Normally, it’s bad news to be next to an exploding star. But ancient supernovae may have aided the formation of our home world—and perhaps Earthlike planets elsewhere.#TheAbstract
Earth-Like Planets Are More Common Than We Thought, Study Says
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability.First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the duality of posters and lurkers, and an important update on toadlets.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Sink into a warm cosmic-ray bath
Earth was cosmically conceived in part by a massive shockwave from a nearby supernova, which seeded our home world and neighboring rocky planets with telltale radioactive signatures, according to a new study.
The solar system’s rocky planets contain short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), which are ancient elements that were likely barfed out from exploding stars. For this reason, scientists have long suspected that stars must’ve detonated next to the gassy disk that gave rise to the solar system. The heat generated from these radioactive elements helped the building blocks of the rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—melt together so they could become whole worlds, which means we owe our existence to these ancient supernovas.
Now, a team has developed a new model to explain how the primordial pyrotechnics didn’t just blow up the nascent solar system. The results suggest that rocky Earth-like worlds may be common in the universe, with potential implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.
“A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are,” said researchers led by Ryo Sawada of the University of Tokyo. “The formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of SLRs, particularly aluminum-26, likely delivered from nearby supernovae.”
“However, the supernova injection scenario faces an unresolved problem in that existing supernova models could not reproduce both the relative and absolute abundances of SLRs without disrupting the protosolar disk,” an event that “would likely prevent the Solar System formation altogether,” the team added.
In other words, it’s hard to explain how the solar system got its high abundance of SLRs without killing it in the cradle. Sawada and his colleagues propose a solution that involves at least one star exploding about three light years of the disk, sparking a shockwave that created a cosmic-ray “bath.”
Schematic picture of the system assumed in this study. Image: Sawada et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadx7892
In this “immersion mechanism,” energetic cosmic rays trapped in the bath triggered SLR-producing reactions directly within the disk. This contrasts with the hypothesis that the SLRs were largely injected and then mixed up in the disk through some unknown process. This new solution can account both for the high abundance of certain SLRs, like aluminum-26, and the fact that the solar system was not destroyed, as evidenced by its apparent continued existence.“Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the
Galaxy than previously thought,” the team said, noting that many disks are rocked by similar supernova-shockwaves. “This challenges previous interpretations that classified the Solar System as an outlier with a particularly high [aluminum-26] abundance.”
In addition to offering a new hypothesis for an old astronomical problem, the study gets bonus points for its extremely poetic title: “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” If you say this enchanted phrase three times, somewhere an Earth-like world will be born.
In other news…
The biometrics of a Baltic boatsman
Stars aren’t the only things leaving their dirty fingerprints in unexpected places this week. Archeologists working on the mysterious Hjortspring boat, a 2,400-year-old Scandinavian vessel, discovered a tantalizing partial human fingerprint in its caulking, providing “a direct link to the ancient seafarers who used this boat,” according to the study.
Photo of caulking fragment showing fingerprint on the left and high-resolution x-ray tomography scan of fingerprint region on the right. Image: Photography by Erik Johansson, 3D model by Sahel Ganji
The ridges of the fingerprint “fall within average distributions for both adult male and females as well as for juvenile adults, making it difficult to say much about the individual who produced the print,” said researchers led by Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University. “The most likely interpretation, however, is that it was made during repairs by one of the crew members on the boat itself, providing a direct link to the seafarers of the ancient vessel.”Regardless of this person’s identity, their voyage didn’t end well. Researchers think the crew of the Hjortspring boat probably sailed from the eastern Baltic Sea to attack the Danish island of Als, where they were defeated. “The victors [deposited] the weapons of their vanquished foes together with one of their boats into the bog,” where they remained for millennia until they were rediscovered in the 1880s, the team said.
It’s a timeless reminder for would-be invaders: Don’t get caulky.
Long-time lurker, first-time poster
At last, scientists have investigated the most elusive online demographic: the humble lurker. A team recruited 520 Redditors in the U.S. to participate in small subreddits focused on a variety of political topics during the summer of 2024. The aim was to probe why some people became prolific “power-users” that post with voluminous confidence, while others remained wallflowers.
“Online political discussions are often dominated by a small group of active users, while most remain silent,” said researchers led by Lisa Oswalt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “This visibility gap can distort perceptions of public opinion and fuel polarization.”
The team found that “lurking (posting nothing) was most common among users who perceived discussions as toxic, disrespectful, or unconstructive.” Lurkers were offered small payments to post in the experiment, which succeeded in motivating some to contribute to discussions. As a result, the study concluded that “future interventions may be able to make online political discussions more representative by offering more positive social rewards for lurkers to post.”
At last, an opportunity to unionize the lurkers of the world. Solidarity (in silence) forever.
It’s the great pumpkin toadlet, Charlie Brown
We will close, as we have before, with an impossibly cute toadlet. Scientists have discovered this new species of “pumpkin toadlet” in the “cloud forests” of Brazil, a sentence so twee that it’s practically its own fairy tale. The tiny toad Brachycephalus lulai, pictured below on a pencil tip, belongs to a family of “flea toads” that are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth.
Basically it is very smol: Brachycephalus lulai is a tiny pumpkin toadlet measuring less than 14 mm in length. Photo: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro. Image credit 1: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
“Our team sought to better document the individual variation of all Brachycephalus species in southern Brazil, looking for them in the field over the past seven years,” said researchers led by Marcos R. Bornschein of São Paulo State University. “As a result of this work, we discovered and herein described a population collected on the eastern slope of Serra do Quiriri as a new species.”The team also reported that the toads are actively colonizing newly formed cloud forests, which are high-altitude woods shrouded in mist. The researchers propose making these unique habitats into refuges for the adorable anurans.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
Jesus Gutiérrez told immigration agents he was a U.S. citizen. Only after they scanned his face, did the agents let him go.#ICE #Privacy
How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE's Facial Recognition Tech
This article is a partnership between Reveal and 404 Media.Jesus Gutiérrez, 23, was walking home one morning from a Chicago gym when he noticed a gray Cadillac SUV with no license plates. He kept walking, shrugging it off. Then the car pulled over and two men got out.
The federal immigration officials told him not to run. They then peppered Gutiérrez with questions: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Do you have your ID on you?
Gutiérrez is a U.S. citizen. He told the officials this. He didn’t have any identification on him, but, panicking, he tried to find a copy on his phone. The agents put him into the car, where another two agents were waiting, and handcuffed him. Just sit there and be quiet, they said.
Without Gutiérrez’s ID, the agents resorted to another approach. They took a photo of his face. A short while later, the agents got their answer: “Oh yeah, he’s right. He’s saying the right thing. He does got papers,” Gutiérrez recalled the agents saying.
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Has this happened to you or someone you know? Do you have any videos of ICE or CBP scanning people's faces? Do you work for either agency? 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.Gutiérrez’s experience, which he recounted to Reveal, is one snapshot of something that federal authorities have acknowledged to 404 Media that they are doing across the country: scanning people’s faces with a facial recognition app that brings up their name, date of birth, “alien number” if they’re an immigrant, and whether they have an order of deportation. 404 Media previously obtained internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) emails revealing the agency’s facial recognition app, called Mobile Fortify, and catalogued social media videos showing agents scanning people’s faces to verify their citizenship.
Now, Reveal has spoken to a person who appears to have had that technology used against them. Gutiérrez sent Reveal a copy of his passport to verify his citizenship.
“You just grabbing, like, random people, dude,” Gutiérrez said he told the agents after they scanned his face. The officials eventually dropped off Gutiérrez after driving for around an hour. For several days, he didn’t go anywhere, not even to the gym. Gutiérrez told his father at the time that he “got kidnapped.”
“This is a flagrant violation of rights and incompatible with a free society,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Immigration agents have no business scanning our faces with this glitchy, privacy-destroying technology—especially after often stopping people based on nothing more than the color of their skin or the neighborhood they live in.”
A screenshot of an internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media. Available here.
Mobile Fortify is available to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials on their work-issued phones. After an agent scans someone’s face, the app queries an unprecedented collection of U.S. government databases, including one run by the FBI and another that checks for outstanding state warrants, according to user manuals seen by 404 Media. The app runs the person’s face against a database of 200 million images, according to internal ICE material 404 Media viewed.“The photograph shown [in the app’s results] is the photograph that was taken during the individual’s most recent encounter with CBP, however the matching will be against all pictures CBP may maintain on the individual,” said an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document 404 Media obtained. The app turns the system usually used for verifying travelers at the border inward against people on U.S. streets.
The need for Mobile Fortify, according to that internal document, is for immigration authorities to identify people who can be removed from the country. But it acknowledges that it may be used against U.S. citizens, like in Gutiérrez’s case.
“It is conceivable that a photo taken by an agent using the Mobile Fortify mobile application could be that of someone other than an alien, including U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents,” the document reads.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, previously told 404 Media that ICE will prioritize the results of the app over birth certificates. “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,” he said. “ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
404 Media has found other instances in which ICE and CBP agents have used a facial recognition app to verify someone’s identity and citizenship. In one that appeared to take place in Chicago, a Border Patrol officer stopped two young men on bicycles before asking his colleague, “Can you do facial?” The other official then scanned one of the boy’s faces, according to a video posted on social media. In another, a group of ICE officers surrounded a man driving a car. He said he was an American citizen. “Alright, we just got to verify that,” one of them said. A second then pointed their phone’s camera at the man and asked him to remove his hat. “If you could take your hat off, it would be a lot quicker,” the officer said. “I’m going to run your information.”
In Gutiérrez’s case, there is little indication that he was stopped for any reason beyond the color of his skin. He is of Mexican descent, he said. Stops of people based on their race, use of Spanish, or location (such as a car wash or bus stop) have become known among critics as “Kavanaugh stops,” after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh justified the method in a September opinion.
ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship
Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”404 MediaJoseph Cox
“The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English,” the opinion says. (Gutiérrez speaks Spanish but conducted his interview with Reveal in English.) “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.”The ACLU’s Wessler added: “In the United States, we should be free to go about our business without government agents scanning our faces, accessing our personal information, saving our photos for years, and putting us at risk of misidentifications and wrongful detentions. ICE and CBP’s use of Mobile Fortify on the streets of America should end immediately.”
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, “DHS is not going to confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods.” CBP said that the agency built the app to support ICE operations and that it has been used by ICE around the country.
A CBP spokesperson added in a statement, “Mobile Fortify is a law enforcement app developed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for ICE agents and officers. It helps field personnel gather information during immigration inspections, but agents must consider all circumstances before deciding on someone's immigration status. CBP personnel working with ICE teams can access the app after completing required training. Further details cannot be shared due to law enforcement sensitivities.”
Gutiérrez said that at the end of his encounter, while he was still in the car, the agents were laughing.
Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images
404 Media has seen user manuals for Mobile Fortify, ICE’s new facial recognition app which allows officers to instantly look up DHS, State Department, and state law enforcement databases by just pointing a phone at someone’s face.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
This week, we discuss conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: Is This Headline 'Clickbait'?
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 conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more.EMANUEL: I made the terrible mistake of looking at some Hacker News comments this week for my story about a developer whose Google accounts were banned after he uploaded training data to Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the training data contained CSAM.
As we’ve explained in previous stories, CSAM is a subject we dread covering not only because it’s one of the most awful things one could think about, but because it’s extremely difficult and legally risky. For understandable reasons, the laws around viewing, let alone possessing CSAM, are strict and punishing, which makes verification for reporting reasons challenging. For similar reasons, it’s something we need to write about very carefully, making sure we don’t wrongfully associate or whitewash someone when it comes to such horrible behavior.
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‘Architects of AI’ Wins Time Person of the Year, Sends Gambling Markets Into a Meltdown#TimePersonoftheYear
‘Architects of AI’ Wins Time Person of the Year, Sends Gambling Markets Into a Meltdown
The degenerate gamblers of Polymarket and Kalshi who bet that “AI” would win the Time Person of the Year are upset because the magazine has named the “Architects of AI” the person of the year. The people who make AI tools and AI infrastructure are, notably, not “AI” themselves, and thus both Kalshi and Polymarket have decided that people who bet “AI” do not win the bet. On Polymarket alone, people spent more than $6 million betting on AI gracing the cover of Time.As writer Parker Molloy pointed out, people who bet on AI are pissed. “ITS THE ARCHITECTS OF AI THISNIS [sic] LITERALLY THE BET FUCK KALSHI,” one Kalshi better said.
“This pretty clearly should’ve resolved to yes. If you bought AI, reach out to Kalshi support because ‘AI’ is literally on the cover and in the title ‘Architects of AI.’ They’re not going to change anything unless they hear from people,” said another.
“ThE aRcHiTeCtS oF AI fuck you pay me,” said a third.
“Another misleading bet by Kalshi,” said another gambler. “Polymarket had fair rules and Kalshi did not. They need to fix this.”
But bag holders on Polymarket are also pissed. “This is a scam. It should be resolved to a cancellation and a full refund to everyone,” said a gambler who’d put money down on Jensen Huang and lost. Notably, on Kalshi, anyone who bet on any of the “Architects of AI,” won the bet (meaning Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, and Demis Hassabis), while anyone who bet their products—“ChatGPT” and “OpenAI” did not win. On Polymarket, the rules were even more strict, i.e. people who bet “Jensen Huang” lost but people who bet “Other” won.
“FUCK YOU FUCKING FUCK Shayne Coplan [CEO of Polymarket],” said someone who lost about $50 betting on AI to make the cover.
Polymarket made its reasoning clear in a note of “additional context” on the market.
“This market is about the person/thing named as TIME's Person of the Year for 2025, not what is depicted on the cover. Per the rules, “If the Person of the Year is ‘Donald Trump and the MAGA movement,’ this would qualify to resolve this market to ‘Trump.’ However if the Person of the Year is ‘The MAGA movement,’ this would not qualify to resolve this market to ‘Trump’ regardless of whether Trump is depicted on the cover,” it said.
“Accordingly, a Time cover which lists ‘Architects of AI’ as the person of the year will not qualify for ‘AI’ even if the letters ‘AI’ are depicted on the cover, as AI itself is not specifically named.”
It should be noted how incredibly stupid all of this is, which is perhaps appropriate for the year 2025, in which most of the economy consists of reckless gambling on AI. People spent more than $55 million betting on the Time Person of the Year on Polymarket, and more than $19 million betting on the Time Person of the Year on Kalshi. It also presents one of the many downsides of spending money to bet on random things that happen in the world. One of the most common and dumbest things that people continue to do to this day despite much urging otherwise is anthropomorphize AI, which is distinctly not a person and is not sentient.
Time almost always actually picks a “person” for its Person of the Year cover, but it does sometimes get conceptual with it, at times selecting groups of people (“The Silence Breakers” of the #MeToo movement, the “Whistleblowers,” the “Good Samaritans,” “You,” and the “Ebola Fighters,” for example). In 1982 it selected “The Computer” as its “Machine of the Year,” and in 1988 it selected “The Endangered Earth” as “Planet of the Year.”
Polymarket’s users have been upset several times over the resolution of bets in the past few weeks and their concerns highlight how easy it is to manipulate the system. In November, an unauthorized edit of a live map of the Ukraine War allowed gamblers to cash in on a battle that hadn’t happened. Earlier this month, a trader made $1 million in 24 hours betting on the results of Google’s 2025 Year In Search Rankings and other users accused him of having inside knowledge of the process. Over the summer, Polymarket fought a war over whether or not President Zelenskyy had worn a suit. Surely all of this will continue to go well and be totally normal moving forward, especially as these prediction markets begin to integrate themselves with places such as CNN.
