404 Media

2026-02-26 17:02:16

Company Helps Men Scrub Negative Posts About Them from Tea App

Tea App Green Flags, a service that claims it can “protect your digital reputation,” will remove negative posts about men from private online groups where women share “red flags” about men they’ve dated in order to help other women.

The service is another escalation in the age of online dating, women attempting to protect each other from other men in the dating pool, and instances of men fighting against those efforts. It also shows how some of these allegedly private women’s groups, especially the Tea app, are regularly infiltrated and manipulated by men.

When I reached out to an email listed on Tea App Green Flags’s site, I got a call from a man behind the operation who identified only as Jay. He said he started the service about two years ago, and that he initially focused on the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. For the past year, he’s been offering services specifically for the Tea app, a “dating safety” app for women that suffered a devastating breach last year, and which my investigation revealed, was founded by a man who wanted to monetize the Are We Dating the Same guy phenomenon. The site also claims it can remove posts from Tea app copycat for men TeaOnHer, as well as posts on Instagram.

Jay declined to say how much revenue the site generates, but claims he gets about 50 to 60 calls a day and currently has six employees. On its website, Tea App Green Flags claims it has removed more than 2,500 posts on the Tea app for 759 clients. Jay said that most of his clients are men, but that some are women who are trying to take down posts about their husbands or boyfriends.

Potential clients can pay $1.99 to report one account and up to $79.99 to report 25 accounts.

“We just want to take down posts about people who are being defamed,” Jay told me. “And when I say defamed, it means like, ‘this guy has a small penis,’ or ‘this guy smells.’ That doesn't fit the mission statement of what the Tea app was for, which is to warn women against people who are harmful, who are abusive, who are cheaters. We've noticed that a lot of the individuals that come to us, almost all of them, come to us for little stupid things.”

Clients interested in Tea App Green Flags’s services go to the site and fill out a form with their information and information about the posts they want removed. The company reviews the case and then starts the “takedown process,” which can take between 21-30 days. Tea App Green Flags says it will then continue to monitor posts about the client and remove them for three months.

💡
Were you impacted by the Tea hack? 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.

When I asked Jay how this “takedown process” works he said “I can’t give that info. That’s the business.”

Jay told me that he would not work with clients who have been accused of sexual assault by multiple people on the Tea app, or by one person in one of the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups who used their real name and face in a profile picture.

“Sometimes we find along the process that there are pedophiles or people who actually did what they did, and they're very bad,” Jay said. “So we say, we're not doing this. We can't take a rap for that. We're ethical. We just want to take down people who are being defamed.”

Jay told me he understands why Facebook groups like Are We Dating the Same Guy are necessary and thinks they are a good idea, but the anonymous nature of the Tea app "causes a cesspool of defamation.”

When I asked Jay what he thinks about the fact that some women don’t feel safe sharing information about some dangerous men unless they can do so anonymously, he said it would be better if women showed their face, or if the Tea app at least gave women that option.

“I have a Tea app account. I'm a dude. All my reps have Tea app accounts. They're men,” Jay said. “How much can you trust these people and what they're doing?”

One reason the Tea app hack was so dangerous is because the app used to ask women to upload a picture of their face in order to verify that they are women. Those images were posted all over the internet because of the hack, putting those women at risk and leading to more harassment.

Tea App Green Flags is far from the first attempt from men trying to fight back against these types of groups. In 2024, for example, we wrote about a man who tried to sue women who posted about him in Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. His first case was dismissed, and he refiled days later as a class action lawsuit; later that year, he was sent to prison for tax fraud.

Tea did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

'Are We Dating the Same Guy' Guy Imprisoned for Tax Fraud

After suing 27 women and multiple platforms because people he'd dated warned others not to date him, he filed a class action lawsuit against them. Now, he's headed to federal prison.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-26 15:48:40

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys

It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.

Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

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The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-26 15:45:29

The Islamic State Is Using AI to Resurrect Dead Leaders and Platforms Are Failing to Moderate It

The Islamic State’s online warriors are still posting. It’s been almost a decade since the group lost the Battle of Raqqa and saw its IRL territorial ambitions thwarted. Unable to hold territory in the real world, the group renewed its focus on posting and has started using AI to resurrect dead leaders. And, because social media platforms have gutted their content moderation operations, the terror group’s strategy is working.

The Islamic State’s online success is detailed in a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent research institution that studies extremist movements. For the study, researchers tracked IS accounts on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Element, and SimpleX. It found videos posted in Discord channels dedicated to video games and tracked how the groups have modified old content to fit on new platforms.
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Like many others posting online in 2026, the Islamic State has found success by talking about the Epstein Files, using AI to create new videos of dead leaders, and has begun taking its message to video games like Minecraft and Roblox.

“They are very adept at exploiting platforms [and] spreading messages,” Moustafa Ayad, a researcher at ISD and author of this study, told 404 Media. He noted that the group has been active online for 10 years and that part of their success is a willingness to experiment.

Ayad said that Facebook remains a central hub for IS, despite its push into new spaces. His research discovered 350 IS accounts on Facebook that generated tens of thousands of views. One video of an IS fighter talking to camera had more than 77,000 views and 101 shares. The Islamic State branding is blurred to defeat the site’s auto-moderation.

According to Ayad, Islamic State’s engagement numbers are up across the board. “Trust and safety teams have been rolled back over the past few years…a lot of this is outsourced to third party companies who aren’t necessarily experts in understanding if a piece of content came from the Islamic State,” he said.

Social media companies like Meta used the election of Donald Trump as an excuse to cut back on moderating their platforms. Meta said this would mean “more speech and fewer mistakes.” No policies around terrorism have changed, but broadly speaking the largest social media platforms are doing a worse job at moderating their sites. In practice it’s turned Facebook into a place where a group like the Islamic State can spread its message without falling afoul of content moderation teams. Even three years ago, IS influencers wouldn’t have lasted long on the site.

This rollback of moderation has coincided with a spike in views for IS accounts, the report argues. “Individual IS ‘influencer’ accounts are experiencing higher engagement rates on terrorist content than previously recorded by ISD analysts,” the report said. “It is unclear if this uptick is due to moderation gaps, platform mechanics or specific tactical adjustments by IS supporters and support outlets and groups.”

“We’re not talking about content where there’s a gray area,” Ayad said. “It’s very clearly branded Islamic State…supports violence, supports the killing of minorities, the celebration of bombings, the pillaging that is happening in Sub Saharan Africa.”

Something new is the adoption of AI systems to resurrect dead leaders. Ayad described a video where the deceased IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered speeches again.

“It’s a sanctioned version of using AI for a ‘beloved leader’ or taking him out of context and placing him in a meadow, surrounded by beautiful flowers, paying homage,” he said. “Some of these circles are strange.”

Another popular topic in current IS propaganda is the Epstein Files. According to Ayad, an AI-generated photo of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton canoodling in bed makes frequent appearances on IS accounts across platforms. The picture is, supposedly, pulled from the Epstein files but it’s a popular fake. Ayad said Epstein has been a perfect springboard for IS to talk about “western degeneracy.”

Ayad has also seen Islamic State videos created using Minecraft and Roblox. “They’re creating these virtual worlds that mimic the Islamic State’s caliphate, literally calling it something like Wilayat Roblox [the Province of Roblox] … and they’ll completely mimic the video styles of well-known Islamic State Videos using Roblox characters. This includes faux executions. It includes Arabic and English voiceover in the same cadence as an Islamic State narrator.”

One of the most famous pieces of Islamic State propaganda is a film called Flames of War: The Fighting Has Just Begun. Ayad has seen multiple 1 for 1 recreations of the film using Roblox characters. “They’re often tied to Discords where a number of users are creating this content. They always claim it’s fake or a LARP,” he said. “To see them in this video game skin is odd, to say the least.”

