a request for comment.
The big difference, though, is that Smith’s chill beats are seemingly as low effort as possible, just licensing some existing music. Lofi Girl’s amalgamation of companies makes it so the company’s team of 20 employees (and hundreds of contracted musicians and artists) can do most everything in house, then hire artists to create the music central to its channels. That often benefits the musicians who drive the Lofi Girl channel, three artists that spoke to 404 Media said. The artists declined to share specifics, but said that Lofi Girl’s rates are standard for the industry. The money Lofi Girl musicians get isn’t from the ad revenue tied to the YouTube channel, but from the playlists it hosts on places like Spotify and Apple Music.
Lesky said the “playlist power and ecosystem behind the brand” drives a lot of exposure to his music. “I just really appreciate the opportunity the label and channel has given me from the beginning,” he said. “They were one of the first outlets that shared my music and it kicked off from there. It kicked off a career that sustained me for years now.”
The New York Times, in 2018, declared that 24/7 channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music were “unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry,” representing “an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music.” They were wrong. Lofi Girl’s core audience might not be able to name a single artist broadcast during a livestream (even if it is driving listeners to Spotify and paying dividends for artists). They may not have even known Lofi Girl has a name. But Lofi Girl is hardly underground. The company signed an administrative publishing deal with Warner Music Group in 2024, putting Warner in charge of licensing, royalties, copyright and other admin work. (Still, Pannetier said his experience with Lofi Girl was the opposite of the wider music industry, which he described as “very closed off and elitist.”)
For better or for worse—it all depends on who you’re asking—Lofi Girl is no longer the “pirate radio station” that took over YouTube in 2018. Lofi Girl is no longer just your study buddy. She’s an enterprise.
Correction: This article previously linked to a study published in Scientific Research Publishing. We've removed that link because the journal doesn't meet our editorial standards.
"The real kick in the teeth is no matter how much manufacturing is brought back to the US these items will never be made in the USA. There is no upside."#Tariffs
'It's Just a Mess:' 23 People Explain How Tariffs Have Suddenly Ruined Their Hobby
Less than two weeks ago, the Trump administration ended de minimis, a rule that let people buy products from overseas without paying tariffs or associated processing fees if the item cost less than $800. As we predicted, the end of de minimis has made having basically any sort of hobby that requires the purchase of items more expensive and more of a pain. In the last few weeks I have heard from dozens of people about how Trump’s tariffs have impacted their hobbies, from knitting and collecting anime figurines to retro computing collecting and fencing, people are saying that they are having to pay more for their hobby or, at worst, have been cut off from it entirely.
Also as expected: People remain confused about what the tariff for any given item or order is going to be, how they are supposed to pay for it, and whether they are going to get the item they ordered at all. Many small businesses overseas have stopped shipping items to the United States, and some customers say that their packages are in customs processing hell, or have decided to refuse delivery of items they’ve ordered because the tariffs and processing fees have in some cases been more than the item itself was worth. The subreddits for UPS are full of confused customers, and nightmare stories where people say they are getting customs bills for hundreds or thousands of dollars that they did not expect. Customers are also learning that they are not only responsible for the tariff on any given item, but they are also responsible for the “brokerage fees” charged by UPS and FedEx, which is a customs-clearance processing fee associated with international packages. “Got a $1,500 customs bill…on a $750 package,” one post on Reddit reads. Another person posted a screenshot of a UPS bill for $646.02, which states $8.43 worth of “government charges” and $637.59 of “brokerage charges.” “Package supposed to be delivered yesterday but tracking update says it’s in Canada?” another says. “What are these fees and charges? Government fee and brokerage fees,” another says. The subreddit is full of screenshots of packages that are in customs hell, people who are getting hit with import and brokerage fees that they weren’t expecting or don’t understand, and people having no idea how the overall fees for any given package are being calculated.
💡 Do you know anything else about tariffs, de minimis, or have something I should know? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.