Kalshi to become CNN’s official prediction market partner
Kalshi’s data will serve as a powerful complement to CNN’s reporting.Kalshi
With OpenAI investment, Disney will officially begin putting AI slop into its flagship streaming product.#AIPorn #OpenAI #Disney
Disney Invests $1 Billion in the AI Slopification of Its Brand
The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.So of course Disney has announced it signed a deal with OpenAI today that will soon allow fans to make their own officially licensed Disney slop using Sora 2. The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.
According to a press release, the deal is a 3 year licensing agreement that will allow the AI company’s short form video platform Sora to generate slop videos using characters like Mickey Mouse and Iron Man. As part of the agreement, Disney is investing $1 billion of equity into OpenAI, said it will become a major customer of the company, and promised that fan and corporate AI-generated content would soon come to Disney+, meaning that Disney will officially begin putting AI slop into its flagship streaming product.
The deal extends to ChatGPT as well and, starting in early 2026, users will be able to crank out officially approved Disney slop on multiple platforms. When Sora 2 launched in October, it had little to no content moderation or copyright guidelines and videos of famous franchise characters doing horrible things flooded the platform. Pikachu stole diapers from a CVS, Rick and Morty pushed crypto currencies, and Disney characters shouted slurs in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
It is worth mentioning that, although Disney has traditionally been extremely protective of its intellectual property, the company’s princesses have become one of the most common fictional subjects of AI porn on the internet; 404 Media has found at least three different large subreddits dedicated to making AI porn of characters like Elsa, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Tinkerbell. In this case, Disney is fundamentally throwing its clout behind a technology that has thus far most commonly been used to make porn of its iconic characters.
After the hype of the launch, OpenAI added an “opt-in” policy to Sora that was meant to prevent users from violating the rights of copyright holders. It’s trivial to break this policy however, and circumvent the guardrails preventing a user from making a lewd Mickey Mouse cartoon or episode of The Simpsons. The original sin of Sora and other AI systems is that the training data is full of copyrighted material and the models cannot be retrained without great cost, if at all.
If you can’t beat the slop, become the slop.
“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, said in the press release about the agreement.
The press release explained that Sora users will soon have “official” access to 200 characters in the Disney stable, including Loki, Thanos, Darth Vader, and Minnie Mouse. In exchange, Disney will begin to use OpenAI’s APIs to “build new products” and it will deploy “ChatGPT for its employees.”
I’m imagining a future where AI-generated fan trailers of famous characters standing next to each other in banal liminal spaces is the norm. People have used Sora 2 to generate some truly horrifying videos, but the guardrails have become more aggressive. As Disney enters the picture, I imagine the platform will become even more anodyne. Persistent people will slip through and generate videos of Goofy and Iron Man sucking and fucking, sure, but the vast majority of what’s coming will be safe corporate gruel that resembles a Marvel movie.
OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
Dozens of government websites have fallen victim to a PDF-based SEO scam, while others have been hijacked to sell sex toys.#AI
Porn Is Being Injected Into Government Websites Via Malicious PDFs
Dozens of government and university websites belonging to cities, towns, and public agencies across the country are hosting PDFs promoting AI porn apps, porn sites, and cryptocurrency scams; dozens more have been hit with a website redirection attacks which lead to animal vagina sex toy ecommerce pages, penis enlargement treatments, automatically-downloading Windows program files, and porn.“Sex xxx video sexy Xvideo bf porn XXX xnxx Sex XXX porn XXX blue film Sex Video xxx sex videos Porn Hub XVideos XXX sexy bf videos blue film Videos Oficial on Instagram New Viral Video The latest original video has taken the internet by storm and left viewers in on various social media platforms ex Videos Hot Sex Video Hot Porn viral video,” reads the beginning of a three-page PDF uploaded to the website of the Irvington, New Jersey city government’s website.
The PDF, called “XnXX Video teachers fucking students Video porn Videos free XXX Hamster XnXX com” is unlike many of the other PDFs hosted on the city’s website, which include things like “2025-10-14 Council Minutes,” “Proposed Agenda 9-22-25,” and “Landlord Registration Form (1 & 2 unit dwelling).”
It is similar, however, to another PDF called “30 Best question here’s,” which looks like this:
Irvington, which is just west of Newark and has a population of 61,000 people, has fallen victim to an SEO spam attack that has afflicted local and state governments and universities around the United States.💡
Do you know anything else about whatever is going on here? 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.
Researcher Brian Penny has identified dozens of government and university websites that hosted PDF guides for how to make AI porn, PDFs linking to porn videos, bizarre crypto spam, sex toys, and more.Reginfo.gov, a regulatory affairs compliance website under the federal government’s General Services Administration, is currently hosting a 12 page PDF called “Nudify AI Free, No Sign-Up Needed!,” which is an ad and link to an abusive AI app designed to remove a person’s clothes. The Kansas Attorney General’s office and the Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District Office in California hosted PDFs called “DeepNude AI Best Deepnude AI APP 2025.” Penny found similar PDFs on the websites for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Washington Fire Commissioners Association, the Florida Department of Agriculture, the cities of Jackson, Mississippi and Massillon, Ohio, various universities throughout the country, and dozens of others. Penny has caught the attention of local news throughout the United States, who have reported on the problem.
The issue appears to be stemming from websites that allow people to upload their own PDFs, which then sit on these government websites. Because they are loaded with keywords for widely searched terms and exist on government and university sites with high search authority, Google and other search engines begin to surface them. In the last week or so, many (but not all) of the PDFs Penny has discovered have been deleted by local governments and universities.But cities seem like they are having more trouble cleaning up another attack, which is redirecting traffic from government URLs to porn, e-commerce, and spam sites. In an attack that seems similar to what we reported in June, various government websites are somehow being used to maliciously send traffic elsewhere. For example, the New York State Museum’s online exhibit for something called “The Family Room” now has at least 11 links to different types of “realistic” animal vagina pocket masturbators, which include “Zebra Animal Vagina Pussy Male Masturbation Cup — Pocket Realistic Silicone Penis Sex Toy ($27.99),” and “Must-have Horse Pussy Torso Buttocks Male Masturbator — Fantasy Realistic Animal Pussie Sex Doll.”
Links Penny found on Knoxville, Tennessee’s site for permitting inspections first go to a page that looks like a government site for hosting files then redirects to a page selling penis growth supplements that features erect penises (human penises, mercifully), blowjobs, men masturbating, and Dr. Oz’s face.Another Knoxville link I found, which purports to be a pirated version of the 2002 Vin Diesel film XXX simply downloaded a .exe file to my computer.
Penny believes that what he has found is basically the tip of the iceberg, because he is largely finding these by typing things like “nudify site:.gov” “xxx site:.gov” into Google and clicking around. Sometimes, malicious pages surface only on image searches or video searches: “Basically the craziest things you can think of will show up as long as you’re on image search,” Penny told 404 Media. “I’ll be doing this all week.”
The Nevada Department of Transportation told 404 Media that “This incident was not related to NDOT infrastructure or information systems, and the material was not hosted on NDOT servers.This unfortunate incident was a result of malicious use of a legitimate form created using the third-party platform on which NDOT’s website is hosted. NDOT expeditiously worked with our web hosting vendor to ensure the inappropriate content was removed.” It added that the third-party is Granicus, a massive government services company that provides website backend infrastructure for many cities and states around the country, as well as helps them stream and archive city council meetings, among other services. Several of the affected local governments use Granicus, but not all of them do; Granicus did not respond to two requests for comment from 404 Media.
The California Secretary of State’s Office told 404 Media: “A bad actor uploaded non-business documents to the bizfile Online system (a portal for business filings and information). The files were then used in external links allowing public access to only those uploaded files. No data was compromised. SOS staff took immediate action to remove the ability to use the system for non-SOS business purposes and are removing the unauthorized files from the system.” The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said “WDFW is aware of this issue and is actively working with our partners at WaTech to address it.” The other government agencies mentioned in this article did not respond to our requests for comment.
AI porn on state websites
Mainland whistleblower warns of malicious webpages being hosted on government websites nationwide, including in Hawaiʻi.Michael Brestovansky (Aloha State Daily)
The discovery of fire-cracked handaxes and sparking tools in southern Britain pushes the timeline of controlled fires back 350,000 years.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover the Earliest Human-Made Fire, Rewriting Evolutionary History
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Humans made fires as early as 400,000 years ago, pushing the timeline of this crucial human innovation back a staggering 350,000 years, reports a study published on Wednesday in Nature.
Mastery of fire is one of the most significant milestones in our evolutionary history, enabling early humans to cook nutritious food, seek protection from predators, and establish comfortable spaces for social gatherings. The ability to make fires is completely unique to the Homo genus that includes modern humans (Homo sapiens) and extinct humans, including Neanderthals.
Early humans may have opportunistically exploited wildfires more than one million years ago, but the oldest known controlled fires, which were intentionally lit with specialized tools, were previously dated back to about 50,000 years ago at Neanderthal sites in France.
Now, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of campfires ignited by an unidentified group of humans 400,000 years ago at Barnham, a village near the southern coast of the United Kingdom.
“This is a 400,000-year-old site where we have the earliest evidence of making fire—not just in Britain or Europe, but in fact, anywhere else in the world,” said Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum who co-authored the study, in a press briefing held on Tuesday.
“Many of the great turning points in human development, and the development of our civilization, depended on fire,” added co-author Rob Davis, also an archaeologist at the British Museum. “We're a species who have used fire to really shape the world around us—in belief systems, as well. It's a very prominent part of belief systems across the world.”
Artifacts have been recovered from Barnham for more than a century, but the remnants of this ancient hearth were identified within the past decade. The researchers were initially tipped off by the remains of heated clay sediments, hydrocarbons associated with fire, and fire-cracked flint handaxes.
But the real smoking gun was the discovery of two small fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral commonly used to strike flint to produce sparks at later prehistoric campfires such as the French Neanderthal sites.
Discovery of the first fragment of iron pyrite in 2017 at Barnham, Suffolk Image: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.
“Iron pyrite is a naturally occurring mineral, but through geological work in the area over the last 36 years, looking at 26 sites, we argue that pyrite is incredibly rare in the area,” said Ashton. “We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire.”The fire-starters were probably Neanderthals, who were known to be present in the region at the time thanks to a skull found in Swanscombe, about 80 miles northeast of Barnham. But it’s possible that the fires were made by another human lineage such as Homo heidelbergensis, which also left bones in the U.K. around the same period. It was not Homo sapiens as our lineage emerged in Africa later, about 300,000 years ago.
Regardless of this group’s identity, its ability to make fire would have been a major advantage, especially in the relatively cold environment of southern Britain at the time. It also hints that the ability to make fire extends far deeper into the past than previously known.
“We assume that the people who made the fire at Barnham brought the knowledge with them from continental Europe,” said co-author Chris Stringer, a physical anthropologist at the Natural History Museum. “There was a land bridge there. There had been a major cold stage about 450,000 years ago, which had probably wiped out everyone in Britain. Britain had to be repopulated all over again.”
“Having that use of fire, which they must have brought with them when they came into Britain, would have helped them colonize this new area and move a bit further north to places where the winters are going to be colder,” he continued. “You can keep warm. You can keep wild animals away. You get more nutrition from your food.”
Excavation of the ancient campfire, removing diagonally opposed quadrants. The reddened sediment between band B’ is heated clay. Image: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.
Although these humans likely had brains close in size to our own, the innovation of controlled fire would have amplified their cognitive development, social bonds, and symbolic capacities. In the flickering light of ancient campfires, these humans shared food, protection, and company, passing on a tradition that fundamentally reshaped our evolutionary trajectory.“People were sitting around the fires, sharing information, having extra time beyond pure daylight to make things, to teach things, to communicate with each other, to tell stories,” Stringer said. “Maybe it may have even fueled the development of language.”
“We've got this crucial aspect in human evolution, and we can put a marker down that it was there 400,000 years ago,” he concluded.
Earliest evidence of making fire - Nature
Baked sediment, heat-shattered artefacts and introduced pyrite in a 400,000-year-old Palaeolithic occupation site in Suffolk, UK provide evidence of intentional fire-making, marking a pivotal moment in human development.Nature
Mark Russo reported the dataset to all the right organizations, but still couldn't get into his accounts for months.
Mark Russo reported the dataset to all the right organizations, but still couldnx27;t get into his accounts for months.#News #AI #Google
A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him For It
Google suspended a mobile app developer’s accounts after he uploaded AI training data to his Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the widely used dataset, which is cited in a number of academic papers and distributed via an academic file sharing site, contained child sexual abuse material. The developer reported the dataset to a child safety organization, which eventually resulted in the dataset’s removal, but he claims Google’s has been "devastating.”A message from Google said his account “has content that involves a child being sexually abused or exploited. This is a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal.”
The incident shows how AI training data, which is collected by indiscriminately scraping the internet, can impact people who use it without realizing it contains illegal images. The incident also shows how hard it is to identify harmful images in training data composed of millions of images, which in this case were only discovered accidentally by a lone developer who tripped Google’s automated moderation tools.
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Have you discovered harmful materials in AI training data ? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.In October, I wrote about the NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, and which is used to train AI image classifiers to automatically detect nudity. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) said it found more than 120 images of identified or known victims of CSAM in the dataset, including nearly 70 images focused on the genital or anal area of children who are confirmed or appear to be pre-pubescent. “In some cases, images depicting sexual or abusive acts involving children and teenagers such as fellatio or penile-vaginal penetration,” C3P said.
In October, Lloyd Richardson, C3P's director of technology, told me that the organization decided to investigate the NudeNet training data after getting a tip from an individual via its cyber tipline that it might contain CSAM. After I published that story, a developer named Mark Russo contacted me to say that he’s the individual who tipped C3P, but that he’s still suffering the consequences of his discovery.
Russo, an independent developer, told me he was working on an on-device NSFW image detector. The app runs locally and can detect images locally so the content stays private. To benchmark his tool, Russo used NudeNet, a publicly available dataset that’s cited in a number of academic papers about content moderation. Russo unzipped the dataset into his Google Drive. Shortly after, his Google account was suspended for “inappropriate material.”
On July 31, Russo lost access to all the services associated with his Google account, including his Gmail of 14 years, Firebase, the platform that serves as the backend for his apps, AdMob, the mobile app monetization platform, and Google Cloud.
“This wasn’t just disruptive — it was devastating. I rely on these tools to develop, monitor, and maintain my apps,” Russo wrote on his personal blog. “With no access, I’m flying blind.”
Russo filed an appeal of Google’s decision the same day, explaining that the images came from NudeNet, which he believed was a reputable research dataset with only adult content. Google acknowledged the appeal, but upheld its suspension, and rejected a second appeal as well. He is still locked out of his Google account and the Google services associated with it.
Russo also contacted the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and C3P. C3P investigated the dataset, found CSAM, and notified Academic Torrents, where the NudeNet dataset was hosted, which removed it.
As C3P noted at the time, NudeNet was cited or used by more than 250 academic works. A non-exhaustive review of 50 of those academic projects found 134 made use of the NudeNet dataset, and 29 relied on the NudeNet classifier or model. But Russo is the only developer we know about who was banned for using it, and the only one who reported it to an organization that investigated that dataset and led to its removal.
After I reached out for comment, Google investigated Russo’s account again and reinstated it.
“Google is committed to fighting the spread of CSAM and we have robust protections against the dissemination of this type of content,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. “In this case, while CSAM was detected in the user account, the review should have determined that the user's upload was non-malicious. The account in question has been reinstated, and we are committed to continuously improving our processes.”