What drives an Islamic State poster? “It’s done very much for the love of the game,” Ayad said. It’s done for the fact that, as a user, ‘I might not be able to participate in physical Jihad but I can participate in electronic Jihad.’”

Keeping Islamic State off of major social media platforms is a constant battle, but one frustrating finding of the study is that the tactics for avoiding moderation haven’t changed much.

“Techniques included the use of alternative news outlets to rebrand IS news, as well as purchasing or hijacking channels with high subscriber bases. These were then repurposed to share IS content. IS supporters, groups and outlets also use coded language: they sometimes referred to the group as ‘black hole’ or the ‘righteous few’ to confound moderation efforts.”

To fight back against IS online, Ayad said that platforms needed to be better at coordination. Often a group is kicked off of Facebook so it moves to TikTok or another platform where it flourishes. He also said that all the companies need to be more transparent about who they’re kicking off their platform and why.

“Europol does these big takedown days and they’re effective to a certain degree but the fact of the matter is that the Islamic State is spread across an expanse of different platforms and messaging applications,” he said. “They’re able to shift operations to another place, wait it out and regenerate on that platform…it’s not like you’re dealing with an average user, you’re dealing with a user that’s determined to spread their ideology and exploit your platform to their own ends.”

And then there’s the old problem of language. “There needs to just be better moderation of under-moderated languages,” Ayad said. Facebook and other platforms have long been terrible at moderating non-English languages. A lot of rancid content online gets a pass because it’s in Arabic or Bengali.

More Speech and Fewer Mistakes

We're ending our third party fact checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.

^{Meta Newsroom (Meta)}

404 Media

2026-02-25 20:08:57

Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

First spotted by adult content creators raising the alarm on social media, the changes open anyone who uses wishlists publicly to increased privacy risk unless they change how they receive packages.

In an email sent to list holders, Amazon said beginning March 25, it will reveal users’ shipping addresses to third-party sellers. The platform added that gift purchasers might end up seeing your address as part of this process, too.

Before this change, the only information visible to sellers and gift purchases was the recipients’ city and state.

“We're writing to inform you about an upcoming change to Amazon Lists. Starting March 25, 2026, we will remove the option to restrict purchases from third-party sellers for list items. When this change takes effect, gift purchasers will be able to purchase items sold by third-party sellers from your lists and your delivery address will be shared with the seller for fulfillment. This change will provide gift purchasers with access to a wider selection of items when shopping from your lists,” Amazon said in the email. “Important note: When gifts are purchased from your shared or public lists, Amazon needs to provide your shipping address to sellers and delivery partners to fulfill these orders. During the delivery process, your address may become visible to gift purchasers through delivery updates and tracking information. To help protect your privacy, we recommend using a PO Box or non-residential address for any list you share with public audiences.”

If you have public wishlists, you can manage individual list settings here and select "manage list." From there you can change your list privacy settings to private or shared to limit who has access, or remove your shipping address entirely by selecting "none" from the dropdown menu.

Most of the popular shipping methods in the US, including UPS, Fedex, and the USPS, don’t show full addresses as part of package tracking. But if a third-party seller shares a gift recipient’s home address with a buyer as part of the tracking process, Amazon is saying that’s out of the platform’s control. And some of those delivery services send photos as part of the tracking process for proof of delivery, which could include more information about one’s home or location than they would want a gift sender to see.

“Those who do a range of work where privacy concerns are top of mind would be left to wonder what problem Amazon is solving with this change,” Krystal Davis, an adult content creator who posted about receiving the email from Amazon, told 404 Media. “Those who use these lists as an opportunity to allow fans to show support and offset expenses will lose that option. The alternatives to Amazon wishlist are significantly lacking.”