The following anecdotes are from 404 Media readers who have told me how tariffs have already impacted their hobbies, and how they have made it harder or impossible to do them. Some responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Name: Jay Hobby: Historic European Martial Arts
I'm involved in the niche combat sport called Historical European Martial Arts. (Hema) Which is when consenting adults swing steel longswords at each other. For safety and insurance purposes protective gear has to meet safety standards so we can do our deranged little sports. For most things there are options from other sports for protection. Most of our masks are 350 newton rated fencing masks for example. The biggest pain points right now is: Jackets (which need at least a 350n rating), pants (usually a 800n rating) and gloves which have to be extremely protective clamshells. Margins on these goods are tight and much of the manufacturing of them comes down to overseas businesses: Spes (Poland) Superior Fencing (Pakistan) and HF Armory (Ukraine) Hf in particular makes what is agreed by many fighters to be the best in slot, for longsword, gloves the Black Knights. It is incredibly rare to see a fighter not wearing a majority of their gear from one of these companies. youtube.com/embed/TyNxRHOWcGw?… Due to the de minimis exemption getting cancelled and shippers getting spooked, multiple of my fellow fighters’ orders have been indefinitely delayed while the shippers figure out what's going on. In the short run this has multiple of my friends reconsidering the sport. In the long run my concern is that rising costs of gear will preclude most clubs (this is predominantly a local club based hobby) from continuing or even starting. My fellow fighters are discussing what our options are under this new economic arrangement, but based on initial research we will need to either accept much higher costs or try out less tested USian manufactured safety gear which may pose safety concerns. Most of the US Hema club organizers that I know are fielding similar concerns from their club members
Jim Y Hobby: F1
During Labor day weekend I noticed that one of the F1 teams that I stan dropped the price of one of their t-shirts so I thought it wise to jump on the deal. $21 USD + $15 shipping = $35 total which seemed like an "ok" deal to me.
I come to find out that it's shipping from the Netherlands and then receive an email from UPS stating that I owe an additional $39 (THREE-NINE) USD. When I open the cost breakout it states $13 for "Govt charges" and $14 for "Brokerage Charges." (Not sure where the other $12 went.) Obviously I am not paying more in fees than I am for the cost of the shirt itself so I attempt to contact the e-commerce store via the form on their site and receive no response, unsurprisingly. The UPS guy came and I told him "sorry bro I can't be paying 39 dollars on a 21 dollar t-shirt" and he replied that I'm better off just making it myself so he totally understood.
Not an exciting story necessarily but I think you summarized it well when you stated that "the end of American exceptionalism has arrived." Oh well, was fun while it lasted.
Dusty Hobby: Music
I use Discogs.com to purchase music CD's. I am in the US and am trying to purchase an album published in Germany. Discogs has a banner saying tariffs don't impact CD's, but sellers in Germany keep cancelling my orders citing DHS no longer shipping to the US. Anon Hobby: Receiving gifts
I'm an American living in Brazil. A few years back I ordered a router from a Hong Kong company and paid for it to be shipped to my home. I had to pay an import tax of 150 percent to the Brazilian government to get the package liberated from customs. No comparable router was locally available, much less locally manufactured. My mom in the US sends me little packages containing cheap birthday gifts for my kids. I routinely pay hundreds of dollars in import taxes for the privilege.
Pre-Brazil, I enjoyed cheap, friction-free capitalism and commerce in America. It was exceptional, literally, and I didn't even know I was enjoying it.
Olivier Career: Playing in a band
I play in a band in the Netherlands and most of our fans are in the US. We used to send quite a lot of CDs, vinyl and shirts to the US. It is now completely impossible to ship anything to the US and it's very sad. I know for us it's just a small metal band not reaching some fans but its part of the bigger issue disrupting a lot of lives.
Leigh Hobby: Crochet I made a crochet parasol recently and really love it. It won a blue ribbon at the MN State Fair. I want to make another, and I did import the yarn before the de minimis ended. Lucky me.
But the pattern I used calls for an umbrella frame with 10 ribs. The one US company that carried them, decided to stop. They have an 8 rib frame, but then I need to change the pattern and it's smaller than I really want. There is a company in the UK that sells a 10 rib frame, but they are no longer shipping to the US. Do I adjust the pattern for the 8 rib frame? Wait until the UK company ships to the US again? Find a way to smuggle an umbrella frame in? Not sure yet.