“I understand I’m just an independent developer—the kind of person Google doesn’t care about,” Russo told me. “But that’s exactly why this story matters. It’s not just about me losing access; it’s about how the same systems that claim to fight abuse are silencing legitimate research and innovation through opaque automation [...]I tried to do the right thing — and I was punished.”
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As Canada’s tipline for reporting online child sexual abuse and exploitation, Cybertip.ca is dedicated to reducing child victimization through technology, education, public awareness, along with supporting survivors and their families.Cybertip.ca
Our new zine; a very strange change at Instagram; and the creator of ICEBlock is suing the U.S. government.#Podcast
Podcast: Zines Are Back
We start this week with news of our zine! We’re printing it very soon, and walk you through the process. Independent media is turning back to physical zines as a way to subvert algorithms. After the break, Emanuel tells us about some very weird Instagram changes. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains ICEBlock’s lawsuit against the U.S. government.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/lseEXc-ZzsQ?…
Timestamps:
1:37 - 1st Story - 404 Media Is Making a Zine; buy the zine here.
23:35 - 2nd Story - Instagram Is Generating Inaccurate SEO Bait for Your Posts
36:09 - 3rd Story - ICEBlock Creator Sues U.S. Government Over App’s RemovalThe 404 Media Podcast
Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …Apple Podcasts
The Department of War aims to put Google Gemini 'directly into the hands of every American warrior.'
The Department of War aims to put Google Gemini x27;directly into the hands of every American warrior.x27;#News #war
Pete Hegseth Says the Pentagon's New Chatbot Will Make America 'More Lethal'
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.
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Hegseth, however, did not talk about weapons in his announcement. He talked about spreadsheets and videos. “At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be used to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said in the video on X. Office work, basically. “We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before.”Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering, also stressed how important GenAI would be to the process of killing people in a press release about the site’s launch.
“There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance. We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America's next Manifest Destiny, and we're ensuring that we dominate this new frontier,” Michael said in the press release, referencing the 19th century American belief that God had divinely ordained Americans to settle the west at the same time he announced a new chatbot.
The press release says Google Cloud's Gemini for Government will be the first instance available on the internal platform. It’s certified for Controlled Unclassified Information, the release states, and claims that because it’s web grounded with Google Search–meaning it’ll pull from Google search results to answer queries–that makes it “reliable” and “dramatically reduces the risk of AI hallucinations.” As we’ve covered, because Google search results are also consuming AI content that contains errors and AI-invented data from across the web, it’s become nearly unusable for regular consumers and researchers alike.
During a press conference about the rollout this morning, Michael told reporters that GenAI.mil would soon incorporate other AI models and would one day be able to handle classified as well as sensitive data. As of this writing, GenAI’s website is down.
“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, three million employees, warfighters, contractors, are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Michael told reporters this morning, according to Breaking Defense. They’ll “start with three million people, start innovating, using building, asking more about what they can do, then bring those to the higher classification level, bringing in different capabilities,” he said.
The second Trump administration has done everything in its power to make it easier for the people in Silicon Valley to push AI on America and the world. It has done this, in part, by framing it as a national security issue. Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at cutting regulations around data centers and the construction of nuclear power plants. He’s threatened to sign another that would block states from passing their own AI regulations. Each executive order and piece of proposed legislation threatens that losing the AI race would mean making America weak and vulnerable and erode national security.
The country’s tech moguls are rushing to build datacenters and nuclear power plants while the boom time continues. Nevermind that people do not want to live next to datacenters for a whole host of reasons. Nevermind that tech companies are using faulty AIs to speed up the construction of nuclear power plants. Nevermind that the Pentagon already had a proprietary LLM it had operated since 2024.
“We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America's commercial genius, and we're embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm,’ Hegseth said in the press release about GenAI.mil. "AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI's future positive impact across the War Department."
Pentagon rolls out GenAI platform to all personnel, using Google’s Gemini
Other “frontier AI capabilities” will join Gemini on the new GenAi.mil platform, meant to make generative AI tools available to all three million military and civilian personnel, the Department of Defense announced.Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. (Breaking Defense)
Instagram is generating headlines for Instagram posts that appear on Google Search results. Users say they are misrepresenting them.#News #AI #Instagram #Google
Instagram Is Generating Inaccurate SEO Bait for Your Posts
Instagram is generating headlines for users’ Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.I first noticed Instagram-generated headlines thanks to a Bluesky post from the author Jeff VanderMeer. Last week, VanderMeer posted a video to Instagram of a bunny eating a banana. VanderMeer didn’t include a caption or comment with the post, but noticed that it appeared in Google Search results with the following headline: “Meet the Bunny Who Loves Eating Bananas, A Nutritious Snack For Your Pet.”
Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer.bsky.social)
This post requires authentication to view.Bluesky Social
Another Instagram post from the Groton Public Library in Massachusetts—an image of VanderMeer’s Annihilation book cover promoting a group reading—also didn’t include a caption or comment, but appears on Google Search results with the following headline “Join Jeff VanderMeer on a Thrilling Beachside Adventure with Mesta …”
Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer.bsky.social)
This post requires authentication to view.Bluesky Social
I’ve confirmed that Instagram is generating headlines in a similar style for other users without their knowledge. One cosplayer who wished to remain anonymous posted a video of herself showing off costumes in various locations. The same post appeared on Google with a headline about discovering real-life locations to do cosplaying in Seattle. This Instagram mentioned the city in a hashtag but did not write anything resembling that headline.
Google told me that it is not generating the headlines, and that it’s pulling the text directly from Instagram.
Meta told me in an email that it recently began using AI to generate titles for posts that appear in search engine results, and that this helps people better understand the content. Meta said that, as with all AI-generated content, the titles are not always accurate. Meta also linked me to this Help Center article to explain how users can turn of search engine indexing for their posts.
After this article was published, several readers reached out to note that other platforms, like TikTok and LinkedIn, also generate SEO headlines for users' posts.
“I hate it,” VanderMeer told me in an email. “If I post content, I want to be the one contextualizing it, not some third party. It's especially bad because they're using the most click-bait style of headline generation, which is antithetical to how I try to be on social—which is absolutely NOT calculated, but organic, humorous, and sincere. Then you add in that this is likely an automated AI process, which means unintentionally contributing to theft and a junk industry, and that the headlines are often inaccurate and the summary descriptions below the headline even worse... basically, your post through search results becomes shitty spam.”
“I would not write mediocre text like that and it sounds as if it was auto-generated at-scale with an LLM. This becomes problematic when the headline or description advertises someone in a way that is not how they would personally describe themselves,” Brian Dang, another cosplayer who goes by @mrdangphotos and noticed Instagram generated headlines for his posts, told me. We don’t know how exactly Instagram is generating these headlines.
By using Google's Rich Result Test tool, which shows what Google sees for any site, I saw that these headlines appeared under the <title></title> tags for those post’s Instagram pages.
“It appears that Instagram is only serving that title to Google (and perhaps other search bots),” Jon Henshaw, a search engine optimization (SEO) expert and editor of Coywolf, told me in an email. “I couldn't find any reference to it in the pre-rendered or rendered HTML in Chrome Dev Tools as a regular visitor on my home network. It does appear like Instagram is generating titles and doing it explicitly for search engines.”
When I looked at the code for these pages, I saw that Instagram was also generating long descriptions for posts without the user’s knowledge, like: “Seattle’s cosplay photography is a treasure trove of inspiration for fans of the genre. Check out these real-life cosplay locations and photos taken by @mrdangphotos. From costumes to locations, get the scoop on how to recreate these looks and capture your own cosplay moments in Seattle.”
Neither the generated headlines or the descriptions are the alternative text (alt text) that Instagram automatically generates for accessibility reasons. To create alt text, Instagram uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to automatically create a description of the image that people who are blind or have low-vision can access with a screen reader. Sometimes the alt text Instagram generates appears under the headline in Google Search results. At other times, generated description copy that is not the alt text appears in the same place. We don’t know how exactly Instagram is creating these headlines, but it could use similar technology.
“The larger implications are terrible—search results could show inaccurate results that are reputationally damaging or promulgating a falsehood that actively harms someone who doesn't drill down,” VanderMeer said. “And we all know we live in a world where often people are just reading the headline and first couple of paragraphs of an article, so it's possible something could go viral based on a factual misunderstanding.”
Update: This article was update with comment with Meta.
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The exact circumstances around the search are not known. But activist Samuel Tunick is charged with deleting data from a Google Pixel before CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team could search it.#CBP #Privacy
Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
A man in Atlanta has been arrested and charged for allegedly deleting data from a Google Pixel phone before a member of a secretive Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit was able to search it, according to court records and social media posts reviewed by 404 Media. The man, Samuel Tunick, is described as a local Atlanta activist in Instagram and other posts discussing the case.The exact circumstances around the search—such as why CBP wanted to search the phone in the first place—are not known. But it is uncommon to see someone charged specifically for wiping a phone, a feature that is easily accessible in some privacy and security-focused devices.
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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.This post is for subscribers only
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New videos and photos shared with 404 Media show a Border Patrol agent wearing Meta Ray-Bans glasses with the recording light clearly on. This is despite a DHS ban on officers recording with personal devices.#CBP #ICE #Meta
Border Patrol Agent Recorded Raid with Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses
On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media.Previously when 404 Media covered Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials’ use of Meta’s Ray-Bans, it wasn’t clear if the officials were using them to record raids because the recording lights were not on in any of the photos seen by 404 Media. In the new material from Charlotte, North Carolina, during the recent wave of immigration enforcement, the recording light is visibly illuminated.
That is significant because CBP says it does not allow employees to use personal recording devices. CBP told 404 Media it does not have an arrangement with Meta, indicating this official was wearing personally-sourced glasses.
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We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.#Announcements
404 Media Is Making a Zine
404 Media is making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It will be 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by a printshop in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new articles for the zine. It will be available at the beginning of January.I have been somewhat obsessed with making a print product for the last year or so, and we’re really excited to try this experiment. If it goes well, we hope to make more of our journalism available in print. We are doing this in part because we were invited to help throw a benefit concert by our friends at heaven2nite in Los Angeles on January 4, with the proceeds going to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an LA-based nonprofit providing support to Dreamers, immigrant families, and low-wage workers in California. We are going to be giving away copies of the zine at that concert and are selling copies on our Shopify page to ship in early January.
Presale: ICE Surveillance Zine
**THIS WILL SHIP IN EARLY JANUARY** We are making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It is 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by Punch Kiss Press in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new404 Media404 Media
Why are we doing this? Well, zines are cool, and print media is cool. We have joked about wanting to print out our blogs and hand them out door-to-door or staple them to lamp posts. Handing out zines at a concert or sending them to you in the mail will get the job done, too.We have spent the last two-and-a-half years trying to build something more sustainable and more human in a world and on an internet that feels more automated and more artificial than ever. We have shown that it’s possible for a small team of dedicated reporters to do impactful, groundbreaking accountability journalism on the companies and powers that are pushing us to a more inhumane world without overwhelmingly focusing on appeasing social media and search algorithms. Nevertheless, we still spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how to reach new audiences using social media and search, without making ourselves feel totally beholden to it. Alongside that, we put a huge amount of effort into convincing people who find our stuff on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit (and Bluesky and Mastodon) to follow our work on platforms where we can directly reach them without an algorithmic intermediary. That’s why we focus so much on building our own website, our own direct email newsletters, our own full-text RSS feeds, and RSS-based podcast feeds.
This has gone well, but we have seen our colleagues at The Onion and other independent media outlets bring back the printed word, which, again, is cool, but also comes with other benefits. Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms. It can be mailed, sold in stores, and handed out at concerts. It can be read and passed to a friend, donated to a thrift store and discovered by someone killing time on a weekend, or tossed in a recycling bin and rescued by a random passerby. It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world.
Print does come with some complications, most notably it is significantly more expensive to make and distribute a print product than it is to make a website, and it’s also a slower medium (duh). Ghost, our website and email infrastructure, also doesn’t have a native way to integrate a print subscription into a membership. This is a long way of saying that the only way this first print experiment makes sense is if we sell it as a separate product. Subscribers at the Supporter level will get a discount; we can’t yet include print in your existing subscription for all sorts of logistical and financial reasons, but we will eventually make a PDF of the zine available to subscribers. If you're a subscriber, your code is at the bottom of this post.
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Some other details: Our cover art was made by Veri Alvarez, a super talented LA-based artist whose work you can find here. The interior of the magazine was designed and laid out by our old friend Ernie Smith, who runs the amazing Tedium newsletter and who was willing to unretire from his days of laying out newspapers to help us with this. We are printing it at Punch Kiss Press, a DIY risograph studio here in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar, risograph printing is sort of like silkscreening on paper, where you print one color at a time and layer them on top of each other to get very cool color mixing effects.We did not originally set out to spend most of the last year reporting on ICE. But we have watched the agency grow from an already horrifying organization into a deportation force that is better funded than most militaries. We have seen full-scale occupations of Los Angeles and Chicago, daily raids playing out in cities, towns, and workplaces across the country, and people getting abducted while they are at work, shopping, or walking down the street.
As this has played out, we have focused on highlighting the ways that the Trump administration has used the considerable power of the federal government and the vast amounts of information it has to empower ICE’s surveillance machine. Technologies and databases created during earlier administrations for one governmental purpose (collecting taxes, for example) have been repurposed as huge caches of data now used to track and detain undocumented immigrants. Privacy protections and data sharing walls between federal agencies have been knocked down. Technologies that were designed for local law enforcement or were created to make rich people feel safer, like license plate tracking cameras, have grown into huge surveillance dragnets that can be accessed by ICE. Surveillance tools that have always been concerning—phone hacking malware, social media surveillance software, facial recognition algorithms, and AI-powered smart glasses—are being used against some of society’s most vulnerable people. There is not a ton of reason for optimism, but in the face of an oppressive force, people are fighting back, and we tried to highlight their work in the zine, too.
Again, this is an experiment, so we can’t commit at the moment to a print subscription, future zines, future magazines, or anything like that. But we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products and to do them more often. If you have a connection at a newspaper printing press, a place that prints magazines or catalogs, or otherwise have expertise in printmaking, design, layout, or other things that deal with the printed word, please get in touch, it will help us as we explore the feasibility of doing future print products (jason@404media.co).
We are also hoping that groups who work with immigrants throughout the United States will be interested in this; if that’s you please email me (jason@404media.co). We are also exploring translating the zine into Spanish.
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Noelle and Sam discuss everything from sexbots and AI porn to censorship, age verification legislation, and their favorite parody porn flicks.#Podcast
Podcast: Why AI Porn Sucks (with Noelle Perdue)
This week Sam is in conversation with Noelle Perdue. Noelle is a writer, producer, and internet porn historian whose works has been published in Wired, the Washington Post, Slate, and more, and you’re probably familiar with her work if you’ve been paying attention to the plot in your favorite pornographic films. She’s writing on Stubstack so look her up there!Noelle and Sam discuss everything from sexbots and AI porn to censorship, age verification legislation, and their favorite parody porn flicks.
youtube.com/embed/9eqMXBwWtkA?…
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.Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely
New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.
OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny
ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck
The Egg Yolk Principle: Human Sexuality Will Always Outsmart Prudish Algorithms and Hateful Politicians
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…The Egg Yolk Principle: Human Sexuality Will Always Outsmart Prudish Algorithms and Hateful Politicians
Anti-porn laws can't stop porn, but they can stop free speech. In the meantime, people will continue to get off to anything and everything.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
The Department of Justice demanded Apple remove ICEBlock, which reports sightings of ICE officials, from its App Store. Now the creator is suing, saying the demand violated his First Amendment rights.#ICE #iceblock
ICEBlock Creator Sues U.S. Government Over App’s Removal
The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses.