Many online sex workers use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from subscribers and fans. It’s a practice that’s gone on for years. Revealing one’s full address to buyers — especially if they don’t realize this change has gone into effect, or missed the email sent by Amazon with the warning to switch to a P.O. box — puts their safety at serious risk. And like so many privacy and security issues that affect sex workers first, anyone could potentially be affected; lots of people use public wishlists who might want to keep their location private, and should consider checking their settings or switching to a non-residential address if they want to maintain that privacy.
Screenshot via Amazon showing the "Manage List" page, with the option to share shipping address with sellers grayed out and a notice: "This setting will no longer be supported starting February 25, 2026. After this date, third-party sellers will receive your shipping address to fulfill orders. You can review of update your lists' shipping address on this page."
Amazon provides conflicting information on when and how this change will go into effect. The email sent to wishlist holders says it will start on March 25, 2026, but as of writing, a notice on the “Manage List” settings page said starting February 25, third party sellers will see users’ shipping addresses. Amazon confirmed to 404 Media that the option to restrict purchases from third-party sellers for list items is being removed on March 25, one month from today.

Do as the dominatrix says: Why Amazon is 'king of the kinky wish list'

Shopping fetishes take on a whole new meaning when dominatrixes and their subs turn to Amazon, and gift-buying provides an expression of desire -- as well as punishment.

^{Donna Tam (CNET)}

404 Media

2026-02-25 15:19:36

Podcast: Ring Is Just Getting Started

This week we start with Jason’s follow up to Ring launching its ‘Search Party’ feature. It turns out, according to a leaked email he got, the feature is only starting with finding lost dogs. After the break, Emanuel explains why we’ve learned nothing about amplification when it comes to the recent looksmaxxing trend. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how Grok produced the real name of a sex worker who performs pseudonymously.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/IEq8dlnLP8o?…
1:11 - ⁠Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs⁠⁠

30:26 - ⁠⁠We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons⁠⁠

⁠⁠Grok Exposed a Porn Performer’s Legal Name and Birthdate—Without Even Being Asked⁠⁠

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}

404 Media

2026-02-25 15:16:52

FBI Got Grok to Hand Over Prompts Used to Create Nonconsensual Porn

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.

The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

“For example, in one prompt, TUCK queried: ‘In a sensual sports style, a confident blonde woman playfully undresses on a tennis court, starting with her white crop top pulled up to expose her bare breasts. She has long wavy hair, a toned athletic body, and a flirtatious smile, wearing a short navy pleated skirt and holding a racket. She slowly lowers her top, revealing full nudity, tosses her hair, and swings the racket teasingly, with a surprising clumsy spin like a comedic twirl,’” the affidavit says.

The FBI says that Tuck also allegedly used Grok to create a complaint about the woman’s husband that was then filed to the company he works for.

The actions described in the affidavit are extreme and horrifying, but are not terribly out of the ordinary for harassment cases that we have reported on before. What’s notable here is that this case shows that law enforcement is looking at chats with AI bots as potential sources of evidence and that X is complying with these requests.

Most importantly, it highlights X’s role in allowing Grok to create nonconsensual sexual material in a criminal case that involves extreme cyberstalking and real life harm. According to the affidavit, Tuck used Grok to create this nonconsensual sexual material at the same time that Grok was being heavily criticized for creating child sexual abuse material. This all happened during the “undress her” phenomenon, which showed just how terribly Grok’s content moderation is. Last week, we also reported that Grok was used to reveal the real name of an adult performer.

Correction: This piece originally said the FBI issued Grok with a subpoena. It was a search warrant.

Home | Court Watch

The Definitive Source for Legal News

^{Court Watch}

404 Media

2026-02-25 14:41:23

What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions.

Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.
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If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

But humans aren’t horses. “This is much bigger than Einstein,” Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.”

Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.

“Agentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI ‘agents’ that can navigate [learning management systems] and complete assignments without any student involvement,” the MLA’s statement from October said. “The recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes—with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better.”

The statement called on educators, lawmakers, and learning management system providers like Canvas, too cooperate in order to give academic institutions the abilities to block AI agents like Einstein.

Canvas did not respond to a request for comment.