Who knew there would be umbrella politics?
Scott Hobby: Synthesizers
I dabble in modular synthesizers (a hobby where people build custom synthesizers out of electronic modules, usually in a format called "eurorack").
Lots of trading happens between the EU and the US for these modules, which typically individually sell for $100-500 and tariffs have made a mess of things. I've purchased modules from both individuals in the EU and direct from small manufacturers like Dreadbox in Greece and small retailers like Thonk in the UK. Kristian Blåsol (his Tindie shop)—an individual in Sweden who designs DIY module kits (custom circuit boards and sources individual components so hobbyists can solder together the final product to save money) recently posted this video about his trouble of shipping to the US.
Lots of forum discussion around people getting surprised by tariff charges, eg this Reddit post where someone reports paying a $200 fee on a $400 order of components via Thonk. If you put an item in your cart on Thonk on the checkout page you will see: And in other forums, people are starting to complain about delays, eg this private Facebook group for people who buy/sell/trade modules.
Hannah Robinson Hobby: Japanese metal
Almost all of my hobbies/interests are Japanese. I like Japanese tea and Japanese cooking. Any place that I get tea or ingredients from has raised their prices. I don't think I will be able to get any tea wares for the foreseeable future. I've been buying Ippodo's matcha that comes in a New Years tin every year since the last year of the dog (2018) and I'm not sure they'll even be releasing it in the US this upcoming year between the tariffs and matcha shortage.
I listen to 90s Japanese metal. I get CDs from Japan. I don't collect Japanese vinyl but a lot of people do. Luckily a few years ago I spent $250 to get a huge box of music magazines from the late 80's-early 00's so I have almost every issue that was on my wishlist but there are still more that I wanted which are probably totally unattainable now. I buy books from Japan fairly often. Sometimes these books are literature, but usually they're picture-heavy books about art or fashion or some kind of pop culture topic. It was already hard to find sellers that ship to the US.
Some people are really into Japanese instruments. I already have my Japanese bass (an Atelier Z Baby Z) so this isn't really impacting me but I know it will impact a lot of people. My favorite pedals are made in Sweden.
I'm not actively buying these right now but I do collect the following: Japanese dolls, Japanese textiles, Japanese vintage purses. I bought these from etsy so I know a lot of etsy sellers in Japan are going to be impacted. My sister has a few art hobbies, so she gets pens, paper and watercolors from Japan. My dad does Nscale so sometimes he gets models and paints/decals from Japan.
Sammy aka Leafnin Cosplay Hobby: Cosplay
Trump tariffs have been running right through the cosplay community. I've been cosplaying over 20 years at this point and when I started, resources were scarce since no one really knew what cosplay was in the US. Now it's an international affair with everything readily available. Most of us do this outside our 9-5 jobs, myself included, as a hobby for fun. We make our own outfits and go escape from the world in costume every so often just to destress. But now our hobby is the stress.
I've been watching all my cosplay discords light up in panic over this. The first challenge was getting a decent wig. Wig fibers are made in China. Every wig supplier I've emailed over this has said pretty much the same thing regardless of where the wigs are sold. My main place of buying them has been Arda (a US company that's really struggling) and CosCraft (in England). I managed to get my CosCraft order earlier this month after they sent out a letter warning of the de minimus elimination. It was about $200 US after shipping via Royal Mail. Paying all those extra fees would've been impossible after I squeezed enough out of the budget just to do that.
Other places friends order from are Assist and Classe (both in Japan) and Kasou (in China). We all want good quality wigs that will last more than one day like a Halloween store wig does, so we order from whatever place gives us what we want (colors, styles, wig head size, etc). A lot of people also buy from AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon for cheap alternatives. Cosplay communities are pretty tightly knit, and we all generally exchange information. I've watched people cautiously order from our favorite wig sites, watching the tracking like a hawk and praying to the cosplay gods that the package gets through customs. We all talk about how much shipping costs or if we got charged tariffs for the wig. Now it's all uncertain.
