After years of debate, scientists found a telltale sign that an ancient ape walked on two legs, making it the oldest known human relative.#TheAbstract
Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor
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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.Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.
For years, scientists have debated whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis—an ape known from skull and limb bones found in Chad—was primarily bipedal, meaning that it walked on two legs like humans, or if it walked on all fours like chimpanzees.
Now, a team led by Scott Williams, an associate professor of anthropology at the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, has spotted a detail in the femur bone, known as a femoral tubercle, that strongly suggests this ape was a biped. Since bipedalism is a defining trait of human relatives, known as hominins, the discovery confirms that these bones belonged to the earliest known human ancestor by a margin of about one million years.
“The really novel part of our study is the discovery of a new feature that had never been noticed before, and that's the femoral tubercle,” Williams told 404 Media in a call. “I think that was the final piece of evidence that convinced me that this was a biped, and therefore probably a hominin, because you don't find that feature in anything else.”
“I think this will convince a lot of people, but certainly not everyone,” he added. “There'll be rebuttals. I'm sure that people will challenge it. That's fine. That's how science works.”
Fig. 1. S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human. Image: Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130
Indeed, the remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis have generated controversy since they were initially reported in 2002. Over the past five years, different teams have argued both for and against the hypothesis that this species walked on two legs. This unresolved question inspired Williams and his colleagues to take a “fresh and independent look” at the fossils, he said.The researchers conducted a comparison of the limb bones with other hominin remains, while also re-examining them using a technique called 3D geometric morphometrics. The latter effort exposed a hidden detail: the presence of a femoral tubercle, which is a bony protrusion where the femur connects to the hip.
“It basically prevents our torso from falling backward or falling sideways as we walk,” explained Williams. "Chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes don't need to have that structure because they don't have to take on a vertical posture like we do. You don't need that structure—unless you're a biped.”
Of course, hominins didn’t just suddenly stand upright one day, and this ancient species shows an interesting mix of features that suggest it still spent plenty of time in the treetops in addition to walking on land. This liminal state between arboreal and terrestrial life persisted for millions of years in hominins until the rise of Homo erectus two million years ago, which is the first hominin to walk in a similar upright position to modern humans.
In addition to pinpointing our own human origins, the fossils offer a possible glimpse of the last common ancestor between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. These two ape lineages split about six or seven million years ago, around the same time Sahelanthropus tchadensis was roaming through Chad.
“The debate about what the last common ancestor was like is really highly contested,” Williams said. The remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis suggest that human relatives in this era may have been similar in size to chimpanzees and bonobos, but had body proportions more akin to later hominins.
While Sahelanthropus tchadensis can be described as the earliest human ancestor in a general sense, it was probably not the direct ancestor to modern humans. It’s become clear in recent decades that a diversity of hominin lineages emerged and became extinct over the past seven million years, so it’s difficult to trace the direct lineage of our own species, Homo sapiens, the only humans that have survived to the modern day.
“The more fossils that are discovered,” Williams said, “the more complicated the picture looks.”
The nonprofit research group Epoch AI is tracking the physical imprint of the technology that’s changing the world.#News
Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters
A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s datacenters. The team pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take that data and turn it into an interactive map that lists their costs, power output, and owners.Massive datacenter construction projects are a growing and controversial industry in America. Silicon Valley and the Trump administration are betting the entire American economy on the continued growth of AI, a mission that’ll require spending billions of dollars on datacenters and new energy infrastructure. Epoch AI’s maps act as a central repository of information about the noisy and water hungry buildings growing in our communities.
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On Epoch’s map there’s a green circle over New Albany, Ohio. Click the circle and it’ll take you to a satellite view of the business complex where Meta is constructing its "Prometheus" datacenter. According to Epoch, the total cost of construction for the datacenter so far is $18 billion and it uses 691 megawatts of power.“A combination of weatherproof tents, colocation facilities and Meta’s traditional datacenter buildings, this datacenter shows Meta’s pivot towards AI,” Epoch said in the notes for the datacenter. “Reflecting that patchwork, our analysis uses a combination of land use maps, natural gas turbine permitting, and satellite/aerial imagery of cooling equipment to estimate compute capacity.” Users can even click through a timeline of the construction and watch the satellite imagery change as the datacenter grows.
“There’s a lot of public discourse and discourse with researchers about the future of AI,” Jean-Stanislas Denain, a senior researcher at Epoch AI, told 404 Media. “Insiders have access to a lot of proprietary data, but many people do not. So it just seems very good for there to be this online resource.”
Zoom back out to a wider view of the country and click a circle in Memphis, Tennessee to learn about xAI’s Colossus 2. “To start powering the data center, xAI made the unusual choice to install natural gas turbines across the border in Mississippi, possibly to get faster approval for their operation,” Epoch AI noted. “Battery facility looks complete (though more might be added). Turbines look connected up, minimal construction around them. Based on this, and on earlier tweets from Elon Musk, 110,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs are operational.”
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Information about the datacenters is incomplete. It’s impossible to know exactly how much everything costs and how it will run. State and local laws are variable so not all construction information is public and satellite imagery can only tell a person so much about what’s happening on the ground. Epoch AI’s map is likely only watching a fraction of the world’s datacenters. “As of November 2025, this subset is an estimated 15% of AI compute that has been delivered by chip manufacturers globally,” Epoch AI explained on its website. “We are expanding our search to find the largest data centers worldwide, using satellite imagery and other data sources.”The methodology section of the site explains how Epoch AI does the work and includes timelapse photography of the monstrous datacenters growing. One of the big visual tells it looks for in satellite imagery is cooling equipment. “Modern AI data centers generate so much heat that the cooling equipment extends outside the buildings, usually around them or on the roof. Satellite imagery lets us identify the type of cooling, the number of cooling units, and (if applicable) the number of fans on each unit,” it said.
“We focus on cooling because it’s a very useful clue for figuring out the power consumption,” Denain said. “We first want to estimate power, but often we don’t have much information about that…and then we can relate power to the amount of compute and also the cost of building it. If you want to estimate power, cooling is pretty useful.”
After counting the fans, the Epoch team plugs the information into a model it’s designed that can help it figure out how much energy a datacenter uses. “This model is based on the type of cooling and physical features like the number of fans, the diameter of the fans, and how much floorspace the full cooling unit takes up,” Epoch AI explained on its website. “The cooling model still has significant uncertainty. Specification data suggests that the actual cooling capacity can be as much as 2× higher or lower than our model estimates, depending on the chosen fan speed.”
Charting America’s datacenters with open source intelligence isn’t a perfect practice. “In the discovery phase, some data centers will be so obscure that we won’t find news, rumors, or existing databases mentioning them. While larger data centers are more likely to be reported due to their significance and physical footprint, there are many smaller data centers (<100 MW) that could add up to significant levels of AI compute,” Epoch AI said.
But Epoch AI continues to expand its toolset and look through more satellite imagery with the goal of mapping Big Tech’s newest project. The goal is to cast light into the darkness. “Even if we have a perfect analysis of a data center, we may still be in the dark about who uses it, and how much they use,” Epoch AI’s website said. “AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic make deals with hyperscalers such as Oracle and Amazon to rent compute, but the arrangement for any given data center is sometimes secret.”
Meta Prometheus - Frontier Data Centers Satellite Explorer
See how satellite imagery, permits, and public disclosures are used to track the power capacity and performance of frontier data centers.Epoch AI
Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.#zine
The Weird Way the 404 Media Zine Was Built
This post originally ran on Tedium, our zine designer Ernie Smith's wonderful website and newsletter about the Dull Side of the Internet. Check it out here.I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.
For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.
But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.
So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.
I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).
But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.