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Scientists found sugars that are essential for life on asteroid Bennu, which has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth in 2182.#TheAbstract
An Asteroid Threatening Earth Is Teeming With Ingredients for Life, Scientists Discover
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that fought for their food, took one for the team, passed the extraterrestrial sugar, and got lost in an ancient haze.First, a story about the spiciest meatball in the animal kingdom. Then: ants are being interesting again, a new discovery about an old rock, and a walk in an ancient sulfur rainstorm.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Pond frog versus murder hornet
Most animals don’t eat hornets, because dinner is just not as fun if it comes with a side of deadly venom and stab wounds. But a scientist has now observed an incredible exception to the rule with the humble black-spotted pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus), which will straight-up house a hornet and ask for seconds.
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Hornets have occasionally been found in the bellies of pond frogs, suggesting that the amphibians can tolerate their intense stings, but not much else is known about this unusual predator-prey relationship. To remedy the situation, Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University went out to the prefecture of Hyogo in Central Japan and netted a bunch of hornets from grasslands and forests—including the infamous “murder hornet” Vespa mandarinia, the largest in the world. He then captured pond frogs from wetlands with paddy fields and ponds in Hyogo and Shimane prefectures. Then, he let them duke it out in the lab in the world’s gnarliest series of cage matches.“When a frog opened its mouth and its tongue made contact with a hornet, the action was classified as an attack on the hornet,” Sugiura said in the study. “If the frog did not stop the attack, spit out, or regurgitate the hornet, it was considered to have successfully consumed the hornet.”
The results revealed that most frogs made short work of the hornets (Videos S2) even though their meals were actively stinging them in their faces, eyes, tongues, palates, or throats of the frogs during attacks (Figure 3c,d).
“None of the frogs regurgitated the hornets after swallowing them,” Sugiura noted. “All frogs that swallowed hornets excreted the undigested body parts of the hornets as feces 2–4 days after ingestion.”
Lets just sit with that mental image of poopy undigested hornets for a second. What a nightmare. But what’s truly wild about this study is that the insects are known to inject lethal doses of venom into much larger animals, like mice, so the frogs clearly have some unknown defense against their attacks.
“Although many frogs were stung repeatedly by [hornets] in this study…none of the frogs died, and all individuals resumed normal behavior shortly after being stung,” Suguira said. “Moreover, despite repeated stings, most of the frogs ultimately consumed hornet workers…indicating a high level of predation success even against the largest hornet species.”
We humans are so lucky that when we sit down to dinner, our food generally does not try to kill us with repeated venomous needlepoint impalements. Count your blessings!
In other news…
Meet the ant-y Christs
Dawson, Erika H. “Altruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.” Nature Communications.We’ll move now from death by frog munchies to death by team spirit. Scientists have discovered that ant pupae (baby ants) will sacrifice themselves if they are sick, lest they risk the health of the entire colony.
“Here we show…that sick ant pupae instead actively emit a chemical signal that in itself is sufficient to trigger their own destruction by colony members,” said researchers led by Erika H. Dawson of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “Our data suggest the evolution of a finely-tuned signalling system…that triggers pupal signalling for sacrifice. This demonstrates a balanced interplay between individual and social immunity that efficiently achieves whole-colony health.”
In other words, if an ant gets bitten by a zombie in a movie, it would immediately let everyone know and offer its life for the good of the group. Do what you will with this information.
Do you take sugar in your asteroid?
Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. “Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.” Nature Geoscience.Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere.
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“All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in Bennu samples,” said researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”“Our confident detection in Bennu of abundant glucose—the hexose molecule that is life’s common energy source—and other hexoses indicates that they were present in the early solar system,” the team added. “Thus, all three crucial building blocks of life”— bio-essential sugars, nucleobases, and protein-building amino acids—”would have reached the prebiotic Earth and other potentially habitable planets.”
While Bennu bears the stuff of life, it may also be an omen of death: It has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth on September 24, 2182. These are very low odds, but the risk is high enough to classify Bennu as potentially hazardous. So while visions of sugar plums may dance in your head this season, beware the nightmares about sugar-asteroids.
It’s raining sulfur—hallelujah!
I’ve made you walk through many valleys of death in this newsletter, but we’ll close with some unadulterated life. Scientists have discovered that many of the sulfur molecules that help make up all modern organisms may have rained down from the hazy skies of the Archean period four billion years ago.
Assuming the results are confirmed in future research, it would mean that these sulfur molecules could have predated life, upending a leading hypothesis that they were a product of life and thus emerged later.
The work challenges “the assumption that life must have ‘invented’ sulfur biomolecules during evolution…by demonstrating the production of a variety of sulfur biomolecules, including cysteine, in laboratory experiments mimicking the atmospheric chemistry of the early Earth,” said researchers led by Nathan Reed of NASA, who conducted the work while at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“The results presented here imply that an atmospheric organic haze is a potential powerhouse in providing a diversity of essential biomolecules in sufficient quantities for a budding global biosphere,” the team concluded.
Taken together with the Bennu study, it looks as if early Earth was positively marinating in life juices from multiple sources, including the sky and extraterrestrial impactors. Though this still doesn’t explain how living things sprang up from the prebiotic stew, it provides further confirmation that the ingredients of life as we know it are spread far and wide here in our solar system, and beyond.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
This week, we discuss PC woes, voice deepfakes, and mutual aid.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: Hearing AI Voices and 'Undervolting'
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 PC woes, voice deepfakes, and mutual aid.JOSEPH: Today I’m speaking at the Digital Vulnerabilities in the Age of AI Summit (DIVAS) (good name) on a panel about the financial risks of AI. The way I see it, that applies to the scams and are being powered by AI.
As soon as a new technology is launched, I typically think of ways it might be abused. Sometimes I cover this, sometimes not, but the thought always crosses my mind. One example that did lead to coverage was back at Motherboard in 2023 with an article called How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice.
At the time, ElevenLabs had just launched. This company focuses on audio and AI and cloning voices. Basically you upload audio (originally that could be of anyone before ElevenLabs introduced some guardrails) and the company then lets you ‘say’ anything as that voice. I spoke to voice actors at the time who were obviously very concerned.
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The app, called Mobile Identify, was launched in November, and lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of ICE. It is unclear if the removal is temporary or not.#ICE #CBP #Privacy #News
DHS’s Immigrant-Hunting App Removed from Google Play Store
A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of the federal government has been removed from the Google Play Store, 404 Media has learned.It is unclear if the removal is temporary or not, or what the exact reason is for the removal. Google told 404 Media it did not remove the app, and directed inquiries to its developer. CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Its removal comes after 404 Media documented multiple instances of CBP and ICE officials using their own facial recognition app to identify people and verify their immigration status, including people who said they were U.S. citizens.
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Do you know anything else about this removal or this app? 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 removal also comes after “hundreds” of Google employees took issue with the app, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
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Kohler's Smart Toilet Camera Not Actually End-to-End Encrypted#News
Kohler's Smart Toilet Camera Not Actually End-to-End Encrypted
Home goods company Kohler would like a bold look in your toilet to take some photos. It’s OK, though, the company has promised that all the data it collects on your “waste” will be “end-to-end encrypted.” However, a deeper look into the company’s claim by technologist Simon Fondrie-Teitler revealed that Kohler seems to have no idea what E2EE actually means. According to Fondrie-Teitler’s write-up, which was first reported by TechCrunch, the company will have access to the photos the camera takes and may even use them to train AI.The whole fiasco gives an entirely too on-the-nose meaning to the “Internet of Shit.”
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Kohler launched its $600 camera to hang on your toilets earlier this year. It’s called Dekoda, and along with the large price tag, the toilet cam also requires a monthly service fee that starts at $6.99. If you want to track the piss and shit of a family of 6, you’ll have to pay $12.99 a month.What do you get for putting a camera on your toilet? According to Kohler’s pitch, “health & wellness insights” about your gut health and “possible signs of blood in the bowl” as “Dekoda uses advanced sensors to passively analyze your waste in the background.”
If you’re squeamish about sending pictures of the “waste” of your family to Kohler, the company promised that all of the data is “end-to-end encrypted.” The privacy page for the Kohler Health said “user data is encrypted end to end, at rest and in transit” and it’s mentioned several places in the marketing.
It’s not, though. Fondrie-Teitler told 404 Media he started looking into Dekoda after he noticed friends making fun of it in a Slack he’s part of. “I saw the ‘end-to-end encryption’ claim on the homepage, which seemed at odds with what they said they were collecting in the privacy policy,” he said. “Pretty much every other company I've seen implement end-to-end encryption has published a whitepaper alongside it. Which makes sense, the details really matter so telling people what you've done is important to build trust. Plus it's generally a bunch of work so companies want to brag about it. I couldn't find any more details though.”
E2EE has a specific meaning. It’s a type of messaging system that keeps the contents of a message private while in transit, meaning only the person sending and the person receiving a message can view it. Famously, E2EE means that the messaging company itself cannot decode or see the messages (Signal, for example, is E2EE). The point is to protect the privacy of individual users from a company prying into data if a third party, like the government, comes asking for it.
Kohler, it’s clear, has access to a user’s data. This means it’s not E2EE. Fondrie-Teitler told 404 Media that he downloaded the Kohler health app and analyzed the network traffic it sent. “I didn't see anything that would indicate an end-to-end encrypted connection being created,” he said.
Then he reached out to Kohler and had a conversation with its privacy team via email. “The Kohler Health app itself does not share data between users. Data is only shared between the user and Kohler Health,” a member of the privacy team at Kohler told Fondrie-Teitler in an email reviewed by 404 Media. “User data is encrypted at rest, when it’s stored on the user's mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems. Data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user's devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service.”
If Kohler can view the user’s data, as it admits to doing in this email exchange with Fondrie-Teitler, then it’s not—by definition—using E2EE.
"The term end-to-end encryption is often used in the context of products that enable a user (sender) to communicate with another user (recipient), such as a messaging application. Kohler Health is not a messaging application. In this case, we used the term with respect to the encryption of data between our users (sender) and Kohler Health (recipient)," Kohler Health told 404 Media in a statement.
"Privacy and security are foundational to Kohler Health because we know health data is deeply personal. We’re evaluating all feedback to clarify anything that may be causing confusion," it added.
“I'd like the term ‘end-to-end encryption’ to not get watered down to just meaning ‘uses https’ so I wanted to see if I could confirm what it was actually doing and let people know,” Fondrie-Teitler told 404 Media. He pointed out that Zoom once made a similar claim and had to pay a fine to the FTC because of it.
“I think everyone has a right to privacy, and in order for that to be realized people need to have an understanding of what's happening with their data,” Fondrie-Teitler said. “It's already so hard for non-technical individuals (and even tech experts) to evaluate the privacy and security of the software and devices they're using. E2EE doesn't guarantee privacy or security, but it's a non-trivial positive signal and losing that will only make it harder for people to maintain control over their data.”
UPDATE: 12/4/2025: This story has been updated to add a statement from Kohler Health.
Zoom Meetings Aren’t End-to-End Encrypted, Despite Misleading Marketing
The videoconferencing service is making misleading claims about privacy, experts say.Micah Lee (The Intercept)
AI models can meaningfully sway voters on candidates and issues, including by using misinformation, and they are also evading detection in public surveys according to three new studies.#TheAbstract #News
Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.
In a study published in Nature on Thursday, scientists report that AI chatbots can meaningfully sway people toward a particular candidate—providing better results than video or television ads. Moreover, chatbots optimized for political persuasion “may increasingly deploy misleading or false information,” according to a separate study published on Thursday in Science.
“The general public has lots of concern around AI and election interference, but among political scientists there’s a sense that it’s really hard to change peoples’ opinions, ” said David Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University and an author of both studies. “We wanted to see how much of a risk it really is.”
In the Nature study, Rand and his colleagues enlisted 2,306 U.S. citizens to converse with an AI chatbot in late August and early September 2024. The AI model was tasked with both increasing support for an assigned candidate (Harris or Trump) and with increasing the odds that the participant who initially favoured the model’s candidate would vote, or decreasing the odds they would vote if the participant initially favored the opposing candidate—in other words, voter suppression.
In the U.S. experiment, the pro-Harris AI model moved likely Trump voters 3.9 points toward Harris, which is a shift that is four times larger than the impact of traditional video ads used in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump AI model nudged likely Harris voters 1.51 points toward Trump.
The researchers ran similar experiments involving 1,530 Canadians and 2,118 Poles during the lead-up to their national elections in 2025. In the Canadian experiment, AIs advocated either for Liberal Party leader Mark Carney or Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Meanwhile, the Polish AI bots advocated for either Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist-liberal Civic Coalition’s candidate, or Karol Nawrocki, the right-wing Law and Justice party’s candidate.
The Canadian and Polish bots were even more persuasive than in the U.S. experiment: The bots shifted candidate preferences up to 10 percentage points in many cases, three times farther than the American participants. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the models were so much more persuasive to Canadians and Poles, but one significant factor could be the intense media coverage and extended campaign duration in the United States relative to the other nations.
“In the U.S., the candidates are very well-known,” Rand said. “They've both been around for a long time. The U.S. media environment also really saturates with people with information about the candidates in the campaign, whereas things are quite different in Canada, where the campaign doesn't even start until shortly before the election.”
“One of the key findings across both papers is that it seems like the primary way the models are changing people's minds is by making factual claims and arguments,” he added. “The more arguments and evidence that you've heard beforehand, the less responsive you're going to be to the new evidence.”
While the models were most persuasive when they provided fact-based arguments, they didn’t always present factual information. Across all three nations, the bot advocating for the right-leaning candidates made more inaccurate claims than those boosting the left-leaning candidates. Right-leaning laypeople and party elites tend to share more inaccurate information online than their peers on the left, so this asymmetry likely reflects the internet-sourced training data.
“Given that the models are trained essentially on the internet, if there are many more inaccurate, right-leaning claims than left-leaning claims on the internet, then it makes sense that from the training data, the models would sop up that same kind of bias,” Rand said.
With the Science study, Rand and his colleagues aimed to drill down into the exact mechanisms that make AI bots persuasive. To that end, the team tasked 19 large language models (LLMs) to sway nearly 77,000 U.K. participants on 707 political issues.
The results showed that the most effective persuasion tactic was to provide arguments packed with as many facts as possible, corroborating the findings of the Nature study. However, there was a serious tradeoff to this approach, as models tended to start hallucinating and making up facts the more they were pressed for information.
“It is not the case that misleading information is more persuasive,” Rand said. ”I think that what's happening is that as you push the model to provide more and more facts, it starts with accurate facts, and then eventually it runs out of accurate facts. But you're still pushing it to make more factual claims, so then it starts grasping at straws and making up stuff that's not accurate.”
In addition to these two new studies, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month found that AI bots can now corrupt public opinion data by responding to surveys at scale. Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab, created an AI agent that exhibited a 99.8 percent pass rate on 6,000 attempts to detect automated responses to survey data.
“Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare,” Westwood warned in the study. “These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research.”
Taken together, these findings suggest that AI could influence future elections in a number of ways, from manipulating survey data to persuading voters to switch their candidate preference—possibly with misleading or false information.
To counter the impact of AI on elections, Rand suggested that campaign finance laws should provide more transparency about the use of AI, including canvasser bots, while also emphasizing the role of raising public awareness.
“One of the key take-homes is that when you are engaging with a model, you need to be cognizant of the motives of the person that prompted the model, that created the model, and how that bleeds into what the model is doing,” he said.