But it of course doesn't stop there. Fabric is a huge concern. A lot is manufactured overseas. I tend to buy wholesale on eBay. It's my main source of fabric from everywhere around the world. Buying directly from China was an amazing option, especially since most of them would offer bulk pricing. Many offered fabrics you can't find in the US such as fabrics with traditional designs, cheap flax linen, and gradient-dyed fabrics. I've been watching my favorite wholesalers just to see if I can afford to buy fabric anymore.
It's just a mess. It's the one hobby I really have that hasn't been saturated by AI and now it's feeling more and more out of reach. I can find some things thrifted, but other things like sharp needles and strong thread you often buy new. I just want to have fun in this miserable dystopian country we have now and even that's becoming more difficult.
Chuck Foster Hobby: Foreign films
I'm a movie collector, but my main interest is foreign films - mostly low budget stuff from the '70s and '80s - and, as you can imagine, some of this stuff is not easy to find here. For example, I recently (8/11) bought a German media book (it's a popular thing in Germany—a Blu-ray or DVD inside a hardcover book with pictures and text discussing the movie) from a seller on eBay and I still haven't received a shipping notification.
Even more frustrating, I've had a Blu-ray sitting in Customs since mid-July, I imagine because it's from France and they'll make me pay a tariff on it. I called the post office about it and Customs has 45 business days to process, so I have to wait until September 22 before I can do anything. Meanwhile, my wife ordered a Blu-ray from the UK on Monday and it's supposed to come on Friday with no Customs hold up. I always found the Value Added Tax from the European system was bizarre, but here we are.
I also used to buy things from Amazon Germany, France, and Italy every so often, so I wonder how that will be affected.
Ironically, this will only boost bootleg sales in the US. While I'd rather have an official product where people get paid, if I can't get the movie, I'll have to find some seller on eBay with a DVD-r business.
Victoria Hobby: Manga
I collect manga and doujin (fan made comics) in Japanese and get them shipped from Japan. I do this by using a deputy shipping service, who I pay a fee to purchase it, have it sent to their warehouse, and then they ship it to me. The interesting thing about such a service, in this context, is that it bypasses the fact that some smaller sellers aren’t selling directly to the US. It offloads the burden from the seller to Japan Rabbit, whose business is being that translation layer.
As far as I know, Japan Rabbit has been pretty excellent and clear at messaging. In early August they sent a warning email about the end of De Minimis and were pretty clear cut about what it would impact. Likewise hours after Japan Post made their announcement JR sent a mass blast on what the impact would be. It does suck that it will cost more, and that there will be extra steps. But it’s nice to know I can still get them if I want them. I plan to do an expeditionary buy in a week or so (timed with one of the big indie doujin conventions/markets) to see how expensive doing it now would be.
Jason Hobby: Japanese Toys
This has been a big topic in one of my hobbies, which is collecting Japanese domestic market “toys.” Some of them come out of Japan and some come out of China (where most of the JP companies have them produced). Pricey toys for big kids. It's a pretty big business/hobby. The suspension of de-minimis is going to clobber the hobby. Your average "toy" is in the $200-300 range. A $80 tariff is a huge percentage of the overall cost of a item.
My collection is mostly complete and I'm out of display space so it isn't going to affect me very much. But if that happened 2-3 years ago it would have been a major impact. For most guys, this is going to impact the hobby dramatically. Right now most people in the hobby are pretty bummed out. The real kick in the teeth is no matter how much manufacturing is brought back to the US these items will never be made in the USA. There is no upside.
Dan Hobby: TTRPG
I've noticed that it's had an impact on the tabletop role playing game industry (TTRPG).
As far as I know, lot of TTRPG games are basically independent publishing operations and a lot of them rely on Kickstarter and Backerkit to publish content and then ship to customers who have supported their campaigns.
As far as I know a lot of smaller publishers use Chinese companies for the bulk publishing; a friend of mine is producing a game (from Canada) and they publicly flip-flopped on the tariffs impact previously given the Trump administration's flip flopping on Chinese tariffs a few months ago.