Why page layout on Linux is fairly uncommon
The meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops that have no time for your weird non-standard app.)Admittedly, the native tools have been getting better. I’m not really a fan myself, but I know GIMP is getting closer in parity to Photoshop. Inkscape is a totally viable vector drawing app. Video is very doable on Linux thanks to the FOSS Kendenlive and the commercial DaVinci Resolve. Blender is basically a de facto standard for 3D at this point. The web-based Penpot is a capable Figma alternative. And Krita, while promoted as a digital painting app, has become my tool of choice for making frame-based animated GIFs, which I do a lot for Tedium.
But for ink-stained print layout nerds, it has been tougher to make the shift (our apologies to Scribus). And Adobe locks down Creative Cloud pretty hard.
However, the recent Affinity release, while drawing some skepticism from the open-source community as a potential enshittification issue, is starting to open up a fresh lane. For those not aware, the new version of Affinity essentially combines the three traditional design apps—vector editor, raster editor, and page layout—into a single tool. It’s pretty good at all three. (Plus, for business reasons related to its owner Canva, it’s currently free to use.)
While it doesn’t have a dedicated Linux version, it more or less runs very well using WINE, the technology that has enabled a Linux renaissance via the Steam Deck. (Some passionate community members, like the WINE hacker ElementalWarrior, have worked hard to make this a fully-fleshed out experience that can even be installed more or less painlessly.)
The desire for a native Linux version of a pro-level design app is such that the Canva subsidiary is thinking about doing it themselves.
But I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, so I decided to try to build as much of the zine as I could with Affinity for page layout. For the few things I couldn’t do, I would remote into a Mac.
The RISO factor
Another consideration here is the fact that this zine is being built with Risograph printing, a multicolor printing approach distinct from the more traditional CMYK. The inky printing process, similar to screen printing, has a distinct, vibrant look, even if it avoids the traditional four-color approach (in our case, using layers of pink, black, and lime green).Throughout the process, I spent a lot of time setting layers to multiply to ensure the results looked good, and adding effects like halftone and erase to help balance out the color effects. This mostly worked OK, though I did have some glitches.
At one point, a lime-green frog lost much of its detail when I tried to RISO-fy it, requiring me to double-check my color settings and ensure I was getting the right tone. And sometimes, PDF exports from Affinity added unsightly lines, which I had to go out of my way to remove. If I was designing for newspapers, I might have been forced to come up with a quick plan B for that layout. But fortunately, I had the luxury of not working on a daily deadline like I might have back in the day.
I think that this layout approach is genuinely fascinating—and I know Jason in particular is a huge fan of it. Could I see other publications in the 404 mold taking notes from this and doing the same thing? Heck yes.
A sneak peek at the inside layout of the 404 Media zine.The ups and downs of print layout on Linux
So, the headline you can take away from this is pretty simple: Laying stuff out in Affinity over Linux is extremely doable, and if you’re doing it occasionally, you will find a quite capable tool.Admittedly, if this was, like, my main gig, I might still feel the urge to go back to MacOS—especially near the end of the process. Here’s what I learned:
The good: Workflow-wise, it was pretty smooth. Image cutouts—a tightly honed skill of mine that AI has been trying to obsolete for years—were very doable. Affinity also has some great effects tools that in many ways beat equivalents in other apps, such as its glitch tool and its live filter layers. It didn’t feel like I was getting a second-class experience when all was said and done.
The bad: My muscle memory for InDesign shortcuts was completely ineffective for this, and there were occasional features of InDesign and Photoshop that I did not find direct equivalents for in Affinity. WINE’s file menus tend to look like old Windows, which might be a turn-off for UX purists, and required a bit of extra navigation to dig through folders. Also, one downside of WINE that I could not work past was that I couldn’t use my laptop’s Intel-based GPU for machine learning tasks, a known bug that I imagine slowed some things down on graphically intensive pages.
I checked, by the way; this was not a WINE thing, it did this in MacOS too. (Ernie Smith)
The ugly: I think one area Affinity will need to work on as it attempts to sell the idea that you can design in one interface are better strategies to help mash down content for export. At one point while I was trying to make a PDF, Affinity promised me that the file I would be exporting was going to be 17 exabytes in size, which my SSD was definitely not large enough for. That wasn’t true, but it does emphasize that the dream of doing everything in one interface gets complicated when you want to send things to the printer. Much of the work I did near the end of the process was rasterizing layers to ensure everything looked as intended.When I did have to use a Mac app for something (mainly accessing Spectrolite, a prepress app for RISO designs), I accessed an old Hackintosh using NoMachine, a tool for connecting to computers remotely. So even for the stuff I actually needed MacOS for, I didn’t need to leave the comforts of my janky laptop.
Looking for a Big Tech escape hatch
Was it 100% perfect? No. Affinity crashed every once in a while, but InDesign did that all the time back in the day. And admittedly, an office full of people using Affinity on Linux isn’t going to work as well as one guy in a coffee shop working with a team of editors over chat and email.But it’s my hope that experiences like mine convince other people to try it, and for companies to embrace it. Affinity isn’t open-source, and Canva is a giant company with plenty of critics, just like Adobe. But there are emerging projects like PixiEditor and Graphite that could eventually make print layout an extremely viable and even modern open-source endeavor.
But we have to take victories where we can find them, and the one I see is that Affinity is a lot less locked down than Creative Cloud, which is why it’s viable on Linux. And in general, this feels like an opportunity to get away from the DRM-driven past of creative software. (Hey Canva, it’s never too late to make Affinity open-source.)
Difficult reporting shouldn’t have to be tethered to the whims of Big Tech to exist. Especially when that tech—on Amazon’s cloud, using Adobe’s PDFs, through Google’s search, over Meta’s social network, with Apple’s phones, and on Microsoft’s operating system—too often causes uncomfortable tensions with the reporting. This is one step towards a better escape hatch.
Affinity for Linux? Canva's next big move could reshape the desktop software market
Canva is seriously considering porting Affinity to Linux - a move that could transform desktop Linux and challenge Adobe.Duncan McLeod (TechCentral)
Joseph talks to Craig Silverman about how open source intelligence (OSINT) has changed over the years, and his new outlet Indicator.#Podcast
The Shifting World of OSINT (with Craig Silverman)
Joseph speaks to Craig Silverman, one of the co-founders of Indicator. Indicator is a new, independent media company that Craig runs with Alexios Mantzarlis. For years Craig has covered the world of ad fraud and disinformation using all sorts of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. Definitely check out Indicator at Indicator.media. The site publishes its own investigations but also tips and tricks you can use yourself.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/Lmj42F6HrPo?…The 404 Media Podcast
Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …Apple Podcasts
Don’t worry, we’re not changing our website. But we’re finally the owners of the real deal: a .com domain.#Announcements
We Bought 404media.com
“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com.That September day I was on holiday in an Airbnb. Sam was in San Diego to report on the sentencing of a high profile sex trafficker. Emanuel was home. Jason was also at home and eating a bagel. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be able to buy a .com for two main reasons: they are typically quite expensive, and when we created our company the domain was already in use by someone else.
Fortunately for us, that company had seemingly moved on to other things, and the domain was up for auction. I got some emails from our domain registrar about the auction a few days before, and some 404 Media readers contacted us about it too. This was our chance.
But an auction is a very different experience to just buying the domain outright. We would be trying to beat other people or bots. We thought that might include those kindly trying to buy the domain on our behalf, or others trying to take it from underneath us. And we had no idea how high the price might go.
I was in charge of placing the bids themselves. Soon we found I wasn’t able to place bids of a certain size because, we later learned, the account didn’t have the necessary level of verification to do so. We were leading with a bid of $1,207.
A few minutes into our group call, Jason started recording it.
“I think we should just get 202 Media if this doesn’t work,” he said.
“Okay, under one minute until the five minute extension is over,” I added.
Emanuel led a ten second countdown.
“Your bid won,” I read from the screen. Everyone cheered. Here is what we said immediately afterwards:
A transcript of some of the group call.