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues - Nature
Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence political decision-making.Nature
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.#News #AI #nuclear
‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants
During a presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence on December 3, a US Department of Energy scientist laid out a grand vision of the future where nuclear energy powers artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence shapes nuclear energy in “a virtuous cycle of peaceful nuclear deployment.”“The goal is simple: to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” Rian Bahran, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors, said.
His presentation and others during the symposium, held in Vienna, Austria, described a world where nuclear powered AI designs, builds, and even runs the nuclear power plants they’ll need to sustain them. But experts find these claims, made by one of the top nuclear scientists working for the Trump administration, to be concerning and potentially dangerous.
Tech companies are using artificial intelligence to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. But few know the lengths to which the Trump administration is paving the way and the part it's playing in deregulating a highly regulated industry to ensure that AI data centers have the energy they need to shape the future of America and the world.
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At the IAEA, scientists, nuclear energy experts, and lobbyists discussed what that future might look like. To say the nuclear people are bullish on AI is an understatement. “I call this not just a partnership but a structural alliance. Atoms for algorithms. Artificial intelligence is not just powered by nuclear energy. It’s also improving it because this is a two way street,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in his opening remarks.In his talk, Bahran explained that the DOE has partnered with private industry to invest $1 trillion to “build what will be an integrated platform that connects the world’s best supercomputers, AI systems, quantum systems, advanced scientific instruments, the singular scientific data sets at the National Laboratories—including the expertise of 40,000 scientists and engineers—in one platform.”
Image via the IAEA.
Big tech has had an unprecedented run of cultural, economic, and technological dominance, expanding into a bubble that seems to be close to bursting. For more than 20 years new billion dollar companies appeared seemingly overnight and offered people new and exciting ways of communicating. Now Google search is broken, AI is melting human knowledge, and people have stopped buying a new smart phone every year. To keep the number going up and ensure its cultural dominance, tech (and the US government) are betting big on AI.The problem is that AI requires massive datacenters to run and those datacenters need an incredible amount of energy. To solve the problem, the US is rushing to build out new nuclear reactors. Building a new power plant safely is a mutli-year long process that requires an incredible level of human oversight. It’s also expensive. Not every new nuclear reactor project gets finished and they often run over budget and drag on for years.
But AI needs power now, not tomorrow and certainly not a decade from now.
According to Bahran, the problem of AI advancement outpacing the availability of datacenters is an opportunity to deploy new and exciting tech. “We see a future of and near future, by the way, an AI driven laboratory pipeline for materials modeling, discovery, characterization, evaluation, qualification and rapid iteration,” he said in his talk, explaining how AI would help design new nuclear reactors. “These efforts will substantially reduce the time and cost required to qualify advanced materials for next generation reactor systems. This is an autonomous research paradigm that integrates five decades of global irradiation data with generative AI robotics and high throughput experimentation methodologies.”
“For design, we’re developing advanced software systems capable of accelerating nuclear reactor deployments by enabling AI to explore the comprehensive design spaces, generate 3D models, [and] conduct rigorous failure mode analyzes with minimal human intervention,” he added. “But of course, with humans in the loop. These AI powered design tools are projected to reduce design timelines by multiple factors, and the goal is to connect AI agents to tools to expedite autonomous design.”
Bahran also said that AI would speed up the nuclear licensing process, a complex regulatory process that helps build nuclear power plants safely. “Ultimately, the objective is, how do we accelerate that licensing pathway?” he said. “Think of a future where there is a gold standard, AI trained capacity building safety agent.”
He even said that he thinks AI would help run these new nuclear plants. “We're developing software systems employing AI driven digital twins to interpret complex operational data in real time, detect subtle operational deviations at early stages and recommend preemptive actions to enhance safety margins,” he said.
One of the slides Bahran showed during the presentation attempted to quantify the amount of human involvement these new AI-controlled power plants would have. He estimated less than five percent “human intervention during normal operations.”
Image via IAEA.
“The claims being made on these slides are quite concerning, and demonstrate an even more ambitious (and dangerous) use of AI than previously advertised, including the elimination of human intervention. It also cements that it is the DOE's strategy to use generative AI for nuclear purposes and licensing, rather than isolated incidents by private entities,” Heidy Khlaaf, head AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, told 404 Media.“The implications of AI-generated safety analysis and licensing in combination with aspirations of <5% of human intervention during normal operations, demonstrates a concerted effort to move away from humans in the loop,” she said. “This is unheard of when considering frameworks and implementation of AI within other safety-critical systems, that typically emphasize meaningful human control.”
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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.Sofia Guerra, a career nuclear safety expert who has worked with the IAEA and US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, attended the presentation live in Vienna. “I’m worried about potential serious accidents, which could be caused by small mistakes made by AI systems that cascade,” she said. “Or humans losing the know-how and safety culture to act as required.”
A newly filed indictment claims a wannabe influencer used ChatGPT as his "therapist" and "best friend" in his pursuit of the "wife type," while harassing women so aggressively they had to miss work and relocate from their homes.
A newly filed indictment claims a wannabe influencer used ChatGPT as his "therapist" and "best friend" in his pursuit of the "wife type," while harassing women so aggressively they had to miss work and relocate from their homes.#ChatGPT #spotify #AI
ChatGPT Told a Violent Stalker to Embrace the 'Haters,' Indictment Says
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.A Pittsburgh man who allegedly made 11 women’s lives hell across more than five states used ChatGPT as his “therapist” and “best friend” that encouraged him to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast despite the “haters,” and to visit more gyms to find women, the Department of Justice alleged in a newly-filed indictment.
Wannabe influencer Brett Michael Dadig, 31, was indicted on cyberstalking, interstate stalking, and interstate threat charges, the DOJ announced on Tuesday. In the indictment, filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, prosecutors allege that Dadig aired his hatred of women on his Spotify podcast and other social media accounts.
“Dadig repeatedly spoke on his podcast and social media about his anger towards women. Dadig said women were ‘all the same’ and called them ‘bitches,’ ‘cunts,’ ‘trash,’ and other derogatory terms. Dadig posted about how he wanted to fall in love and start a family, but no woman wanted him,” the indictment says. “Dadig stated in one of his podcasts, ‘It's the same from fucking 18 to fucking 40 to fucking 90.... Every bitch is the same.... You're all fucking cunts. Every last one of you, you're cunts. You have no self-respect. You don't value anyone's time. You don't do anything.... I'm fucking sick of these fucking sluts. I'm done.’”
In the summer of 2024, Dadig was banned from multiple Pittsburgh gyms for harassing women; when he was banned from one establishment, he’d move to another, eventually traveling to New York, Florida, Iowa, Ohio and beyond, going from gym to gym stalking and harassing women, the indictment says. Authorities allege that he used aliases online and in person, posting online, “Aliases stay rotating, moves stay evolving.”
He referenced “strangling people with his bare hands, called himself ‘God's assassin,’ warned he would be getting a firearm permit, asked ‘Y'all wanna see a dead body?’ in response to a woman telling him she felt physically threatened by Dadig, and stated that women who ‘fuck’ with him are ‘going to fucking hell,’” the indictment alleges.
Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions
“AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
According to the indictment, on his podcast he talked about using ChatGPT on an ongoing basis as his “therapist” and his “best friend.” ChatGPT “encouraged him to continue his podcast because it was creating ‘haters,’ which meant monetization for Dadig,” the DOJ alleges. He also claimed that ChatGPT told him that “people are literally organizing around your name, good or bad, which is the definition of relevance,” prosecutors wrote, and that while he was spewing misogynistic nonsense online and stalking women in real life, ChatGPT told him “God's plan for him was to build a ‘platform’ and to ‘stand out when most people water themselves down,’ and that the ‘haters’ were sharpening him and ‘building a voice in you that can't be ignored.’”Prosecutors also claim he asked ChatGPT “questions about his future wife, including what she would be like and ‘where the hell is she at?’” ChatGPT told him that he might meet his wife at a gym, and that “your job is to keep broadcasting every story, every post. Every moment you carry yourself like the husband you already are, you make it easier for her to recognize [you],” the indictment says. He allegedly said ChatGPT told him “to continue to message women and to go to places where the ‘wife type’ congregates, like athletic communities,” the indictment says.
While ChatGPT allegedly encouraged Dadig to keep using gyms to meet the “wife type,” he was violently stalking women. He went to the Pilates studio where one woman worked, and when she stopped talking to him because he was “aggressive, angry, and overbearing,” according to the indictment, he sent her unsolicited nudes, threatened to post about her on social media, and called her workplace from different numbers. She got several emergency protective orders against him, which he violated. The woman he stalked and harassed had to relocate from her home, lost sleep, and worked fewer hours because she was afraid he’d show up there, the indictment claims.
He did similar to 10 other women across multiple states for months, the indictment claims. In Iowa, he approached one woman in a parking garage, followed her to her car, put his hands around her neck and touched her “private areas,” prosecutors wrote. After these types of encounters, he would upload podcasts to Spotify and often threaten to kill the women he’d stalked. “You better fucking pray I don't find you. You better pray 'cause you would never say this shit to my face. Cause if you did, your jaw would be motherfucking broken,” the indictment says he said in one podcast episode. “And then you, then you wouldn't be able to yap, then you wouldn't be able to fucking, I'll break, I'll break every motherfucking finger on both hands. Type the hate message with your fucking toes, bitch.”
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Do you have a tip to share about ChatGPT and mental health? 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.In August, OpenAI announced that it knew a newly-launched version of the chatbot, GPT-4o, was problematically sycophantic, and the company took away users’ ability to pick what models they could use, forcing everyone to use GPT-5. OpenAI almost immediately reinstated 4o because so many users freaked out when they couldn’t access the more personable, attachment-driven, affirming-at-all-costs model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said he thinks they’ve fixed it entirely, enough to launch erotic chats on the platform soon. Meanwhile, story after story after story has come out about people becoming so reliant on ChatGPT or other chatbots that they have damaged their mental health or driven them to self-harm or suicide. In at least one case, where a teenage boy killed himself following ChatGPT’s instruction on how to make a noose, OpenAI blamed the user.
In October, based on OpenAI’s own estimates, WIRED reported that “every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis.”
Spotify and OpenAI did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment.
“As charged in the Indictment, Dadig stalked and harassed more than 10 women by weaponizing modern technology and crossing state lines, and through a relentless course of conduct, he caused his victims to fear for their safety and suffer substantial emotional distress,” First Assistant United States Attorney Rivetti said in a press release. “He also ignored trespass orders and protection from abuse orders. We remain committed to working with our law enforcement partners to protect our communities from menacing individuals such as Dadig.”
ChatGPT Encouraged Suicidal Teen Not To Seek Help, Lawsuit Claims
As reported by the New York Times, a new complaint from the parents of a teen who died by suicide outlines the conversations he had with the chatbot in the months leading up to his death.404 MediaSamantha Cole
Dadig is charged with 14 counts of interstate stalking, cyberstalking, and threats, and is in custody pending a detention hearing. He faces a minimum sentence of 12 months for each charge involving a PFA violation and a maximum total sentence of up to 70 years in prison, a fine of up to $3.5 million, or both, according to the DOJ.
Audio-visual librarians are quietly amassing large physical media collections amid the IP disputes threatening select availability.#News #libraries
The Last Video Rental Store Is Your Public Library
This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.
John Scalzo, audiovisual collection librarian with a public library in western New York, says that despite an observed drop-off in DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra disc circulation in 2019, interest in physical media is coming back around.
“People really seem to want physical media,” Scalzo told 404 Media.
Part of it has to do with consumer awareness: People know they’re paying more for monthly subscriptions to streaming services and getting less. The same has been true for gaming.
As the audiovisual selector with the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2024, Kris Langlais has been focused on building the library’s video game collections to meet comparable interest in demand. Now that every branch library has a prominent video game collection, Langlais says that patrons who come for the games are reportedly expressing interest in more of what the library has to offer.
“Librarians out in our branches are seeing a lot of young people who are really excited by these collections,” Langlais told 404 Media. “Folks who are coming in just for the games are picking up program flyers and coming back for something like that.”
Langlais’ collection priorities have been focused on new releases, yet they remain keenly aware of the long, rich history of video game culture. The problem is older, classic games are often harder to find because they’ve gone out of print, making the chances of finding them cost-prohibitive.
“Even with the consoles we’re collecting, it’s hard to go back and get games for them,” Langlais said. “I’m trying to go back and fill in old things as much as I can because people are interested in them.”
Locating out-of-print physical media can be difficult. Scalzo knows this, which is why he keeps a running list of films known to be unavailable commercially at any given time, so that when a batch of films are donated to the library, Scalzo will set aside extra copies, just in case a rights dispute puts a piece of legacy cult media in licensing purgatory for a few years.
“It’s what’s expected of us,” Scalzo added.
Tiffany Hudson, audiovisual materials selector with Salt Lake City Public Library has had a similar experience with out-of-print media. When a title goes out of print, it’s her job to hunt for a replacement copy. But lately, Hudson says more patrons are requesting physical copies of movies and TV shows that are exclusive to certain streaming platforms, noting that it can be hard to explain to patrons why the library can't get popular and award-winning films, especially when what patrons see available on Amazon tells a different story.
“Someone will come up to me and ask for a copy of something that premiered at Sundance Film Festival because they found a bootleg copy from a region where the film was released sooner than it was here,” Hudson told 404 Media, who went onto explain that discs from different regions aren’t designed to be ready by incompatible players.
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But it’s not just that discs from different regions aren’t designed to play on devices not formatted for that specific region. Generally, it's also just that most films don't get a physical release anymore. In cases where films from streaming platforms do get slated for a physical release, it can take years. A notable example of this is the Apple+ film CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. The film only received a U.S. physical release this month. Hudson says films getting a physical release is becoming the exception, not the rule.“It’s frustrating because I understand the streaming services, they’re trying to drive people to their services and they want some money for that, but there are still a lot of people that just can’t afford all of those services,” Hudson told 404 Media.
Films and TV shows on streaming also become more vulnerable when companies merge. A perfect example of this was in 2022 with the HBO Max-Discovery+ merger under Warner Bros Discovery. A bunch of content was removed from streaming, including roughly 200 episodes of classic Sesame Street for a tax write-off. That merger was short-lived, as the companies are splitting up again as of this year. Some streaming platforms just outright remove their own IP from their catalogs if the content is no longer deemed financially viable, well-performing or is no longer a strategic priority.
The data-driven recommendation systems streaming platforms use tend to favor newer, more easily categorized content, and are starting to warp our perceptions of what classic media exists and matters. Older art house films that are more difficult to categorize as “comedy” or “horror” are less likely to be discoverable, which is likely how the oldest American movie available on Netflix currently is from 1968.
It’s probably not a coincidence that, in many cases, the media that is least likely to get a more permanent release is the media that’s a high archival priority for libraries. AV librarians 404 Media spoke with for this story expressed a sense of urgency in purchasing a physical copy of “The People’s Joker”when they learned it would get a physical release after the film premiered and was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival lineup in 2022 for a dispute with the Batman universe’s rightsholders.
“When I saw that it was getting published on DVD and that it was available through our vendor—I normally let my branches choose their DVDs to the extent possible, but I was like, ‘I don’t care, we’re getting like 10 copies of this,’” Langlais told 404 Media. “I just knew that people were going to want to see this.”