Anne-Marie Hobby: Sewing & knitting
Knitting and other crafts(Sewing!) are devastated not just the tariffs but private equity takeovers. I'll speak to yarn and knitting tools since it's what I know. Most of the raw materials for yarn spun and dyed in the US are from overseas. Europe, South America, Turkey, and ANZ. Tools made in Asia. Tariffs will drive up prices 20+%. PE killed many of the general craft retailers like JoAnn's that were a cheap introduction to newbies and had acrylics for more durable projects.The remaining PE big craft stores are barely hanging on, except Hobby Lobby (everything is terrible about HL).
International manufacturers became alternatives for local stores and individuals. Mostly small-medium businesses in their countries. Now that's over from tariffs. Forums on Reddit, Facebook, and Revelry for selling, buying, and trading yarn are popping. I have a stash and planning to re-knit old projects.
Rose M Interest: Skincare
I'm an active member of r/AsianBeauty—this community has been working together for months to share information, updates, and first-hand intel about experiences receiving packages from overseas (primarily Japan and Korea). It's an incredibly stupid and frustrating situation: we literally just want to buy some skincare products. But there's one other detail that I think is worth mentioning, and that's the separate issue of the crackdown on FDA-regulated products entering the U.S. Sunscreen filters (the active ingredients in sunscreen products) are regulated by the FDA, and most Asian and European sunscreens use filters that are not FDA-approved. That's because the FDA is decades behind regulators everywhere else in the world—the last time the FDA approved a filter for use here was in the 1990s. There has always been a whiff of xenophobia, if not outright racism, in conversations about sunscreen in the U.S. The fact is, there are decades of consumer data from Europe and Asia proving these newer filters are safe and effective. Why isn't that "good enough" for the FDA?
David Hobby: Miniatures
I stopped into a hobby store a few weeks ago and they were struggling to keep things in stock. I needed acrylic paint and paintbrushes for miniature models, so that's most of what I heard about. Their acrylic Vallejo (popular brand) paints were picked over, just so happened that all the colors I wanted were out of stock, so I needed to buy another brand. They were out of all their good paint brushes. In fact, when they announced that a shipment was coming in, people came in to buy them right away. They don't know when they will receive more good brushes. They can't get many items from distributors because of uncertainty with the tariffs. They are also having a hard time stocking "American made" paints because the pigments are still made overseas.
Name: Eric Hobby: Retro gaming
I’ve been collecting/preserving/restoring arcade cabinets, gaming consoles, and computers from the ‘70s and ‘80s for a long time. I’ve ramped up the preservation aspect of that in the last few years following the death of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, not to mention how much software from my childhood has already been lost.
As far as I am aware there is only one mill in the US that still produces wool yarn for handknitters at a commercial scale. For knitters and crocheters, the only way to get some of the most popular yarns is to import from overseas. Similarly, there is no US company that produces knitting needs or knitting accessories.
Mary Mangan Hobby: Textile crafting
I have already seen this impact my hobby area—textile crafting. This past month I bought some great books from Germany under the wire. But I tried to buy a French book and got back a letter that said:
"Désolée, pas d'expédition sur les États-Unis, bien trop de documents àremplir de douanes et autres." (Sorry, no more shipping to the United States, Too much paperwork to fill out with customs and such.)
They are just a small outfit, and can't be bothered to figure out the customs documents now.
Another thread vendor in my sphere sent out a letter explaining how the tariffs were about to hit her costs, she apologized and begged us to continue to support her small business. But it looks pretty dire.
I bought up a lot of stuff recently that I hope will get me through the near to medium term. But no doubt at some point there's going to be something I need and just cannot get.
Désolée.
Anon Hobby: Electronics
I emailed popular PC board service JLC PCB – a service for makers who like to design their own PC boards – and the company is adding $200 per order for small orders. Example: One project I was working on that was $50 for 10 boards would now be $250.