Right now, our .com domain just redirects to the .co one. Maybe we’ll put an Easter Egg or something else fun on it soon, but we also had practical reasons for buying it. The first is that we’re proud to say 404 Media is a well known publication at this point, and we don’t want anyone else parking and abusing the .com domain that many people may end up at by mistake. The second is that, understandably, many people mistakenly email us at the @404media.com domain rather than the @404media.co domain, so now we’ll be able to catch those lost emails and save us all a lot of heartache.But our ability to buy the domain signifies something important: that we are able to grow, bit by bit, sustainably. When we launched 404 Media in August 2023, we each put $1,000 in. That was to pay for the domain, the content management system (CMS) and website host we use called Ghost, some other add-ons that automatically send people emails, and that’s about it. Buying a .com was a pipedream then, just like running a website and podcast years later was.
Since then we’ve built a fulltext RSS feed for our subscribers (something that didn’t exist with Ghost before); run multiple in-person events; and most recently produced a physical zine. All while reporting and writing cutting edge journalism on technology and AI and how they are really impacting humans every day.
Thank you to all of our paying subscribers who make it possible for us to write impactful journalism every day. And let us buy a new domain.
404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feed
We paid for the development of full text RSS feeds for Ghost-based publishers. Now we can offer them to our paid subscribers, and other Ghost sites can use the service too.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
Astronomers think they may have captured starlight from the first generation of stars, which shone more than 13 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars
Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the discovery of 3I ATLAS, the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks.First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
The Vindication of Nanotyrannus
For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus—sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse.
This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex.
“Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study. “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensis representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex.”
The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.”
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These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon…that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University.Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era—right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex, said Zanno’s team.
In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign supreme as the tyrant king of its time, we also salute this new dinosaurian dauphin.
In other news…
I can haz seas-burger?
In 1559, a Spanish colonial fleet was dashed to pieces by a hurricane in Florida. Among the many casualties of this disaster were a cat and a kitten, whose remains were found centuries later in the lower hull of a galleon shipwreck at Emanuel Point, near Pensacola.
These felines “are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States,” according to a study from April filled with fascinating facts about the fallen felines. For example, the adult cat ate like a sailor, devouring nutritious fish and domestic meat (like pork or poultry), with few signs of rodents in its diet.
This suggests the cat “was so effective at controlling rat populations that such prey was an insufficient food source,” said researchers led by Martin Welker of the University of Arizona.
It seems that cats have been impressing people with their legendary hunting prowess for centuries.
The study also includes some fun passages about the prized role of cats as pest control on these European ships, including this excerpt from a marine treatise from 1484:
“If goods laden on board of a ship are devoured by rats, and the owners consequently suffer considerable damage, the master must repair the injury sustained by the owners, for he is considered in fault. But if the master kept cats on board, he is excused from the liability.”
A resolution for 2026: Bring back cat-based legal exemptions.
The search for the ur-stars
For generations, astronomers have dreamed of glimpsing the very first stars in the universe, known as Population III. This year, these stellar trailblazers may have finally come into view, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope and the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which can magnify distant objects in space.
Lensed light from an ancient galaxy called LAP1-B, which traveled more than 13 billion years before it was captured by JWST, contains the expected low-metal signatures of Population III stars, according to a December study.
“Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars in the Universe is currently an exciting frontier in astrophysics and cosmology,” said researchers led by Eli Visbal of the University of Toledo. “Up to this point, there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars, defined by their extremely low metallicities.”
“We argue that LAP1-B is the first Pop III candidate to agree with three key theoretical predictions for classical Pop III sources,” the team added. “LAP1-B may only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study of Pop III stars with gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters.”
JWST continues to be a JW-MVP, and it will be exciting to see what else it might spy next.
A swing-kle in time
Let’s close out this wild year with some rest and relaxation in the most soothing of all human creations: the hammock. In a study published last month, researchers meditated on the history of these sleepy slings, from their Indigenous origins in the Americas to their widespread adoption by European mariners and settler-colonists.
The work is full of interesting ruminations about the unique properties and its multifaceted purposes, which ranged from rocking newborn babies to sleep at the dawn of life to comforting the ailing in the form of death beds and burial shrouds.
“The hammock facilitated transitions between life stages like birth, puberty, leadership, and death,” said researchers Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Kuhn of SUNY-Binghamton. But it also facilitated more quotidian shifts in the body: sleep, dreaming, entering hallucinogenic states, and healing.”
What better way to celebrate this weird liminal week, suspended between the past and the future, than an ode to this timeless technology of transitions. It’s been so much fun hanging out with you all in 2025, and I look forward to swinging into a New Year of all things Abstract.
Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you next week.
Comet 3I/ATLAS
NASA missions are working together to track and study this rare, interstellar comet as it passes through our solar system.dghernandez (NASA Science)
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Metax27;s relationship with links and more.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You
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 our recommendations for the year.SAM: Whenever we shout out a podcast, book, TV show, or other media or consumable product on our own podcast or in a Behind the Blog, you guys seem to enjoy it and want more. To be totally real with you, I get a ton of great recommendations from you, the readers and listeners, all year long and am always learning a lot from the things you throw in the comments around the site and on social media. The 404 Media community has good taste.
We talked through some of our top recommendations of the year in this week’s podcast episode, but here’s a more complete list of what each of us has enjoyed this year, and thinks you might also find worth digging into.
This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe nowBehind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
I am starting to think I will never receive my horny novelty holiday decorations.#AISlop #christmas #etsy
When Will My Pornographic Shrek Christmas Ornament Arrive?
I am starting to think I will never receive my personalized, likely AI-generated horny Shrek Christmas ornaments I purchased from Wear and Decor. I had hoped the indecent and probably unauthorized Shrek ornament depicting the green ogre getting a blowjob would arrive before Christmas and, ideally, before I traveled home for the holidays. I doubt that’s going to happen. I think I’ve been rooked.The ornament depicts Shrek, his eyes wide and a smile on his ogre lips, as a long haired Fiona descends upon his crotch. “Let’s get Shrekxy and save Santa the trip,” reads a caption above the scene on the online retailer Wear and Decor read. There was space at the bottom where I could personalize the ornament with the name of myself and a loved one, as if to indicate that I was Shrek and that Fiona was my wife.
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When I showed it to my wife weeks ago, after we first put up our Christmas tree, she simply said “No.” “Don’t you think it’s funny?” I said.“You’re supposed to be shopping for a tree topper,” she said.“It’s only $43.99 for two,” I said. “That’s a bargain.”She stared.
I had been shopping for a tree topper online when I stumbled into the strange world of AI generated pornographic custom ornaments starring popular cartoon characters listed on sites of dubious repute. I do not know what it says about my algorithms that attempting to find a nice, normal, and classy tree topper for Christmas led me to a horrifying world of horny—and seemingly AI generated— knock off novelty Christmas ornaments. I don’t want to reflect on that. I just want to show you what I’ve stumbled upon.
There is a whole underground world of erotic Christmas ornaments starring famous cartoon characters. Some of them are on Etsy, but most are dubious looking sites with names like Homacus and Pop Art. There are themes that repeat. Spanking. Butts. In flagrante delicto bedroom scenes. The promise that the purchaser can personalize these gifts with the name of their loved one and the logo of their favorite football team. I am sure the Baltimore Ravens love that you can buy an ornament depicting a nude Grinch gripping the ass of a female Grinch (notably not that of his canonical wife Martha May Whovier) emblazoned with their logo.
Image via Homacus.
“My butt would be so lonely without you touching it all the time,” reads the inscription above Zootopia’s Nick Wilde with Judy Hopps bent over his knee. You can purchase this same scene with Belle and Beast, Rey and Ben from Star Wars, a pair of Grinches, or Jack Skellington and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. In another variant, a male cartoon character is bent over the ass of a presenting female. Shrek is nose deep in Fiona’s ass. “I adore and love every part of you—Especially your butt. Merry Grinchmas,” the caption reads.Image via Homacus.