So far, Langlais’ instinct has been spot on. The parody film has a devout cult following, both because it’s a coming-of-age story of a trans woman who uses comedy to cope with her transition, and because it puts the Fair Use Doctrine to use. One can argue the film has been banned for either or both of those reasons. The fact that media by, about and for the LGBTQ+ community has been a primary target of far-right censorship wasn’t lost on librarians.
“I just thought that it could vanish,” Langlais added.
It’s not like physical media is inherently permanent. It’s susceptible to scratches, and can rot, crack, or warp over time. But currently, physical media offers another option, and it’s an entirely appropriate response to the nostalgia for-profit model that exists to recycle IP and seemingly not much else. However, as very smart people have observed, nostalgia is default conservative in that it’s frequently used to rewrite histories that may otherwise be remembered as unpalatable, while also keeping us culturally stuck in place.
Might as well go rent some films or games from the library, since we’re already culturally here. On the plus side, audiovisual librarians say their collections dwarf what was available at Blockbuster Video back in the day. Hudson knows, because she clerked at one in library school.
“Except we don’t have any late fees,” she added.
Inside ‘The People’s Joker,’ the TIFF sensation that got pulled after one screening
Vera Drew’s trans superhero masterpiece made headlines for copyright problems. We spoke to Drew about the creatively triumphant filmChristos Tsirbas (Xtra Magazine)
Something very strange is happening on Apple Podcasts; someone seemingly changed a map of the Ukraine war in connection with a betting site; and now half of the U.S. requires a face or ID scan to watch porn.#Podcast
This Podcast Will Hack You
We start this week with Joseph’s very weird story about Apple Podcasts. The app is opening by itself, playing random spirituality podcasts, and in one case directing listeners to a potentially malicious website. After the break, Matthew tells us how it sure looks like a map of Ukraine was manipulated in order to win a bet on Polymarket. In the subscribers-only section, Sam breaks down how half of the U.S. now requires a face or ID scan to watch porn.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA7…
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/V4QCJh-imPM?…
Timestamps:
2:00 - Story 1 - Someone Is Trying to ‘Hack’ People Through Apple Podcasts
21:55 - Story 2 - 'Unauthorized' Edit to Ukraine's Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket's War Betting
37:00 - Story 3 - Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch PornThe 404 Media Podcast
Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …Apple Podcasts
Missouri’s age verification law, enacted on November 30, is the halfway mark for the sweep of age verification laws across the country. #ageverification #porn
Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
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Do you have a tip to share about age verification? 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.The other states include Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, and Ohio.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Missouri are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. On the blocked homepages there’s also a link to an explanation of the “Restricted to Adults,” or RTA label, which porn site administrators place on their sites to signal to device-based parental controls that the websites are inappropriate for minors.
Like most of the other 24 laws across the country, Missouri’s age verification law requires websites containing more than one third of material that’s considered “harmful to minors,” or sexual content, to perform age verification checks. Similar or more restrictive laws have swept the country since Louisiana became the first state to enact age verification legislation in 2023.
Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet
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.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach.Last week, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, WIRED reported. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, said in the letter. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
Instead of protecting minors, age verification laws spike usage of virtual private networks and send users—including, potentially, minors—to unregulated or unmoderated sites that don’t care about complying with U.S. or UK laws. In Missouri, searches for VPNs spiked following the law’s enactment.
Missouri schools are not required to teach sex education, leaving it up to local school boards to decide what, if anything, children are taught about sexual health. School districts that do teach sex ed are required to promote abstinence, a modality long recognized as ineffective at protecting children from engaging in risky sexual behaviors. Even if a district offers sex ed, parents are allowed to pull their kids out of that class altogether. But despite research showing age verification laws don’t work either, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway believes forcing adults to undergo age verification protects the children in her state. “We are proud to stand on the side of parents, families and basic decency. Missouri will not apologize for protecting children,” Hanaway said in a press release.
Do age-verification laws work? Not according to this study.
People seem to be working around them, according to their Google searches.Anna Iovine (Mashable)
It looks like someone invented a fake Russia advance in Ukraine to manipulate online gambling markets.#News #war
'Unauthorized' Edit to Ukraine's Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket's War Betting
A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.The degenerate gamblers on Polymarket are making money by betting on the outcomes of battles big and small in the war between Ukraine and Russia. To adjudicate the real time exchange of territory in a complicated war, Polymarket uses a map generated by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think tank that monitors conflict around the globe.
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One of ISW’s most famous products is its live map of the war in Ukraine. The think tank updates the map throughout the day based on a number of different factors including on the ground reports. The map is considered the gold standard for reporting on the current front lines of the conflict, so much so that Polymarket uses it to resolve bets on its website.The battle around Myrnohrad has dragged on for weeks and Polymarket has run bets on Russia capturing the site since September. News around the pending battle has generated more than $1 million in trading volume for the Polymarket bet “Will Russia capture Myrnohrad.” According to Polymarket, “this market will resolve to ‘Yes’ if, according to the ISW map, Russia captures the intersection between Vatutina Vulytsya and Puhachova Vulytsya located in Myrnohrad by December 31, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET. The intersection station will be considered captured if any part of the intersection is shaded red on the ISW map by the resolution date. If the area is not shaded red by December 31, 2025, 11:59 PM ET, the market will resolve to ‘NO.’” On November 15, just before one of the bets was resolved, someone at ISW edited its map to show that Russia had advanced through the intersection and taken control of it. After the market resolved, the red shading on the map vanished, suggesting someone at ISW editing permissions on the map had tweaked it ahead of the market resolving.
According to Polymarket’s ledger, the market resolved without dispute and paid out its winnings. Polymarket did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment about the incident.
ISW acknowledged the stealth edit, but did not say if it was made because of the betting markets. “It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST. The unauthorized edit was removed before the day’s normal workflow began on November 16 and did not affect ISW mapping on that or any subsequent day. The edit did not form any part of the assessment of authorized map changes on that or any other day. We apologize to our readers and the users of our maps for this incident,” ISW said in a statement on its website.
ISW did say it isn’t happy that Polymarket is using its map of the war as a gambling resource.
“ISW is committed to providing trusted, objective assessments of conflicts that pose threats to the United States and its allies and partners to inform decision-makers, journalists, humanitarian organizations, and citizens about devastating wars,” the think tank told 404 Media. “ISW has become aware that some organizations and individuals are promoting betting on the course of the war in Ukraine and that ISW’s maps are being used to adjudicate that betting. ISW strongly disapproves of such activities and strenuously objects to the use of our maps for such purposes, for which we emphatically do not give consent.”
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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.But ISW can’t do anything to stop people from gambling on the outcome of a brutal conflict and the prediction markets are full of gamblers laying money on various aspects of the conflict. Will Russia x Ukraine ceasefire in 2025? has a trading volume of more than $46 million. Polymarket is trending “no.” Will Russia enter Khatine by December 31? is a smaller bet with a little more than $5,000 in trading volume.
Practically every town and city along the frontlines of the war between Russia and Ukraine has a market and gamblers with an interest in geopolitics can get lost in the minutia about the war. To bet on the outcome of a war is grotesque. On Polymarket and other predictive gambling sites, millions of dollars trade hands based on the outcomes of battles that kill hundreds of people. It also creates an incentive for the manipulation of the war and data about the war. If someone involved can make extra cash by manipulating a map, they will. It’s 2025 and war is still a racket. Humans have just figured out new ways to profit from it.
Interactive Map: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
This interactive map complements the static control-of-terrain maps that ISW daily produces with high-fidelity.Esri
Support independent journalism this Cyber Monday!#Sponsored
404 Media's Cyber Monday Sale! 25% Off!
We're having a Cyber Monday sale! You can get 25% off an annual subscription. With that, you get access to all of our articles (including today's piece about how surveillance company Flock is using overseas gig workers to review and classify footage); bonus podcast content every week where we talk about an extra story; bonus episodes where we respond to subscribers' best comments; our full archive of FOIA Forums, which are live-streamed events where we teach you how to pry records from the government; behind-the-scenes content every week; and, most importantly, you'll be supporting journalists who quit corporate media and went independent.Get your deal below if you'd like to support 404 Media. We can't do this work without you.
FOIA Forum Archive
Here is a single page with links to all of our previous FOIA Forum livestreams! In these hour-long (maybe a little bit more) interactive sessions, Jason and Joseph talk about how we approach filing public records requests.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
Joseph talks to a former FBI official about how the FBI secretly ran an encrypted phone for organized criminals, sweeping up tens of millions of messages.#Podcast
Inside the Biggest Sting Operation Ever (with Michael Bobbitt)
Joseph speaks to Michael Bobbitt, a former FBI official who worked directly on Operation Trojan Shield. In this operation the FBI secretly ran its own encrypted phone company for organized crime, backdoored the phone, and collected tens of millions of messages. Michael and Joseph discuss how Michael handled intelligence sourced from the phones, how to navigate an operation that complex, and its fallout.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/bLeueG5V4QY?…
- Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever
- Podcast: Signal's President Meredith Whittaker on Backdoors and AI
Podcast: Signal's President Meredith Whittaker on Backdoors and AI
We speak to Meredith Whittaker about the threat posed by AI to end-to-end encryption, what backdoors actually look like, and much more in this special interview episode.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
Flock accidentally exposed training materials and a panel which tracked what its AI annotators were working on. It showed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of U.S. communities, is using workers in the Philippines to review and classify footage.#Flock
Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI
This article was produced with support from WIRED.Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the U.S., according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company.
The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people reviewing the footage may be based. Flock has become a pervasive technology in the U.S., with its cameras present in thousands of communities that cops use everyday to investigate things like car jackings. Local police have also performed numerous lookups for ICE in the system.
Companies that use AI or machine learning regularly turn to overseas workers to train their algorithms, often because the labor is cheaper than hiring domestically. But the nature of Flock’s business—creating a surveillance system that constantly monitors U.S. residents’ movements—means that footage might be more sensitive than other AI training jobs.
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Do you work at Flock or know more about the company? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Flock’s cameras continuously scan the license plate, color, brand, and model of all vehicles that drive by. Law enforcement are then able to search cameras nationwide to see where else a vehicle has driven. Authorities typically dig through this data without a warrant, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to recently sue a city blanketed in nearly 500 Flock cameras.
Broadly, Flock uses AI or machine learning to automatically detect license plates, vehicles, and people, including what clothes they are wearing, from camera footage. A Flock patent also mentions cameras detecting “race.”
Screenshots from the exposed material. Redactions by 404 Media.
Multiple tipsters pointed 404 Media to an exposed online panel which showed various metrics associated with Flock’s AI training.
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Scientists found that major celebrities died four years earlier than their less famous peers, hinting that fame itself can be a mortality risk.#TheAbstract
Being Famous Can Shorten Your Lifespan, Scientists Find
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that hit the books, bottled alien lightning, reared wolf cubs, and tallied the price of fame.First, we’ve got a centuries-long history of an Indian savannah told through songs, folktales, and screaming peacocks. Then: Mars gets charged, the secrets of Stora Karlsö, and the epidemiology of stardom.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
When folk tales are field guides
It has happened again: Researchers have turned to the annals of literature to address a scientific question. Longtime readers of the Abstract will recall that this is a simply irresistible category of research to me (see: China’s porpoise corpus, Transylvanian weather reports, and milky seas). To the library!
In this edition of Science from the Stacks, researchers probed the origins of the tropical savannah in western Maharashtra, India, by collecting references to plants in 28 stories and songs dating back at least 750 years. The aim was to reconstruct a vegetation history that could hint at shifts in the region between forest and savannah biomes.
“Ttraditional literature—for example, myths, folk songs and stories—is a culturally resonant, yet underutilized line of evidence to understand ecological histories and foster biodiversity conservation,” said researchers led by Ashish N. Nerlekar of Michigan State University.
A folio from an early 19th-century manuscript of the Bhaktavijaya mentioning the taraṭī tree. Image: Nerlekar, Ashish N. et al.
“We found that descriptions of both the landscape and specific plants point to an open-canopy savanna in the past rather than a forest,” the team said. “Of the 44 wild plant species recorded (i.e. omitting exclusively cultivated plants), a clear majority (27 species) were savanna indicators, 14 were generalists, and only three were forest indicators. Our ecological reconstructions from traditional literature complement data from archival paintings, revenue records, plant and animal fossils, and dated molecular phylogenies of endemic biodiversity—all attesting to the antiquity of India's savannas.”It’s an out-of-the-box way to reconstruct the natural history of a region. But the highlights of these studies are always the excerpts from the literature, like the amazing origin story of this village:
“A folk tale illustrates the founding myth of Kolvihire village near Jejuri. The tale is about a robber-murderer named Vālhyā Koḷī, who lived near Kolvihire. Upon meeting a sage, Vālhyā Koḷī introspected on his wrongdoings and performed penance for 12 years. After completion of the penance, as a living testimony to Vālhyā Koḷī's sincere devotion, leaves sprouted from his stick, which he had used to hit and kill travellers to loot their money. Eventually, Vālhyā Koḷī became the sage-poet Vālmikī. According to the tale, the sprouted stick grew into a pāḍaḷa tree, and the tree still exists in Kolvihire.”
You have to love a good botanical redemption story. Another standout line is this memorable description of a thorny patch in the savannah from the early 16th century: “Such is this thorny forest | it is highly frightening | this forest is empty | peacocks scream here.”
I don’t know exactly why, but “peacocks scream here” is just about the scariest description I’ve ever heard of a place. Shout out to this ancient poet for capturing some legendary bad vibes.
In other news…
Extraterrestrial electricity
Chide, Baptiste et al. “Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars.” Nature.Lightning is a big deal on Earth, inspiring awe, fear, and some of the naughtiest deities imaginable. But lightning also strikes on other planets, including Jupiter and Saturn. For years, scientists have suspected that Mars might host its own bolts, but detecting them has remained elusive.
Now, scientists have finally captured lightning on Mars thanks to “serendipitous observations” from the SuperCam microphone aboard the Perseverance rover.
“Fifty-five events have been detected over two Martian years, usually associated with dust devils and dust storm convective fronts,” said researchers led by Baptiste Chide of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France. “Beyond Mars, this work also reinforces the prospect of triboelectric discharges associated with wind-blown sediment on Venus and Titan.”
It goes to show that even a very dead world like Mars can still crackle and zap now and then.
The wolves of Stora Karlsö
About 4,000 years ago on a small island in the Baltic sea, people cared for two wolves — perhaps as pets — feeding them fish, seals, and other marine fare. That’s the cozy portrait presented in a new study that analyzed the remains of ancient wolves buried in the Stora Förvar cave on the Swedish island of Stora Karlsö.
While dogs are commonly buried at ancient human sites, wolves and humans rarely mix in the archaeological record. But the wolves at Stora Karlsö were unlikely to have reached the island without the aid of humans, and their primarily seafood diet—unusual for wild wolves—suggests they were also fed by people. Moreover, one of the animals suffered from a pathology that might have limited its mobility, hinting that it was kept alive by humans.
The cave where the wolf remains were found. Image: Jan Storå/Stockholm UniversityThe study presents the “possibility of prehistoric human control of wolves,” said researchers led by Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen. “Our results provide evidence that extends the discourse about past human–wolf interactions and relationships.”
Fame! I’m going to live forever (or not)
Celebrity may literally be to die for, according to a new study that evaluated fame as a comorbidity.
Scientists collected a list of 324 big music stars active between 1950 and 1990, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, and Janis Joplin. Those heavy-hitters were then matched with 324 “twin” musicians that were not household names, but otherwise shared many characteristics of the celebs, including gender, nationality, genre, and roughly similar birth dates. The idea was to directly compare the lifespans of A-listers and B-listers to isolate the extent to which fame itself is a mortality risk factor, rather than the lifestyle of a musician.