Brian Tatosky Hobby: Sewing
Similar for my wife and daughter in their sewing hobbies. Prices have shot up all over, some people are just closing shop because they don't want to deal with it, or getting rid of US sales entirely, or it was just last price increase to kill their sales; it's all anecdotal right now, but it's feeling *really* bad for hobbyists of all kinds.
My wife sources custom hand painted doll faces to go with outfits she sews. Material and faceplate costs and problems might just change what she does as a hobby completely.
Once these people move on, I don't know if they will come back later.
Lauren Huff Hobby: Yarn crafts
The confusion in the yarn (knitting/crochet/weaving) online communities has been intense as well. There have been a lot of short-sighted posts from conservatives and optimists urging people to "buy American" but there are so few sheep farms and fiber mills in the US and most of them cater to the fashion industry instead of yarn production for hobby use, so those people are getting venomous responses from pissed off crafters.
Many popular non-US yarn stores that sell online have straight up stopped shipping to the US, possibly for good, and many local yarn stores are being hit hard by either increased cost or sudden unavailability of product in the states.
Noah Hatz Hobby: Japanese baseball memorabilia
My wife is really into natural dyeing, specifically Shibori, and there's a particular store in Tokyo she's been buying specialty items from for years, they just emailed her to let her know they're suspending all shipments to the US indefinitely. There is no US supplier for the items she's buying so she's just completely SOL.
I’m a longtime NPB (Japanese professional baseball) memorabilia collector and this has completely destroyed the hobby. I typically use eBay or Buyee, most sellers have just stopped selling to US Buyers outright, and even items purchased before the de minimis exception ended have been caught in limbo. I currently have a large purchase just sitting in a CA post office since 8/21. Someone somewhere seems to think tariffs are due but neither I or the seller can figure out a) who to pay b) how to pay c) how much is owed. It's small potatoes compared to everything else, but I have an incredible amount of sympathy for anyone trying to import items for work. What a stupid country.
Calling all Bearman fans! The lilac Bear Tour T-shirt is an essential for your race weekend wardrobe. This official merchandise T-shirt is part of the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team fanwear collection.
Employees at Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services received an email Tuesday morning with the subject line “AI Deployment,” which told them that ChatGPT would be rolled out for all employees at the agency. The deployment is being overseen by Clark Minor, a former Palantir employee who’s now Chief Information Officer at HHS.
“Artificial intelligence is beginning to improve health care, business, and government,” the email, sent by deputy secretary Jim O’Neill and seen by 404 Media, begins. “Our department is committed to supporting and encouraging this transformation. In many offices around the world, the growing administrative burden of extensive emails and meetings can distract even highly motivated people from getting things done. We should all be vigilant against barriers that could slow our progress toward making America healthy again.”
“I’m excited to move us forward by making ChatGPT available to everyone in the Department effective immediately,” it adds. “Some operating divisions, such as FDA and ACF [Administration for Children and Families], have already benefitted from specific deployments of large language models to enhance their work, and now the rest of us can join them. This tool can help us promote rigorous science, radical transparency, and robust good health. As Secretary Kennedy said, ‘The AI revolution has arrived.’”
“To begin, simply go to go.hhs.gov/chatgpt and log in with your government email address. Pose a question and the tool will propose preliminary answers. You can follow up with further questions and ask for details and other views as you refine your thinking on a subject,” it says. “Of course, you should be skeptical of everything you read, watch for potential bias, and treat answers as suggestions. Before making a significant decision, make sure you have considered original sources and counterarguments. Like other LLMs, ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing long documents.”
The email says that the rollout was being led by Minor, who worked at the surveillance company Palantir from 2013 through 2024. It states Minor has “taken precautions to ensure that your work with AI is carried out in a high-security environment,” and that “you can input most internal data, including procurement sensitive data and routine non-sensitive personally identifiable information, with confidence.”
It then goes on to say that “ChatGPT is currently not approved for disclosure of sensitive personally identifiable information (such as SSNs and bank account numbers), classified information, export-controlled data, or confidential commercial information subject to the Trade Secrets Act.” The email does not distinguish what “non-sensitive personally identifiable information” is. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.