The ornaments rarely carry the name of the actual characters they’re depicting. They are “Funny Fairytale Ornament” and “Funny Green Monsters” and “Personalized Funny Lion Couple Christmas Ornament, Custom Name Animal Lovers Decoration, Cute Romantic Holiday Gift.” These titles feel like hold overs from the prompt that was, I assumed, used in an AI image generator to create the ornaments. There are other signs.Some of the Shrek ornaments refer to the green ogre as Grinches. Shrek often looks correct but Fiona is sometimes Yassified, her ogre features smoothed and made more feminine. In an ornament with Belle draped over Beast’s leg, the smiling prince has seven fingers on his left hand. The lighting in the “photos” of the objects is never quite right.
Image via Homacus.
Time Magazine declared the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year in 2025 and there is something about flipping through these listings for cheap and horny ornaments that feels like living in the future. This is the world the architects have built, one where some anonymous person out there in the online ether can quickly generate a lewd cartoon drawing of something from your childhood in an attempt to swindle you for a few bucks while you’re shopping for a Christmas tree topper.I clicked “purchase” on the $40 Shrek blowjob ornament on November 28. The money was deducted from my account but I have not received confirmation of shipping.
More than two miles under the Greenland Sea, tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes live on gas hydrate seeps that leak crude oil and methane.#TheAbstract
In the Dark Arctic Deep, Scientists Find a Hidden Oasis of Strange Life
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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 have discovered a hotspot of weird marine life more than two miles underwater in the Arctic, making it the deepest known example of an environment called a gas hydrate cold seep, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
Researchers found the thriving ecosystem some 2.2 miles under the Greenland Sea using a remote operated vehicle during the Ocean Census Arctic Deep EXTREME24 expedition in 2024. Gas hydrate seeps are patches of seafloor that releases large amounts of gasses, such as methane; the newly discovered site is more than a mile deeper than any previously documented gas hydrate.
The discovery sheds new light on these influential seeps, which play a role in the climate and carbon cycle and support chemosynthetic ecosystems that feed on seafloor gasses instead of sunlight. Giuliana Panieri, the chief scientist of the expedition and lead author of the new study, recalled yelling out with excitement when the team received the first visuals of the seafloor hotspot, which the researchers named the Freya gas hydrate mounds.
“It was crazy because we saw several of these mounds, which are filled with gas hydrates, and all the organisms living there,” said Panieri, who is a professor at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway and the director of the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Polar Sciences, in a call with 404 Media.
“What is fascinating when we have this kind of expedition is the organisms that are living down there,” she added. “At a water depth of almost 4,000 meters, you have these dense oases of organisms. I know that there are many new species. I have to admit, it was very exciting.”
Some of the lifeforms found at Freya mounds: Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV OceanPanieri and her colleagues decided to explore this region after previous detections of massive plumes of gassy bubbles rising up from the seafloor. One of these plumes measured two miles in height, making it the tallest plume of this kind ever found in the oceans. While the team expected to find geological activity, it was still a surprise to see this wealth of gas-stuffed mounds, leaking crude oil and methane, as well as the ecosystem of tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes that are fueled by chemicals from the seep.
In addition to discovering this biological hub at the Freya mounds, the team also explored ecosystems living on hydrothermal vents in the nearby seafloor in the Fram Strait. Hydrothermal vents form at fissures in the seafloor where hot mineral-rich water erupts into the ocean, and they are also known for supporting rich chemosynthetic ecosystems.
The expedition revealed that the organisms living in the hydrate seeps and the vent systems are related, suggesting an ecological connectivity in the Arctic that is absent in other parts of the ocean.
“The Fram Strait of the Arctic is a rare place where deep-sea vents and seeps occur close to each other,” said study co-author Jon Copley, a professor of ocean exploration and science communication at the University of Southampton, in an email to 404 Media.
“The deep Arctic is also a part of the world where there aren't as many deep-sea species overall as other regions, because deep-sea life is still recovering from when a thick ice sheet covered much of the ocean around 20,000 years ago,” he continued. “But hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are an important part of deep-sea biodiversity there today, because life carried on in those chemosynthetic oases beneath that ice-capped ocean.”
Freya gas hydrate mounds with different morphologies. Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV OceanGas hydrates also store huge volumes of greenhouse gases, like methane, which could potentially be released as ocean temperatures rise, making these environments a bit of a wild card for climate predictions. While the Freya mounds are too deep to be affected by ocean warming, its discovery helps to fill in the map of these oily, gas-rich sites in the ocean.
To that point, these seeps are also potential sites for resource extraction through offshore oil drilling and deep sea mining. A central goal of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep expedition is to explore these remote regions to document their ecological activity and assess their vulnerability to future industrial activities.
“Research has already established that hydrothermal vents must be protected from deep-sea mining anywhere in the world, because of the unique colonies of species that live around them,” Copley said. “Our study indicates that deep cold seeps in the Arctic will need similar protection, because they are part of the same web of life with hydrothermal vents in that region. And there are undoubtedly more deep methane hydrate seeps like the Freya Mounds out there in the Arctic, as other deep bubble plumes have been detected nearby.”
“So our discovery shows how much there still is to explore and understand about Arctic deep-sea life—and the need for caution and protection if the Norwegian government resumes plans for deep-sea mining there,” he added, noting that Norway’s parliament has put these plans temporarily on hold, but they could reverse that decision in the future.
This is why Panieri and her colleagues believe that it is critical to secure more funding and support for Arctic exploration, and ocean research more broadly. These expeditions not only reveal new and exotic organisms, they have also been inspired novel biomolecules used in medicines, among other applications.
“The sea floor and the ocean is almost unknown,” Panieri said. “There is so much to be investigated. I think this is also the take-home message here: Every time that we have the possibility to see the seafloor, we discover something new.”
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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.Deep-sea gas hydrate mounds and chemosynthetic fauna discovered at 3640 m on the Molloy Ridge, Greenland Sea - Nature Communications
This study reveals dissociating methane hydrate mounds on the seafloor at more than 3600 m deep in the Greenland Sea.Nature
In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we’re missing when we stop taking risks.#Music #physicalmedia
Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes
Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up.There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.
I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance.
This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting.
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People areleaving Spotify, and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artistspulled their music off the platform this year in protest of the company’sICE recruitment ads and connections tomilitary drones, and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural faux pas. Many folks aresick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and aninternet infested with AI slop. Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go,people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll, desperately wanting to reconnect with something real.My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up aself-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out of storage on my phone, and the amount of music I had available on-the-go shrank even more.
When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music.
There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids’ Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather.” Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit “skip.” Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.
Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification — with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits.
Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call “user friction,” turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes “Content,” flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by“perfect fit” algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized “vibes.”
What we now call “AI Slop” is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses — a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, we’re simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class.
On one hand, I empathize with those who still feel like they get something out of streaming. Having access to so much music can feel empowering, especially when so many people feel like they lack the time and resources to develop a music-listening practice. “What streaming service should I use instead of Spotify?” is a question I’ve been seeing constantly over the past few months.
Here’s my contrarian answer: What if there’s no ethical way to have unlimited access to every book, film, and record ever created? And moreover, what if that’s not something we should want?
What if we simply decided to consume less media, allowing us to have a deeper appreciation for the art we choose to spend our time with? What if, instead of having an on-demand consumer mindset that requires us to systematically strip art of all its human context, we developed better relationships with creators and built new structures to support them? What if we developed a politics of refusal — the ability to say enough is enough — and recognized that we aren’t powerless to the whims of rich tech CEOs who force this dystopian garbage down our throats while claiming it’s “inevitable?”
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1×Tapes and other physical media aren’t a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals.
More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.