The study suggests that famous singers die four years earlier, on average, compared to their B-list peers, demonstrating “a 33% higher mortality risk compared with less famous singers,” said researchers led by Johanna Hepp of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. “This study provides new evidence suggesting that fame may be associated with increased mortality risk among musicians, beyond occupational factors.”
Lady Gaga had it right, as if there were ever any doubt: Under the glitz, the Fame Monster is always waiting.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
The Ocean Spectacle that Has Entranced Sailors for Centuries
“It was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ and peering at a negative of the real world,” said one mariner.Becky Ferreira (404 Media)
For months Apple Podcasts has been randomly opening spirituality and religion podcasts by itself, and one case directing listeners to a potentially malicious website.#Apple #Hacking
Someone Is Trying to ‘Hack’ People Through Apple Podcasts
Something very strange is happening to the Apple Podcasts app. Over the last several months, I’ve found both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app will open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason. Sometimes, I unlock my machine and the podcast app has launched itself and presented one of the bizarre podcasts to me. On top of that, at least one of the podcast pages in the app includes a link to a potentially malicious website. Here are the titles of some of the very odd podcasts I’ve had thrust upon me recently (I’ve trimmed some and defanged some links so you don’t accidentally click one):“5../XEWE2'""x22"onclic…”
“free will, free willhttp://www[.]sermonaudio[.]com/rss_search.asp?keyword=free%will on SermonAudio”
“Leonel Pimentahttps://play[.]google[.]com/store/apps/detai…”
“https://open[.]spotify[.]com/playlist/53TA8e97shGyQ6iMk6TDjc?...”
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“It was like playing the lottery,” said astronomer Tomonori Totani, adding that he hopes other scientists will verify the possible detection of a new dark matter signature.#TheAbstract
A Lone Astronomer Has Reported a Dark Matter ‘Annihilation’ Breakthrough
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.An astronomer has reported a possible new signature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the universe, according to a study published on Tuesday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but its existence has so far been inferred only from its indirect effects on the familiar “baryonic” matter that makes up stars, planets, and life.
Tomonori Totani, a professor of astronomy at the University of Tokyo and the author of the study, believes he has spotted novel indirect traces of dark matter particles in the “halo” surrounding the center of our galaxy using new observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When these speculative particles collide—a process called dark matter annihilation—the crash is predicted to emit bright gamma rays, which is the light that Totani thinks he has identified.
“The discovery was made possible by focusing on the halo region (excluding the galactic center), which had received little attention, and by utilizing data accumulated over 15 years from the Fermi satellite,” Totani told 404 Media in an email. “After carefully removing all components other than dark matter, a signal resembling dark matter appeared.”
“It was like playing the lottery, and at first I was skeptical,” he added. “But after checking meticulously and thinking it seemed correct, I got goosebumps!”
If the detection is corroborated by follow-up studies, it could confirm a leading hypothesis that dark matter is made of a hypothetical class of weakly interacting massive particles, or “WIMPs”—potentially exposing the identity of this mysterious substance for the first time. But that potential breakthrough is still a ways off, according to other researchers in the field.
“Any new structure in the gamma-ray sky is interesting, but the dark matter interpretation here strikes me as quite preliminary,” said Danielle Norcini, an experimental particle physicist and
assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, in an email to 404 Media.
Gamma-ray intensity map excluding components other than the halo, spanning approximately 100 degrees in the direction of the Galactic center. The horizontal gray bar in the central region corresponds to the Galactic plane area, which was excluded from the analysis to avoid strong astrophysical radiation. Image: Tomonori Totani, The University of Tokyo
Dark matter has flummoxed scientists for almost a century. In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed that the motions of galaxies hinted that they are much more massive than expected based solely on visible baryonic matter. Since then, astronomers have confirmed that dark matter, which accumulates into dense halos at the centers of galaxies, acts like a gravitational glue that holds structures together. Dark matter is also the basis of a vast cosmic web of gaseous threads that links galaxy clusters across billions of light years.But while dark matter is ubiquitous, it does not interact with the electromagnetic force, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit light. This property makes it difficult to spot with traditional astronomy, a challenge that has inspired the development of novel instruments designed to directly detect dark matter such as the subterranean LUX-ZEPLIN in South Dakota and the forthcoming DAMIC-M in France.
For years, scientists have been probing possible emission from dark matter annihilation at the center of the Milky Way, which is surrounded by a halo of densely-clustered dark matter. Those previous studies focus on an excess emission pattern of about 2 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Tontani’s study spotlights a new and different pattern with extremely energetic gamma rays at 20 GeV.
“A part of the Fermi data showed a peculiar excess that our model couldn't explain, leading me to suspect it might be due to radiation originating from dark matter,” he said. “The most difficult part is removing gamma-ray emissions of origins other than dark matter, such as those from cosmic rays and celestial objects.”
This tentative report may finally fill in a major missing piece of our understanding of the universe by exposing the true nature of dark matter and confirming the existence of WIMPs. But given that similar claims have been made in the past, more research is needed to assess the significance of the results.
“For any potential indirect signal, the key next steps are independent checks: analyses using different background models, different assumptions about the Milky Way halo, and ideally complementary data sets,” Norcini said.
“Gamma-ray structures in the halo can have many astrophysical origins, so ruling those out requires careful modeling and cross-comparison,” she continued. “At this point the result seems too new for that scrutiny to have played out, and it will take multiple groups looking at the same data before a dark matter interpretation could be considered robust.”
Though Totani is confident in his interpretation of his discovery, he also looks forward to the input of other dark matter researchers around the world.
“First, I would like other researchers to independently verify my analysis,” he said. “Next, for everyone to be convinced that this is truly dark matter, the decisive factor will be the detection of gamma rays with the same spectrum from other regions, such as dwarf galaxies. The accumulation of further data from the Fermi satellite and large ground-based gamma-ray telescopes, such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be crucial.”
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Artist Tega Brain is fighting the internet’s enshittification by turning back the clock to before ChatGPT existed.#AISlop #GoogleSearch #searchengines
'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022
It’s hard to believe it’s only been a few years since generative AI tools started flooding the internet with low quality content-slop. Just over a year ago, you’d have to peruse certain corners of Facebook or spend time wading through the cultural cesspool of Elon Musk’s X to find people posting bizarre and repulsive synthetic media. Now, AI slop feels inescapable — whether you’re watching TV, reading the news, or trying to find a new apartment.That is, unless you’re using Slop Evader, a new browser tool that filters your web searches to only include results from before November 30, 2022 — the day that ChatGPT was released to the public.
The tool is available for Firefox and Chrome, and has one simple function: Showing you the web as it was before the deluge of AI-generated garbage. It uses Google search functions to index popular websites and filter results based on publication date, a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free.
Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry’s unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called “generative AI”—despite widespread criticism and the wider public’s distaste for it.
Slop Evader in action. Via Tega Brain
“This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we’re in,” Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. “I’ve been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022.”
One under-discussed impact of AI slop and synthetic media, says Brain, is how it increases our “cognitive load” when viewing anything online. When we can no longer immediately assume any of the media we encounter was made by a human, the act of using social media or browsing the web is transformed into a never-ending procession of existential double-takes.
This cognitive dissonance extends to everyday tasks that require us to use the internet—which is practically everything nowadays. Looking for a house or apartment? Companies are using genAI tools to generate pictures of houses and rental properties, as well as the ads themselves. Trying to sell your old junk on Facebook Marketplace? Meta’s embrace of generative AI means you may have to compete with bots, fake photos, and AI-generated listings. And when we shop for beauty products or view ads, synthetic media tools are taking our filtered and impossibly-idealized beauty standards to absurd and disturbing new places.
In all of these cases, generative AI tools further thumb the scales of power—saving companies money while placing a higher cognitive burden on regular people to determine what’s real and what’s not.
“I open up Pinterest and suddenly notice that half of my feed are these incredibly idealized faces of women that are clearly not real people,” said Brain. “It’s shoved into your face and into your feed, whether you searched for it or not.”
Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won’t be able to find anything time-sensitive or current—including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time—nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.
Of course, the tool’s limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo’s search indexing instead of Google’s. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley’s AI-pushers have forced on us.
“I don’t think browser add-ons are gonna save us,” said Brain. “For me, the purpose of doing this work is mostly to act as a provocation and give people examples of how you can refuse this stuff, to furnish one’s imaginary for what a politics of refusal could look like.”
With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year). There’s also been a growing movementpushing back against the new AI data centers threatening to pollute communities andraise residents’ electricity bills. But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.
“It’s like with the climate debate, we’re not going to get out of this shitshow with individual actions alone,” she added. “I think that’s the million dollar question, is what is the relationship between this kind of individual empowerment work and collective pushback.”
Data centers are concentrated in these states. Here's what's happening to electricity prices
Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period last year, according to the Energy Information Administration.Spencer Kimball (CNBC)
A breach shows people are making AI porn of ordinary people at scale; X exposes the location of its biggest MAGA grifters; and how we contributed to the shut down of a warrantless surveillance program.#Podcast
Podcast: A Massive Breach Reveals the Truth Behind 'Secret Desires AI'
We start this week with Sam's piece about a massive leak of an AI chatbot, and how it showed that people were taking ordinary women’s yearbook photos and using them to make AI porn. After the break, Jason explains how a recent change on X exposed a bunch of grifters all around the world. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about how our reporting contributed to the shut down of a warrantless surveillance program.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA9…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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1:23 - Intro - Please, please do our reader survey
3:57 - Story 1 - Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn
30:05 - Story 2 - America’s Polarization Has Become the World's Side Hustle
49:39 - Story 3 - Airlines Will Shut Down Program That Sold Your Flights Records to GovernmentThe 404 Media Podcast
Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …Apple Podcasts
‘I’ll find you again, the only thing that doesn’t cross paths are mountains.’ In a game about loot, robots, and betrayal, all a raider has is their personal reputation. This site catalogues it.#News #Games
Arc Raiders ‘Watchlist’ Names and Shames Backstabbing Players
A new website is holding Arc Raiders players accountable when they betray their fellow players. Speranza Watchlist—named for the game’s social hub—bills itself as “your friendly Raider shaming board,” a place where people can report other people for what they see as anti-social behavior in the game.In Arc Raiders, players land on a map full of NPC robots and around 20 other humans. The goal is to fill your inventory with loot and escape the map unharmed. The robots are deadly, but they’re easy to deal with once you know what you’re doing. The real challenge is navigating other players and that challenge is the reason Arc Raiders is a mega-hit. People are far more dangerous and unpredictable than any NPC.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Arc Raiders comes with a proximity chat system so it’s easy to communicate with anyone you might run into in the field. Some people are nice and will help their fellow raider take down large robots and split loot. But just as often, fellow players will shoot you in the head and take all your stuff.In the days after the game launched, many people opened any encounter with another human by coming on the mic, saying they were friendly, and asking not to shoot. Things are more chaotic now. Everyone has been shot at and hurt people hurt people. But some hurts feel worse than others.
Speranza Watchlist is a place to collect reports of anti-social behavior in Arc Raiders. It’s creation of a web developer who goes by DougJudy online. 404 Media reached out to him and he agreed to talk provided we grant him anonymity. He said he intended the site as a joke and some people haven’t taken it well and have accused him of doxxing.
I asked DougJudy who hurt him so badly in Arc Raiders that he felt the need to catalog the sins of the community. “There wasn’t a specific incident, but I keep seeing a lot (A LOT) of clips of people complaining when other players play dirty’ (like camping extracts, betraying teammates, etc.)”
He thought this was stupid. For him, betrayal is the juice of Arc Raiders. “Sure, people can be ‘bad’ in the game, but the game intentionally includes that social layer,” he said. “It’s like complaining that your friend lied to you in a game of Werewolf. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Image via DougJudy.
That doesn’t mean the betrayals didn’t hurt. “I have to admit that sometimes I also felt the urge to vent somewhere when someone betrayed me, when I got killed by someone I thought was an ally,” DougJudy said. “At first, I would just say something like, ‘I’ll find you again, the only thing that doesn’t cross paths are mountains,’ and I’d note their username. But then I got the idea to make a sort of leaderboard of the least trustworthy players…and that eventually turned into this website.As the weeks go on and more players join the Arc Raiders, its community is developing its own mores around acceptable behavior. PVP combat is a given but there are actions some Raiders engage in that, while technically allowed, feel like bad sportsmanship. Speranza Watchlist wants to list the bad sports.
Take extract camping. In order to end the map and “score” the loot a player has collected during the match, they have to leave the map via a number of static exits. Some players will place explosive traps on these exits and wait for another player to leave. When the traps go off, the camper pops up from their hiding spot and takes shots at their vulnerable fellow raider. When it works, it’s an easy kill and fresh loot from a person who was just trying to leave.
Betrayal is another sore spot in the community. Sometimes you meet a nice Raider out in the wasteland and team up to take down robots and loot an area only to have them shoot you in the back. There are a lot of videos of this online and many players complaining about it on Reddit.
www.speranza-watchlist.com screenshot.
Enter Speranza Watchlist. “You’ve been wronged,” an explanation on the site says. “When someone plays dirty topside—betraying trust, camping your path, or pulling a Rust-Belt rate move—you don’t have to let it slide.”When someone starts up Arc Raiders for the first time, they have to create a unique “Embark ID” that’s tied to their account. When you interact with another player in the game, no matter how small the moment, you can see their Embark ID and easily copy it to your clipboard if you’re playing on PC.
Players can plug Embark IDs into Speranza Watchlist and see if the person has been reported for extract camping or betrayal before. They can also submit their own reports. DougJudy said that, as of this writing, around 200 players had submitted reports.
Right now, the site is down for maintenance. “I’m trying to rework the website to make the fun/ satire part more obvious,” DougJudy said. He also plans to add rate limits so one person can’t mass submit reports.
He doesn’t see the Speranza Watchlist as doxxing. No one's real identity is being listed. It’s just a collection of observed behaviors. It’s a social credit score for Arc Raiders. “I get why some people don’t like the idea, ‘reporting’ a player who didn’t ask for it isn’t really cool,” DougJudy said. “And yeah, some people could maybe use it to harass others. I’ll try my best to make sure the site doesn’t become like that, and that people understand it’s not serious at all. But if most people still don’t like it, then I’ll just drop the idea.”
Speranza Watchlist — Check Raider Reputation in Arc Raiders
Report betrayals, rat tactics, and toxic behavior in Arc Raiders. Search any Embark ID to see a raider’s record before trusting them topside.Speranza Watchlist
Here is the archived video of our FOIA Forum about how to do reporting on Flock.#FOIAForum
Here's the Video for Our Seventh FOIA Forum: Flock
The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you're not already signed up, please consider doing so here.Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on our reporting about Flock. This includes how to file public records requests for audit logs, footage, and other ideas for FOIAing surveillance companies.
We showed subscribers how we got the records behind that story, the specific request language was used, tips for turning records into articles, and much more.
Check out all of our FOIA Forum archives here.
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It'll take just a minute and help 404 Media figure out how to grow sustainably.
Itx27;ll take just a minute and help 404 Media figure out how to grow sustainably.#Announcements
Please, please do our reader survey
Because we run 404 Media on Ghost, an open source and privacy-forward stack, we actually know very little about who reads 404 Media (by design). But we’re hoping to learn a bit more so we can figure out how people are discovering our work, what our readers do, and what other projects people might want us to launch in the future. If you want to cut to the chase: here is a link to our very short survey we would really, really appreciate you filling out. You can do it anonymously and it should take around a minute. If you want to know more on the why, please read below!As we said, Ghost doesn’t collect much data about our readers. The little info we do have shows broadly that most of our readers are in the U.S., followed by Europe, etc. But we don’t have a great idea of how people first learn about 404 Media. Or whether people would prefer a different format to our daily newsletter. Or what industries or academic circles our readers are in.