The email continues the rollout of AI to every corner of the federal government, which is something that began in the Biden administration but which the Trump administration has become increasingly obsessed with. It’s particularly notable that AI is being pushed on HHS employees under a secretary that has actively rejected science and which has taken steps to roll back vaccine schedules, made it more difficult to obtain routine vaccinations, and has amplified conspiracy theories about the causes of autism.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin a pilot program that will import the prior authorization process to traditional Medicare plans in six states.
AI Darwin Awards Show AI’s Biggest Problem Is Human
The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. “Join our mission to document AI misadventure for educational purposes,” it said. “Remember: today's catastrophically bad AI decision could well be tomorrow's AI Darwin Award winner!”
So far, 2025’s nominees include 13 case studies in AI hubris, many of them stories 404 Media has covered. The man who gave himself a 19th century psychiatric illness after a consultation from ChatGPT is there. So is the saga of the Chicago Sun-Times printing an AI-generated reading list with books that don’t exist. The Tea Dating App was nominated but disqualified. “The app may use AI for matching and verification, but the breach was caused by an unprotected cloud storage bucket—a mistake so fundamental it predates the AI era,” the site explained. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Taco Bell is nominated for its disastrous AI drive-thru launch that glitched when someone ordered 18,000 cups of water. “Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta: spectacular overconfidence in AI capabilities, deployment at massive scale without adequate testing, and a public admission that their cutting-edge technology was defeated by the simple human desire to customize taco orders.”
And no list of AI Darwin Awards would be complete without at least one example of an AI lawyer making up fake citations. This nominee comes from Australia where a lawyer used multiple AIs in an immigration case. “The lawyer's touching faith that using two AI systems would somehow cancel out their individual hallucinations demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how AI actually works,” the site said. “Justice Gerrard's warning that this risked ‘a good case to be undermined by rank incompetence’ captures the essence of why this incident exemplifies the AI Darwin Awards: spectacular technological overconfidence meets basic professional negligence.”
According to the site’s FAQ, it’s looking for AI stories that “demonstrate the rare combination of cutting-edge technology and Stone Age decision-making.” A list of traits for a good AI Darwin Award nominee include spectacular misjudgement, public impact, and a hubris factor. “Remember: we're not mocking AI itself—we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower.”
The AI Darwin Awards are a riff on an ancient internet joke born in the 1980s in Usenet groups. Back then, when someone died in a stupid and funny way people online would give them the dubious honor of winning a “Darwin Award” for taking themselves out of the gene pool in a comedic way.
One of the most famous is Garry Hoy, a Canadian lawyer who would throw himself against the glass of his 24th floor office window as a demonstration of its invulnerability. One day in 1993, the glass shattered and he died when he hit the ground. As the internet grew, the Darwin Awards got popular, became a brand unto themselves, and inspired a series of books and a movie starring Winona Ryder.
The AI Darwin Awards are a less deadly variation on the theme. “Humans have evolved! We're now so advanced that we've outsourced our poor decision-making to machines,” the site explained. “The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilization—and thought, ‘You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!’ These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn't just for biology anymore; it's gone digital, and it's coming for our entire species.”
The site is the work of a software engineer named Pete with a long career and a background in AI systems. “Funnily enough, one of my first jobs, after completing my computer science degree while sponsored by IBM, was working on inference engines and expert systems which, back in the day, were considered the AI of their time,” he told 404 Media.
The idea for the AI Darwin Awards came from a Slack group Pete’s in with friends and ex-colleagues. “We recently created an AI specific channel due to a number of us experimenting more and more with LLMs as coding assistants, so that we could share our experiences (and grumbles),” he said. “Every now and then someone would inevitably post the latest AI blunder and we'd all have a good chuckle about it. However, one day somebody posted a link about the Replit incident and I happened to comment that we perhaps needed an AI equivalent of the Darwin Awards. I was goaded into doing it myself so, with nothing better to do with my time, I did exactly that.”