How To Ditch Spotify and Support Music in the Age of AI Slop
There’s no shortage of reasons to quit Spotify in 2025. Artists and fans have been departing the platform in droves because they’re fed up with the company paying artists virtually nothing, using algorithms that promote AI-generated slop, running rec…Janus Rose (Touch Grass)
How we tracked ourselves with exposed Flock cameras; a year in review; and our personal recommendations on all sorts of things.#Podcast
Podcast: We Tracked Ourselves with Exposed Flock Cameras
We start this week with Jason’s story about Flock exposing a bunch of AI-powered cameras. These cameras zoom in on people as they walk by, sometimes so closely you can read what’s on their phone screen. After the break, we talk about some of our biggest stories this year. In the subscribers-only section, we give some of our personal recommendations of games, other reporting, or just a more chill life.
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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.
- Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
- Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website
- Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages
- How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
- Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages
A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz's phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.#News
Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed
Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.The moves show how difficult it may be for CBS to stop the episode, which focused on the experience of Venezuelans deported to El Salvadorian mega prison CECOT, from spreading across the internet. Bari Weiss stopped the episode from being released Sunday even after the episode was reviewed and checked multiple times by the news outlet, according to an email CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent to her colleagues.
“You may recall earlier this year when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to,” the show starts, according to a copy viewed by 404 Media.
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Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket joins the pod to talk about indie journalism, the industry, and what's going on in the federal government
Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket joins the pod to talk about indie journalism, the industry, and whatx27;s going on in the federal government#podcasts
Podcast: Marisa Kabas on Landing Big Scoops as an Independent Journalist
Marisa Kabas is the founder of The Handbasket, an independent newsletter and website that has been breaking stories left and right about government workers, the media business, and Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Please go subscribe to The Handbasket here!In this episode of the podcast, Jason and Marisa share notes Marisa about doing journalism without a big newsroom, how the media business has changed over the last decade, and why sources often prefer to talk to journalists who don’t work for mainstream media.
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Stories discussed:
Truth, morality and independence in journalism under the second Trump regime
My full remarks to students and faculty at Grinnell College.The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
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.Or watch it here:
youtube.com/embed/e73spvZnc9s?…Move fast and break people
For Elon Musk's government, the psychological warfare is the point.Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket)
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.#Flock
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.
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1×The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. They shared the details of what they found with me, and I verified many of the details seen in the exposed portals by driving to Bakersfield to walk in front of two cameras there while I watched myself on the livestream. I also pulled Flock’s contracts with cities for Condor cameras, pulled details from company presentations about the technology, and geolocated a handful of the cameras to cities and towns across the United States. Jordan also filmed himself in front of several of the cameras on the Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. Jordan said he and Gaines discovered many of the exposed cameras with Shodan, an internet of things search engine that researchers regularly use to identify improperly secured devices.
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After finding links to the feed, “immediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,” Jordan told me in an interview. “I think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared … I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.” In a YouTube video about his research, Jordan said he was able to use footage pulled from the exposed feed to identify specific people using open source investigation tools in order to show how trivially an exposure like this could be abused.Benn Jordan
Last year, Flock introduced AI features to Condor cameras that automatically zoom in on people as they walk by. In Flock’s announcement of this feature, it explained that this technology “zooms in on a suspect exiting one car, stealing an item from another, and returning to his vehicle. Every detail is captured, providing invaluable evidence for investigators.” On several of the exposed feeds, we saw Flock cameras repeatedly zooming in on and tracking random people as they walked by. The cameras can be controlled by AI or manually.The exposure highlights the fact that Flock is not just surveilling cars—it is surveilling people, and in some cases it is doing so in an insecure way, and highlight the types of places that its Condor cameras are being deployed. Condor cameras are part of Flock’s ever-expanding quest to “prevent crime,” and are sometimes integrated with its license plate cameras, its gunshot detection microphones, and its automated camera drones.
Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me the behavior he saw in videos we shared with him “shows that Flock's ambitions go far beyond license-plate surveillance. They want to be a nation-wide panopticon, watching everyone all the time. Flock's goal isn't to catch stolen cars, their goal is to have total surveillance of everyone all the time."
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1×The cameras were left not just livestreaming to the internet for anyone who could find the link, but in many cases their administrative portals were left open with no login credentials required whatsoever. On this portal, some camera settings could be changed, diagnostics could be run, and text logs of what the camera was doing were being streamed, too. Thirty days of the camera’s archive was left available for anyone to watch or download from any of the cameras that we found. We were not able to geolocate every camera that was left unprotected, but we found cameras at a New York City Department of Transportation parking lot, on a street corner in suburban New Orleans, in random cul-de-sacs, in a Lowes parking lot, in the parking lot of a skatepark, at a pool, outside a parking garage, at an apartment complex, outside a church, on a bike path, and at various street intersections around the country.
Quintin told me the situation reminds him of ALPR cameras from another company that were left unprotected a decade ago.
“This is not the first time we have seen ALPRs exposed on the public internet, and it won't be the last. Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected,” Quintin said. “Law enforcement should not collect information they can’t protect. Surveillance technology without adequate security measures puts everyone’s safety at risk.”
It was not always clear which business or agency owned specific cameras that were left exposed, or what type of misconfiguration led to the exposure, though I was able to find a $348,000 Flock contract for Brookhaven, Georgia, which manages the Peachtree Creek Greenway, and includes 64 Condor cameras.
"This was a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices, and it has since been remedied," a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. It did not answer questions about what caused the misconfiguration or how many devices ultimately were affected.
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Do you know anything else about surveillance? 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.In response to Jordan and Gaines’ earlier research on vulnerabilities in other Flock cameras, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a LinkedIn post that “The Flock system has not been hacked. We secure customer data to the highest standard of industry requirements, including strict industry standard encryption. Flock’s cloud storage has never been compromised.” The exposure of these video feeds is not a hack of Flock’s system, but demonstrates a major misconfiguration of at least some cameras. It also highlights a major misconfiguration in its security that persisted for at least days.
“When I was making my last video [about Flock ALPR vulnerabilities], it was almost like a catchphrase where I'd say like, ‘I don't see how it could get any worse.’ And then something would happen where you'd be like, wow, they pulled it off. They made it worse,” Jordan said. “And then this is like the ultimate one. Because this is completely unrelated [to my earlier research] and I don’t really know how it could be any worse to be honest.”
In a 2023 video webinar introducing the Condor platform to police, Flock executives said the cameras are meant to be paired with their ALPR cameras and are designed to feed video to FlockOS, a police panel that allows cops to hop from camera to camera in real time across a mapped-out view of their city. In Bakersfield, which has 382 Flock cameras according to a transparency report, one of the Condor cameras we saw was located next to a mall that had at least two Flock ALPR cameras stationed at the entrances to the mall parking lot.Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who used to work for the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department, said in the webinar that he built an “intel center” with a high “density” of Flock cameras in that city. “I am passionate about this because I’ve lived it. The background behind video [Condor] with LPR is rich with arrests,” he said. “That rich experience of seeing what happened kind of brings it alive to [judges]. So video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.”
“You can look down a tremendous distance with our cameras, to the next intersection and the next intersection,” he said. “The camera will identify people, what they’re wearing, and cars up to a half a mile away. It’s that good.”
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1×Condor cameras in a Flock demo showing off its AI tracking features
In the webinar Cox pulled up a multiview panel of a series of cameras and took control of them, dragging, panning, and zooming on cameras and hopping between multiple cameras in real time. Cox suggested that police officers could either use Flock’s cameras to pinpoint a person at a place and time and then use it to request “cell tower dumps” from wireless companies, or could use cell GPS data to then go into the Flock system to track a person as they moved throughout a city. “If you can place that person’s cell phone and then the Condor video and Falcon LPR evidence, it would be next to impossible to beat that in court,” he said, adding that some towns may just want to have always-on, always recording video of certain intersections or town squares. “There’s endless endless uses to what we can do with these things.”
On the webinar, Seth Cimino, who was a police officer at the Citrus Heights, California police department at the time but now works directly for Flock, told participants that officers in his city enjoyed using the cameras to zoom in on crimes.