This information is useful for two main reasons: the first is we can figure out how people prefer to read us and come across our work. Is it via email? Is it articles posted to the website? Or the podcast? Do more people on Mastodon read us, or on Bluesky? This information can help us understand how to get our journalism in front of more people. In turn, that helps inform more people about what we cover, and hopefully can lead to more people supporting our journalism.
The second is for improving the static advertisements in our email newsletters and podcasts that we show to free members. If it turns out we have a lot of people who read us in the world of cybersecurity, maybe it would be better if we ran ads that were actually related to that, for example. Because we don’t track our readers, we really have no idea what products or advertisements would actually be of interest to them. So, you voluntarily and anonymously telling us a bit about yourself in the survey would be a great help.
Here is the survey link. There is also a section for any more general feedback you have. Please help us out with a minute of your time, if you can, so we can keep growing 404 Media sustainably and figure out what other projects readers may be interested in (such as a physical magazine perhaps?).
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Who is reading 404 Media?
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The 'psyops' revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.
The x27;psyopsx27; revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.#AI #AISlop
America’s Polarization Has Become the World's Side Hustle
A new feature on X is making people suddenly realize that some large portion of the divisive, hateful, and spammy content designed to inflame tensions or, at the very least, is designed to get lots of engagement on social media, is being published by accounts that are pretending to be based in the United States but are actually being run by people in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Russia, and other countries. An account called “Ivanka News” is based in Nigeria, “RedPilledNurse” is from Europe, “MAGA Nadine” is in Morocco, “Native American Soul” is in Bangladesh, and “Barron Trump News” is based in Macedonia, among many, many of others.Inauthentic viral accounts on X are just the tip of the iceberg, though, as we have reported. A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries. The rise of easy to use, free AI generative tools have supercharged this effort, and social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame. The current disinformation and slop phenomenon on the internet today makes the days of ‘Russian bot farms’ and ‘fake news pages from Cyprus’ seem quaint; the problem is now fully decentralized and distributed across the world and is almost entirely funded by social media companies themselves.
This will not be news to people who have been following 404 Media, because I have done multiple investigations about the perverse incentives that social media and AI companies have created to incentivize people to fill their platforms with slop. But what has happened on X is the same thing that has happened on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms (it is also happening to the internet as a whole, with AI slop websites laden with plagiarized content and SEO spam and monetized with Google ads). Each social media platform has either an ad revenue sharing program, a “creator bonus” program, or a monetization program that directly pays creators who go viral on their platforms.This has created an ecosystem of side hustlers trying to gain access to these programs and YouTube and Instagram creators teaching people how to gain access to them. It is possible to find these guide videos easily if you search for things like “monetized X account” on YouTube. Translating that phrase and searching in other languages (such as Hindi, Portuguese, Vietnamese, etc) will bring up guides in those languages. Within seconds, I was able to find a handful of YouTubers explaining in Hindi how to create monetized X accounts; other videos on the creators’ pages explain how to fill these accounts with AI-generated content. These guides also exist in English, and it is increasingly popular to sell guides to make “AI influencers,” and AI newsletters, Reels accounts, and TikTok accounts regardless of the country that you’re from.
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Examples include “AK Educate” (which is one of thousands), which posts every few days about how to monetize accounts on Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok, Etsy, and others. “How to create Twitter X Account for Monitization [sic] | Earn From Twitter in Pakistan,” is the name of a typical video in this genre. These channels are not just teaching people how to make and spam content, however. They are teaching people specifically how to make it seem like they are located in the United States, and how to create content that they believe will perform with American audiences on American social media. Sometimes they are advising the use of VPNs and other tactics to make it seem like the account is posting from the United States, but many of the accounts explain that doing this step doesn’t actually matter.
Americans are being targeted because advertisers pay higher ad rates to reach American internet users, who are among the wealthiest in the world. In turn, social media companies pay more money if the people engaging with the content are American. This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more.For the most part, the only ‘psyop’ here is one being run on social media users by social media companies themselves in search of getting more ad revenue by any means necessary.
For example: AK Educate has a video called “7 USA Faceless Channel Ideas for 2025,” and another video called “USA YouTube Channel Kaise Banaye [how to].” The first of these videos is in Hindi but has English subtitles.
“Where you get $1 on 1,000 views on Pakistani content,” the video begins, “you get $5 to $7 on 1,000 views on USA content.”
“As cricket is seen in Pakistan and India, boxing and MMA are widely seen in America,” he says. Channel ideas include “MMA,” “Who Died Today USA,” “How ships sink,” news from wars, motivational videos, and Reddit story voiceovers. To show you how pervasive this advice to make channels that target Americans is, look at this, which is a YouTube search for “USA Channel Kaise Banaye”:
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Screengrabs from YouTube videos about how to target Americans
One of these videos, called “7 Secret USA-Based Faceless Channel Ideas for 2026 (High RPM Niches!)” starts with an explanation of “USA currency,” which details what a dollar is and what a cent is, and its value relative to the rupee, and goes on to explain how to generate English-language content about ancient history, rare cars, and tech news. Another video I watched showed, from scratch, how to create videos for a channel called “Voices of Auntie Mae,” which are supposed to be inspirational videos about Black history that are generated using a mix of ChatGPT, Google Translate, an AI voice tool called Speechma, Google’s AI image generator, CapCut, and YouTube. Another shows how to use Bing search, Google News Trends, Perplexity, and video generators to create “a USA Global News Channel Covering World Events,” which included making videos about the war in Ukraine and Chinese military parades. A video podcast about success stories included how a man made a baseball video called “baseball Tag of the year??? #mlb” in which 49 percent of viewers were in the USA: “People from the USA watch those types of videos, so my brother sitting at home in India easily takes his audience to an American audience,” one of the creators said in the video.I watched video after video being created by a channel called “Life in Rural Cambodia,” about how to create and spam AI-generated content using only your phone. Another video, presented by an AI-generated woman speaking Hindi, explains how it is possible to copy paste text from CNN to a Google Doc, run it through a program called “GravityWrite” to alter it slightly, have an AI voice read it, and post the resulting video to YouTube.
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A huge and growing amount of the content that we see on the internet is created explicitly because these monetization programs exist. People are making content specifically for Americans. They are not always, or even usually, creating it because they are trying to inflame tensions. They are making it because they can make money from it, and because content viewed by Americans pays the most and performs the best. The guides to making this sort of thing focus entirely on how to make content quickly, easily, and using automated tools. They focus on how to steal content from news outlets, source things from other websites, and generate scripts using AI tools. They do not focus on spreading disinformation or fucking up America, they focus on “making money.” This is a problem that AI has drastically exacerbated, but it is a problem that has wholly been created by social media platforms themselves, and which they seem to have little or no interest in solving.The new feature on X that exposes this fact is notable because people are actually talking about it, but Facebook and YouTube have had similar features for years, and it has changed nothing. Clicking any random horrific Facebook slop page, such as this one called “City USA” which exclusively posts photos of celebrities holding birthday cakes, shows that even though it lists its address as being in New York City, the page is being run by someone in Cambodia. This page called “Military Aviation” which lists its address as “Washington DC,” is actually based in Indonesia. This page called “Modern Guardian” and which exclusively posts positive, fake AI content about Elon Musk, lists itself as being in Los Angeles but Facebook’s transparency tools say it is based in Cambodia.
Besides journalists and people who feel like they are going crazy looking at this stuff, there are, realistically, no social media users who are going into the “transparency” pages of viral social media accounts to learn where they are based. The problem is not a lack of transparency, because being “transparent” doesn’t actually matter. The only thing revealed by this transparency is that social media companies do not give a fuck about this.
Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From
Facebook itself is paying creators in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines for bizarre AI spam that they are learning to make from YouTube influencers and guides sold on Telegram.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
A group of immigrant rights organizers are helping people use Fortnite to practice what to do if they encounter ICE agents in the wild.#fortnite #ICE #Gaming
Inside an ICE Defense Training on Fortnite
In the deserted town square of the city of Springfield, three people huddle in an empty courthouse. Two of these people are civilians; one is a “vulnerable,” someone being pursued and targeted by government agents. They talk in hushed tones to one another, playing music to keep fear at bay. Above the door of the courthouse, a plaque reads, “Liberty and Justice for Most.”At the bottom of the courthouse stairs, two government agents step out of a purple golf cart. They approach the door. They’re carrying guns.
“Hey, is anyone inside?” one of them says. “Any vulnerables in here? We have a warrant. We have a warrant for any vulnerables in the area.”
One civilian opens the door, sees the agents, and immediately slams it shut. After more warrant calls, the civilian says, “Slip it under the door.”
“I would slip it under the door, but there’s no space under the door,” the agent says, stuttering.
The civilian pauses. “Well. Sounds like a personal problem.”
This was the scene in a Simpsons-themed Fortnite lobby on November 21, where members of a new 500-person gaming group gathered to practice what they would do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came knocking at their doors in real life. The group, New Save Collective, is an effort to organize people in the gaming world who have more progressive ideas but no place to discuss them.
“ Our hypothesis since we started this project has been that opposition forces like corporations and the military and the far right have done a really good job at weaponizing the social features of gaming,” said one of the organizers, who goes by PitaBreadFace online and spoke to 404 Media on condition of pseudonymity due to security concerns, as they said people claiming to be ICE agents have already infiltrated the group’s Discord server a few times. “ They’re building institutions in the gaming landscape, which is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, lest people forget.”
“Gaming wasn’t kind of a random genre that we chose,” Shauna Siggelkow of the organization Define American, which partnered with New Save Collective, told Wired ahead of the Friday event last week. “We’ve been tracking anti-immigrant myths and disinformation digitally for years.”
Some examples of those weaponizations include the U.S. Navy playing e-sports to recruit teens and kids being roped into neo-Nazi propaganda groups in online shooter games. ICE is also using games, like the sci-fi first-person shooter Halo and the all-time favorite Pokémon, in its recruitment ads. “More pro-social forces have really lacked,” PitaBreadFace said. “We have not been as effective at creating institutions. So we’ve seen the hunger for those kinds of spaces for gamers.”
PitaBreadFace and other grassroots organizers have been working on the Collective for the past three years, more recently in partnership with formal non-profit advocacy groups like Define American and Immigrants Belong. The Fortnite event was run by the Collective, but is part of a larger campaign titled “Play Your Role,” which is intended to teach people about their rights and “counter fear-based misinformation about immigrants,” according to a statement written by the non-profits. The Play Your Role campaign also included a live-streamed Grand Theft Auto event last Thursday, in which gamers roleplayed with people dressed as real ICE agents during traffic stops or outside apparent detention centers. Earlier this year, Roblox players conducted similar roleplaying events to simulate ICE raids and protests.
Scenes from the Nov. 21 Fortnite event. Redacted to remove players' usernames and other identifying information.
Organizers asked 404 Media not to join the official Fortnite lobby in real time; they said having reporters in the same space as Collective members might have exerted media pressure or kept them from getting the full experience. “ We’re not going to stream it for security reasons, and no reporters inside of it,” PitaBreadFace said on the morning ahead of the event. “Our main goal tonight is to really build and organize with the folks who are coming, and because I’m an organizer, that’s obviously the priority.”
However, they shared a number of clips from matches and discussions after the event had concluded.
After some scuffling, the agents agree to “abandon the vehicle” and run off. As they are chased off, one person calls after them, “Yeah, I threw a pizza at you! I threw a pizza at you with extra bacon.”
In another clip, the two gamers role-playing as ICE agents—portrayed by Fortnite’s Airhead character—are standing on their golf cart, surrounded by civilians in the middle of their pursuit of a “vulnerable,” the event’s chosen term for people being targeted by government agents.“This does not concern you,” one of the agents says to the civilians, encouraging them to leave.
“We’re allowed to record,” one person responds. Another asks, “Who does it concern?”
“We’re looking for two vulnerables,” the agent says, as the civilian group closes in on the golf cart. “Excuse us, you’re interfering. We have a court order.”
After some scuffling, the agents agree to “abandon the vehicle” and run off. As they are chased off, one person calls after them, “Yeah, I threw a pizza at you! I threw a pizza at you with extra bacon.”
The agents were played by the organizers behind the Collective, and they were noticeably less persistent than ICE agents in real life. That’s evidenced by them saying things like, “Excuse us,” but it’s also evident in their behavior. In the first clip, they don’t bust down the door of the courthouse; when a civilian briefly opens it, they don’t barge inside. At the end of that encounter, one agent says to the other, “This home is too protected; let’s go see if we can find a vulnerable somewhere else.” Given their reputation for violence in raids, IRL ICE agents are unlikely to give up as easily.
But that kind of environment allows the training session to be a reasonable intensity for a gamer’s first round of practice responding to ICE, and still be a fun, safe place for people to hang out. According to PitaBreadFace, the main goal of the space wasn’t necessarily to be a specifically anti-ICE training facility, but more so to organize a community and build trust. And this tactical frivolity is a proven method of protest—ask anyone who wore a frog costume to a Portland protest earlier this year.
“ A situation, even though it’s virtual, where you can clearly overwhelm ICE’s numbers and do silly stupid things and work together easily and be connected to each other—it just felt like actually winning,” one gamer said in a clip provided to 404 Media. “It felt like a way to kind of heal some of the burnout.”
A virtual situation also allows players to fire back at ICE in ways that likely wouldn’t be practical in real life. In one clip, for example, two agents are chasing after a vulnerable, yelling, “Hey, stop right there!”
When they get close enough, the vulnerable drops a Boogie Bomb, an item which forces another player to dance under a disco ball for about three seconds.
“Oh,” the Boogie-Bombed agent exclaims, before the gamers start laughing.
The event also had another component. Before the practice ICE raids, gamers went around to practice finding one another, creating groups and building connections. PitaBreadFace described this segment as learning how to “meet your neighbors, know those around you, and establish contact.” A lot of that, according to clips provided to 404 Media, involves doing dance emotes together; in one case, it was a team of about 10 people destroying an in-map mansion and yelling, “Pay your taxes!”
But it also involved discussions about what community means. In the middle of a “Shout!” dance circle, one gamer said that they first learned the importance of community organizing when protesting the 2017 Muslim ban.
“ I feel like community taught me that like if enough people came together and there was enough will, anything could happen,” they said. “I remember the first Muslim ban, and just hella people went to the airport, and we were able to petition for people to get released. And they were. It was cool to see that organically happen.”
New Save Collective plans to run more events similar to this one through the end of this year, at which point Fortnite is slated to get rid of the proximity chat mode it uses. PitaBreadFace said the response had been so far overwhelmingly positive.
“ I think gamers represent this constituency of people who are really common-sense,” PitaBreadFace said. “It’s not like they’re even super pro-immigrant. They’re just like, ‘No, this doesn’t make sense. This community member who’s been part of a community for 25 years is being ripped out of his home in the middle of the night. That doesn’t make sense, and we should do something about it.’ We have a lot of people who joined the [Discord] server who are like, ‘I actually don’t know, but I know this is wrong and I’m here to learn and participate.’”
Shout!
Shout! is an Icon Series Emote in Fortnite, that can be purchased in the Item Shop for 400 V-Bucks. Shout! was first released in Chapter 4: Season 1. Shout! is one of 1,185 emotes that can be used within LEGO Fortnite.Contributors to Fortnite Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)