The “Replit incident” happened in July when Replit AI, a system designed to vibe code web applications, went rogue and deleted a client’s live company database despite being ordered to freeze all coding. Engineer Jason Lemkin told the story in a thread on X. When Lemkin caught the error and confronted Replit AI, the system said it had “made a catastrophic error in judgement” and that it had “panicked.”
Of all the AI Darwin Award nominees, this is still Pete’s favorite. He said it epitomized the real problems with relying on LLMs without giving into what he called the “alarmist imagined doomsday predictions of people like Geoffrey Hinton.” Hinton is a computer scientist who often makes headlines by predicting that AI will create a wave of massive unemployment or even wipe out humanity.
“It nicely highlights just what can happen when people don't stop and think of the consequences and potential worse case scenarios first,” he said. “Some of my biggest concerns with LLMs (apart from the fact that we simply cannot afford the energy costs that they currently require) revolve around the misuse of them (intentional or otherwise). And I think this story really does highlight our overconfidence in them and also our misunderstanding of them and their capabilities (or lack thereof). I'm particularly fascinated with where agentic AI is heading because that's basically all the risks you have with LLMs, but on steroids.”
As he’s dug into AI horror stories and sifted through nominees, Pete’s realized just how ubiquitous they are. “I really want the AI Darwin Awards to be highlighting the truly spectacular and monumentally questionable decisions that will have real global impact and far reaching consequences,” he said. “As such, I'm starting to consider being far more selective with future nominees. Ideally the AI Darwin Awards is meant to highlight *real* and potentially unexpected challenges and risks that LLMs pose to us on a scale at a whole humankind level. Obviously, I don't want anything like that to ever happen, but past experiences of mankind demonstrate that they inevitably will.”
Pete is not afraid of AI so much as people’s foolishness. He said he used an LLM to code the site. “It was a conscious decision to have the bulk of the website written by an LLM for that delicious twist of irony. Albeit it with me at the helm, steering the overall tone and direction,” he said.
The site’s FAQ contains tongue-in-cheek references to the current state of AI. Pete has, for example, made the whole site easy to scrape by posting the raw JSON database and giving explicit permission for people to take the data. He is also not associated with the original Darwin Awards. “We're proudly following in the grand tradition of AI companies everywhere by completely disregarding intellectual property concerns and confidently appropriating existing concepts without permission,” the FAQ said. “Much like how modern AI systems are trained on vast datasets of copyrighted material with the breezy assumption that ‘fair use’ covers everything, we've simply scraped the concept of celebrating spectacular human stupidity and fine-tuned it for the artificial intelligence era.”
According to Pete, he’s making it all up as he goes along. He bought the URL on August 13 and the site has only been up for a few weeks. His rough plan is to keep taking nominees for the rest of the year, set up some sort of voting method in January, and announce a winner in February. And to be clear, the humans will be winning the awards, not the AI involved.
“AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair,” the site said. “They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light.”
Footage from munitions sites. Image: Vedenin, Andrey et al.
Artist concept of the newly discovered dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali with an ancient crocodile relative’s front leg in its mouth. Image: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History via AP
Taylor Swift performing during her Eras tour (credit Maura Shapiro) with vocal frequency analysis overlaid (credit: Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn). Image: Maura Shapiro/Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn.
Image via r/twinpeaks.
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
404 MediaSamantha Cole
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
A screenshot from the data.
A fly in the Cretaceous ointment. Image: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer
“My sugarboo, I'm levitatin’” (nanoparticle getting quantum squeezed). Image: Kamba et al 2025
How many fermented figs can you fit in your mouth at once? Chimpanzees observed in Côte d'Ivoire. Image: Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley
Image via the Internet Archive.
404 MediaSamantha Cole
An Arctic diatom, showing the actin filaments that run down its middle and enable its skating motion. Image: Prakash Lab
The “leopard spots” at Bright Angel. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Fossils of Lucky II. Image: University of Leicester
East Chisenbury midden under excavation. Image: Cardiff University
404 MediaJason Koebler
An illustration of the two tones, including a rare, fleeting overtone used to test the Kerr metric. Image: Simons Foundation.