“There is an eagerness amongst our staff that are logged in that have their own Flock accounts to be able to monitor our ALPR and pan tilt zoom Condor cameras throughout the community, to a point where sometimes our officers are beating dispatch with the information,” he said. “If there’s an incident that occurs at a specific intersection or a short distance away where our Condor cameras can zoom in on that area, it allows for real time overwatch […] as I sit here right now with you—how cool is this? We just had a Flock alert here in the city. I mean, it just popped up on my screen!”
Samantha Cole contributed reporting.
Introducing Condor Live and Recorded Video
Respond with Confidence with a cutting-edge video camera that empowers officerswww.flocksafety.com
An exoplanet located 750 light years from Earth has an atmosphere unlike anything previously known.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover ‘Black Widow’ Exoplanet That Defies Explanation
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied expectations, broke barriers, made trash into shelter, and lived to swear another day.First, there’s a giant, lemony, diamond-studded, black widow in space. I’ll explain. Then: electrons get ready for a close-up, the ultimately tiny home, and why expletives are the hottest new workout hack.
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.
“Lemonworld”
Astronomers have observed a Jupiter-sized planet more than 700 light years from Earth that is unlike anything spotted before and defies explanation.
Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet is shaped like a lemon, boasts baffling skies, and may have hidden troves of diamonds in its belly. The distant world closely orbits a pulsar, a type of hyper-dense dead star that is tugging on the gassy planet, giving it the distended shape.
Pulsar companions are normally other stars. These are called “black widow” systems because winds from the pulsar weather down the stellar companion, eventually destroying it, similar to the deadly embrace of the namesake spider. It is very rare to see a black widow system with a planet as the pulsar companion.
Curious about this unusual exoplanet, astronomers observed it with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), thereby “unveiling a bizarre atmosphere that raises more questions than it answers,” according to their new study.
“PSR J2322–2650b is different from other ultralight pulsar companions, being the only pulsar companion with a mass, a density, and a temperature similar to those of hot Jupiters,” said researchers led by Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago. “The atmosphere of such an object has never been observed.”
“In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds,” they said.
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Molecular carbon is unusual in planetary atmospheres because carbon atoms tend to bind to other elements, producing more familiar compounds like carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so carbon-dominated, and so depleted in oxygen and nitrogen, that it doesn’t neatly line up with any known planetary formation scenarios. In a sparkling twist, its dense carbon atmosphere may produce soot clouds that then solidify into diamonds, bedazzling its core.Is this a long-lived gas giant that survived the transformation of its star into a pulsar? Or was it born from the debris of the supernova that created the pulsar? And will this black widow system end as others do, with a slow death by pulsar winds? Nobody knows!
“Our findings pose a challenge to the current understanding of black-widow formation” and it will take more observations of similar systems “to determine whether PSR J2322–2650b’s composition is unusual or representative of the class.”
In other news…
An attofirst for attoseconds
Scientists have created the shortest X-ray light pulse ever produced, a breakthrough that could resolve the previously hidden motions of electrons and other particles at subatomic scales.
These newly-demonstrated soft X-ray pulses last for just 19.2 attoseconds, where an attosecond is equal to one quintillionth (10−18) of a second. In other words, an attosecond is to a second as a second is to 31.69 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe.
This is where the science happened. Image: ICFO
“Excitation, scattering, and electron relaxation are crucial processes that control how matter interacts with light,” said researchers led by Fernando Ardana-Lamas of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Spain. “Their timing influences how chemical bonds form or break, how charge and energy move, and how properties of molecules and materials emerge. Understanding these dynamics requires attosecond resolution, as electronic excitations and dynamics occur on timescales of tens of attoseconds.”“We demonstrated the generation of coherent attosecond [short X-ray] pulses with a duration of 19.2 as, significantly shorter than the atomic unit of time,” a milestone that offers “exciting new opportunities to investigate atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics,” the team concluded.
This high pulse speed is necessary for the development of instruments that could capture the mysterious dynamics of particles on subatomic timescales. Other experimental technologies are still required to make these ultrafast cameras a reality, but for now, here’s to shattering the shutter speed record.
My other house is a tooth socket
Here’s a question for prospective home owners: have you ever considered living in a clump of regurgitated bones? This solution worked out well for Caribbean cave bees that lived some 20,000 years ago, according to a new study that reports the discovery of the first known fossilized bee nests built inside skeletal remains.
Scientists found the honeycombed bones buried in a cave on the island of Hispaniola that was once also inhabited by owls. Since owls regularly barf up pellets—gnarly globs of half-digested prey—the solitary bee species had a ready-made supply of skeletal remains, which were apparently a perfect place to raise offspring.
A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee. Image: Courtesy of Lazaro Viñola López.
“Isolated brood cells…were found inside cavities of vertebrate remains,” including tooth sockets and the spinal canal, said researchers led by Lázaro Viñola López of the Field Museum in Chicago. “The high abundance of nests throughout the deposit indicated that this cave was used for a long period as a nesting aggregation area by this solitary bee.”There’s nothing like getting the skeleton keys to your new skeleton house.
A prescription for profanity
Cussing is discouraged in polite company, but it may actually be good for your health and performance, according to a new study that confirms swearing alleviates inhibitions and provides increased endurance during physical challenges.
Psychologists recruited nearly 200 volunteers to hold themselves in a sustained chair pushup while repeating either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds. The results revealed a consistent “swearing advantage” characterized by “significant performance improvements in the swearing condition.”
“These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and contexts requiring courage or assertiveness,” said researchers led by Richard Stephens of Keele University. “As such, swearing may represent a low-cost, widely accessible psychological intervention to help individuals ‘not hold back’ when peak performance is needed.”
At long last, science has vindicated the foul-spoken, the pottymouths, the salty-tongued, and the vulgarians. So go forth, ye cursers, and f*ck that sh*t up! It’s the doctor’s orders, after all.
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 history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Metax27;s relationship with links and more.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization
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 history repeating itself and Meta's relationship with links.JOSEPH: I wanted to add a little bit from behind the scenes of this piece: Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It. As I said on the podcast this week, there are and continue to be many questions around the case. Especially why CBP stopped Samuel Tunick in the first place.
In the piece I did not focus on Tunick’s activism because frankly we don’t know yet how big a role it played in CBP stopping him. I mentioned it but didn’t focus on it. I think regardless, someone being charged for allegedly wiping a phone is interesting essentially no matter who they are.
Yes, it absolutely may turn out that he was stopped specifically because of his activism. Maybe lots of people think it’s very likely that’s the reason. But I can’t frame a story because it feels like that’s maybe the case. I have to go on what actual evidence I have at the moment.
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This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
Oversight Democrats released a new trove of Epstein pictures on Dropbox and left the comments on.#News #JeffreyEpstein
The Government Added a Comments Section to the Epstein Photo Dump
Update: After publication of this piece, House Oversight Democrats disabled comments on the photos. The original article follows below.Thursday afternoon House Democrats publicly released a new trove of photographs they’ve obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein via Dropbox. They left the comments on so anyone who is signed into Dropbox and browsing the material can leave behind their thoughts.
Given that the investigation into Epstein is one of the most closely followed cases in the world and a subject of endless conspiracy theories, and that the committee released the trove of photographs with no context, it’s not surprising that people immediately began commenting on the photographs.
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“Really punchable face,” BedeScarlet—whose avatar is Cloud from Final Fantasy VII—said above a picture of New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks, who wrote a column about his boredom with the Epstein case in November, attended a dinner with Epstein in 2011 and appears in two photographs in this new document dump.“Noam Chomsky,” Alya Colours (a frequent Epstein dropbox commenter) said below a photograph of the linguist talking to Epstein on a plane. Below this there is a little prompt from Dropbox asking me to “join the conversation” next to a smiley face.
In another picture, director Woody Allen is bundled up to his eyes in a heavy coat while Epstein side hugs him. “Yep, I’d know that face anywhere,” Susan Brown commented.
Among the pictures is a closeup of a prescription bottle labeled Phenazopyridine. “This is a medication used to treat pain from urinary tract infections,” Rebecca Stinton added, helpfully, in the comments.
“The fuck were they doing all that math for?” BedeScarlet said next to a picture of Epstein in front of a whiteboard covered in equations.
“Shit probably tastes like ass,” he added to a picture of Epstein cooking something in a kitchen.
There are darker and weird photographs in this collection of images that, as of this writing, do not yet have comments. There’s a pair of box springs in an unfinished room lit by the sun. There is a map of Little St James indicating where Epstein wants various buildings constructed. Bill Gates is shown in two photos standing next to women with their faces blocked out.
And then there are the Lolita pictures. A woman’s foot sits in the foreground, a worn annotated copy of Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita in the background. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet teen in one sock,” is written on the foot, a quote from the novel.
These photos are followed by a series of pictures of passports with the information redacted. Some are from Ukraine. There’s one from South Africa and another from the Czech Republic.
The House Democrats allowing the public to comment on these photos is funny and it’s unclear if intentional or a mistake. It’s also a continuation of the just-get-out-there approach when they have published other material, with it sometimes being in unsorted caches that readers then have to dig through. The only grand revelation in the new material is that Brooks was present at a dinner with Epstein in 2011.
“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner,” a Times spokesperson told Semafor’s Max Tani.
House Oversight Democrats did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.
AI Solutions 87 says on its website its AI agents “deliver rapid acceleration in finding persons of interest and mapping their entire network.”#ICE #AI
ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people.The contract comes as ICE is spending millions of dollars, and plans to spend tens of millions more, on skip tracing services more broadly. The practice involves ICE paying bounty hunters to use digital tools and physically stalk immigrants to verify their addresses, then report that information to ICE so the agency can act.
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Humanity has talked about aliens throughout recorded history, and obsession that has changed science, faith, and media.#Podcast #aliens
Why Are We Obsessed With Aliens?
The past few years have been very exciting for those who want to believe. The U.S. government has released tantalizing videos and held several gripping hearings showing and discussing UFOs. People who always thought the government was hiding evidence of alien life from the general population saw it as proof that what they’ve said was happening all along. Skeptics have made compelling arguments for why all these revelations could be anything but aliens.But this debate and humanity’s obsession with aliens goes as far back as recorded history. In her book, First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, 404 Media’s science reporter and author of The Abstract newsletter Becky Ferreira delves deep into this history, what it teaches us about humans, and what the near and far future of the search for alien life looks like.
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I had a great time reading Becky’s book and an even better time discussing it with her on the podcast. It’s a great conversation that unpacks why these stories get so much attention, and a perspective on aliens in the news and pop culture that’s rooted in history and science.Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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Scientists found submerged stone structures off Brittany that date back at least 7,000 years, which may have been used as fish traps and protective cover for prehistoric people.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover Massive Underwater Ruins That May Be a Lost City of Legend
Scientists have discovered the underwater ruins of huge stone structures erected by humans at least 7,000 years ago in the coastal waters of France, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.The submerged granite ruins near Sein Island, a Breton island in the Atlantic Ocean, are among the oldest large stone structures ever found in France, and may have inspired an ancient local legend about a city called Ys that vanished under the waves.
The structures vary in size from small stone dams, which were probably fish traps, to large monoliths and slabs that protrude six feet from the seafloor and extend 400 feet in length, which perhaps once served as a protective seawall.
Yves Fouquet, a geologist who works with the Society for Maritime Archaeology and Heritage (SAMM), first noticed hints of these long-lost megaliths in LiDAR data collected by the Litto3D program, a national initiative to create a precise 3D digital reconstruction of the entire French coastline. Fouquet and his colleagues confirmed the existence of the mysterious structures, and mapped out their locations, across dozens of dives carried out by ten SAMM divers between 2022 and 2024.
“The detailed analysis of these maps to redraw the underwater geological map of this area (faults, rock types) has made it possible to identify structures that did not appear natural to a geologist,” Fouquet said in an email to 404 Media.
Brittany, a peninsular region of northwest France, is home to the oldest megaliths in the nation and some of the earliest in Europe, which date back some 6,500 years. The team estimated that the submerged stone structures off Sein Island may predate these early megaliths in Brittany by about 500 years, based on their estimation of when the stones would have last been above sea level. But it will take more research to home in on the exact age of the megaliths.
“We plan to continue the exploration and carry out more detailed work to understand the architecture and precise the age of the structures,” Fouquet said.
The discovery of these stones opens a new window into the societies living in Brittany during the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition, a period when hunter-gatherers began to shift toward settled lifestyles involving fishing, farming, and the construction of megaliths and other buildings.
Photos of the structures in Figure 7 of the study. Image: SAMM, 2023
The peoples who made these structures must have been both highly organized and relatively abundant in population in order to erect the stones. They were also sophisticated marine navigators, as the waters around Sein Island are notoriously dangerous—prone to swells and strong currents—which is one reason its underwater heritage has remained relatively poorly explored.“Our results bear witness to the possible sedentary lifestyle of maritime hunter-gatherers on the coast of the extreme west of France from the 6th millennium onwards,” said Fouquet and his colleagues in the study. “The technical know-how to extract, transport, and erect monoliths and large slabs during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition precedes by about 500 years the megalithic constructions in western France in the 5th millennium.”
The discovery raises new questions about the origins of these megalithics structures, which may have had a symbolic or religious resonance to these past peoples. the team added. “This discovery in a high hydrodynamic environment opens up new perspectives for searching for traces of human settlement in Brittany along the submerged coastline of the period 6000–5000 years cal. BCE.”
The researchers also speculate about a possible link between these structures, and the prehistoric people who made them, and local legends about sunken cities that may date back thousands of years.
“Legends about sunken cities, compared with recent data on rising sea levels, shows that the stories of ancient submergences, passed down by oral tradition, could date back as far as 5,000 to 15,000 years,” the team said, citing a 2022 study. “This suggests that oral traditions that may have preserved significant events in memory that could well be worthy of scientific examination. These settlements described in legend reveal the profound symbolic significance of maritime prehistory, which should not be overlooked.”
In particular, the people of Brittany have long told tales of the lost city of Ys, a sunken settlement thought to be located in the Bay of Douarnenez, about six miles east of Sein Island. The sunken megaliths off Sein Island “allow us to question the origin of the history of the city of Ys, not from the historical legends and their numerous additions, but from scientific findings that may be at the origin of this legend,” the team said.
It’s extremely tantalizing to imagine that the long-hidden ruins of these peoples, who appear to have been expert seafarers and builders, are the source of tales that date back for untold generations in the region. But while the researchers raise the possibility of a link between the stones and the story, they cannot conclusively confirm the connection.
“Legend is legend, enriched by all the additions of human imagination over the centuries,” Fouquet said in his email. “Our discoveries are based on what can be scientifically proven.”
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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.Accueil - Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique
Société d’Archéologie et de Mémoire Maritime Plongez dans l’histoire maritime. Vous recherchez sur le littoral Manche-Atlantique un navire, un naufrage, un ancêtre […]Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique
A hacker gained control of a 1,100 mobile phone farm powering covert, AI-generated ads on TikTok.#News #TikTok #Adblock #a16z
Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers
Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment.
“I could see the phones in use, which manager (the PCs controlling the phones) they had, which TikTok accounts they were assigned, proxies in use (and their passwords), and pending tasks. As well as the link to control devices for each manager,” the hacker told me. “I could have used their phones for compute resources, or maybe spam. Even if they're just phones, there are around 1100 of them, with proxy access, for free. I think I could have used the linked accounts by puppeting the phones or adding tasks, but haven't tried.”
As I reported in October, Doublespeed raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program, “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.” Doublespeed uses generative AI to flood social media with accounts and posts to promote certain products on behalf of its clients. Social media companies attempt to detect and remove this type of astroturfing for violating their inauthentic behavior policies, which is why Doublespeed uses a bank of phones to emulate the behavior of real users. So-called “click farms” or “phone farms” often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason.
The hacker told me he had access to around 1,100 smartphones Doublespeed operates. One way the hacker proved he had access to devices was by taking control of one phone’s camera, which seemingly showed it in a rack with other phones.
Images the hacker captured from some of the phones in Doublespeed's phone farm.
The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.
I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.
One health-themed Doublespeed Tiktok account named Chloe Davis posted almost 200 slideshows featuring a middle-aged AI-generated woman. In the posts, the woman usually discusses various physical ailments and how she deals with them. The last image in the slide always includes a picture of someone using a massage roller from a company called Vibit. Vibit did not respond to a request for comment.
A Doublespeed TikTok account promoting a Vibit massager.
Another Doublespeed-operated TikTok account named pattyluvslife posted dozens of slideshows of a young woman who, according to her bio, is a student at UCLA. All the posts from this account talk about how “big pharma” and the supplements industry is a scam. But the posts also always promoted a moringa supplement from a company called Rosabella. The AI-generated woman in these TikTok posts often holds up the bottle of supplements, but it’s obviously AI-generated as the text on the bottle is jumbled gibberish.
An AI-generated image promoting a Rosabella supplement.
Rosabella’s site also claims the product is “viral on TikTok.” Rosabella did not respond to a request for comment.An image from Rosabella's site claiming its brand is viral on TikTok.
While most of the content I’ve seen on Doublespeed-operated TikTok accounts included AI-generated slideshows and still images, Doublespeed is also able to AI-generate videos as well. One Doublespeed-operated account posted several AI-generated videos of a young woman voguing at the camera. The account was promoting a company called Playkit, a “TikTok content agency” that pays users to promote products on behalf of its clients. Notably, this is the exact kind of business Doublespeed would in theory be able to replace with AI-generated accounts. Playkit did not respond to a request for comment.
0:00
/0:04
1×An AI-generated video promoting Playkit, a TikTok content agency.
TikTok told me that its Community Guidelines make clear that it requires creators to label AI-generated or significantly edited content that shows realistic-looking scenes or people. After I reached out for comment, TikTok added a label to the Doublespeed-operated accounts I flagged indicating they're AI-generated.
A16z did not respond to a request for comment.
Doublespeed has said it has the ability to and soon plans to launch its services on Instagram, Reddit, and X, but so far seems to only be operating on TikTok. In October, a Reddit spokesperson told me that Doublespeed’s service would violate its terms of service. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. As we noted in October, Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, sits on Meta’s board of directors. Doublespeed’s business would clearly violate Meta’s policy on “authentic identity representation.”
A man was charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it; an Anthropic exec forced AI onto a Discord community that didn't want it; and we talk the Disney-OpenAI deal.
A man was charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it; an Anthropic exec forced AI onto a Discord community that didnx27;t want it; and we talk the Disney-OpenAI deal.#Podcast
Podcast: Is Wiping a Phone a Crime?
Joseph had to use a different mic this week, that will be fixed next time! We start this week talking about a very unusual case: someone is being charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it. There are a lot of questions remaining, but a super interesting case. After the break, we talk about Matthew’s article on an Anthropic exec forcing AI onto a queer gamer Discord. In the subscribers-only section, we all chat about the Disney and OpenAI deal.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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Timestamps:
00:48 - Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
17:44 - Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee
41:17 - Disney Invests $1 Billion in the AI Slopification of Its BrandThe 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
“We’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence,” Anthropic's Jason Clinton said after launching the bot.
“We’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence,” Anthropicx27;s Jason Clinton said after launching the bot.#News
Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee
A Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members.Users voted to restrict Anthropic's Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.
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Subscribe nowAnthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee
“We’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence,” Anthropic's Jason Clinton said after launching the bot.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
Valorie Moser, the former bookkeeper and co-conspirator for GirlsDoPorn, was sentenced to two years in prison.#girlsdoporn
Woman Who Helped Coerce Victims into GirlsDoPorn Sex Trafficking Ring Sentenced to Prison
The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday.GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular on some of the world’s biggest porn tube sites, including PornHub, where the videos generated millions of views.
Valorie Moser was the bookkeeper for GirlsDoPorn and met victims as they arrived in San Diego to be filmed—and in many cases, brutally abused—by sex traffickers Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and their co-conspirators. More than 500 women were coerced into filming sex scenes in hotel rooms across the city after responding to “modeling” ads online. When they arrived, many testified, they were pressured into signing convoluted contracts, given drugs and alcohol, told the content they were filming would never appear online or reach their home communities, and were sexually abused for hours while the camera rolled.
GirlsDoPorn edited those hours of footage into clips of the women seeming to enjoy themselves, according to court documents. Many of the women were college aged—one celebrated her 18th birthday on camera as part of her GirlsDoPorn appearance—and nervous or inexperienced.
During Moser’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino told Moser, “You provided them assurances and comfort,” Courthouse News reported from the courtroom. “Much of that comfort was false assurances, and assurances you knew to be false. The court does believe you were involved in the fraud and took part in the fraud.”
Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
Michael James Pratt was sentenced to federal prison on charges of sex trafficking connected to the GirlsDoPorn crime ring. “He turned my pain into profit, my life into currency,” said one victim.404 MediaSamantha Cole
Moser was charged with federal sex trafficking counts in 2019 alongside Pratt, Wolfe, and several other co-conspirators. According to prosecutors, Pratt instructed Moser to deceive women about the scheme and how she was involved. Moser worked for GirlsDoPorn from 2015 to 2018. “Pratt instructed Moser not to tell the women the truth about their video’s distribution as she drove the young women to and from the video shoots,” prosecutors wrote in 2021 after she pleaded guilty to charges of sex trafficking. “Moser was to tell the women that she was just an Uber driver. Later, Pratt told Moser to tell the women that she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement and could not discuss it. After the videos were posted on-line and widely available, many women contacted Moser to ask that their videos be taken down. Pratt, Wolfe and co-defendant Ruben Garcia all told Moser to block any calls from these women.”Moser wept during the sentencing and was unable to read her own statement to the victims, according to Courthouse News; her attorney Anthony Columbo read it on her behalf. “I want you to know that I hurt you,” she wrote. “I want you to know that I listened and I learned so much. I feel disgusted, shameful and foolish […] I failed and I am truly sorry.”
US Attorney Alexandra Foster read impact statements from victims, according to the report. “Valorie Moser was the one who picked me up and drove me to the hotel where I was trafficked,” an anonymous victim wrote, as read by Foster. “Her role was to make me feel more comfortable because women trust other women. She reassured me on the way to the hotel that everything would be OK... She wasn’t just a bookkeeper, she was a willing participant. She deserves to be sentenced to jail.”
‘She Turned Ghost White:’ How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Trafficking Ringleader
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.404 MediaSamantha Cole
Moser is ordered to self surrender to start her sentence at noon on January 30.Judge Sammartino sentenced Pratt to 27 years in prison in September; Andre Garcia, the main “actor” in GirlsDoPorn videos, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on June 14, 2021; Theodore Gyi, the primary cameraman for the ring, was sentenced to four years on November 9, 2022 and ordered to pay victims $100,000; Wolfe was sentenced to 14 years on March 20, 2024; Douglas “James” Wiederhold, who performed in videos before Garcia and was the co-owner of MomPOV.com with Pratt, is set to be sentenced in January.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…Original ‘Girls Do Porn’ Actor and Owner of MomPOV.com Arrested on Felony Charges
Douglas "James" Wiederhold, the co-owner of MomPOV.com with Girls Do Porn ringleader Michael Pratt, will appear in San Diego court on Thursday.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
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.
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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.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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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.
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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.
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.
If you are a subscriber, your discount code is below this:
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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.
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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.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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