Einstein is explicit in its pitch: it will log into Canvas (one of the most popular and ubiquitous pieces of education software) and do your classwork for you, just like Kirschenbaum and his fellows warned about last year.

The attractiveness of agentic AIs is a symptom of a decades-long trend in higher education. “Universities…by and large adopted a transactive model of education,” Kirschenbaum said. “Students see their diploma as a credential. They pay tuition and at the end of four years, sometimes five years, they receive the credential and, in theory at least, that is then the springboard to economic stability and prosperity.”

Paliwal seems to agree. He told 404 Media that he attempted to change the university from the inside while working as a TA, but felt stymied by politics. “The only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face. And usually the loudest critics are the ones who can't do their own job well and live in fear of automation,” he said.

For Paliwal, agentic AIs are a method of freeing people from the labor of education. “I think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us,” he said. “We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We've been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?”

Kirschenbaum said that programs like Einstein are the inevitable conclusion of viewing higher education as a certification and transactive process. “What we’re finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we’ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf,” he said. “And so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.”

He said that one solution he’s seen work is to retreat from devices entirely in the classroom. “Colleagues who have done it report that students are almost universally grateful. They understand the reasoning. They understand the logic,” he said. “And they appreciate the opportunity to be freed from the phones and the screens and to focus and engage with other people in a meaningful dialogue.”

But the abandonment of EdTech platforms and screens won’t work for every student. Anna Mills, an English professor at the College of Marin and a colleague of Kirschenbaum’s on the MLA AI task force, compared the fight against agentic AI in education to cybersecurity. “We could decide that bots need to be labeled as bots and that we need to be able to distinguish human activity from AI activity online in some circumstances and that we want to build infrastructure for that,” she said. “That would be an ongoing project, as cybersecurity is.”

Mills is not a luddite. She’s an expert in artificial intelligence systems as well as English, frequently uses Claude, and has been documenting the rise of agentic AIs in EdTech on her YouTube channel for months. She said that using agentic AI like Einstein was cheating, full stop, and academic fraud. “This is in direct violation of these foundational agreements that we make in order to use technology for human communication, human exchange, and human work online,” she said. “And yet that’s not obvious to us. It seems like it’s just another tool, right? But it’s not.”

Mills said she understands Paliwal’s frustrations with education. “But what you need to understand is that online learning spaces are critical for students to access any kind of education,” she said. For her, the proliferation of tools like Einstein do more than help a student bypass the labor of the classroom. They poison the educational well. Online learning has been a boon to many kinds of non-traditional students and that the rise of agentic AI is a threat to that not just because it trivializes traditional forms of education, but because it hurts the credibility of EdTech itself and other online platforms.

The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.

Students aren’t horses and there is no greater freedom they can buy themselves by using AI tools to cheat in the classroom. And worse, the more these tools proliferate, the more suspect the entire enterprise becomes. It’s one thing to cheat yourself out of an education, it’s quite another to muddy the waters of EdTech platforms and online learning for everyone else.

AI Is Ushering in a Textpocalypse

Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.

^{Matthew Kirschenbaum (The Atlantic)}

404 Media

2026-02-24 15:40:49

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area.

The app comes as companies such as Meta continue to add AI-powered features to their glasses. Earlier this month The New York Times reported Meta was working on adding facial recognition to its smart glasses. “Name Tag,” as the feature is called, would let smart glasses wearers identify people and get information about them from Meta’s AI assistant, the report said.

“I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech,” Yves Jeanrenaud, the hobbyist developer and sociologist who made the app, told 404 Media.

To use the app, called Nearby Glasses, users download it from the Google Play Store or GitHub. They may need to tweak some settings such as “enable foreground service” to keep the app scanning. Then they press “Start Scanning” and a debug log will show the app’s activity. If it detects what it believes to be a pair of smart glasses, the app will send a notification: “⚠️ Smart Glasses are probably nearby,” it reads, according to a screenshot posted to the app’s Play Store page.

💡
Do you work at Meta or know anything else about its smart glasses? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

The app works by looking for Bluetooth “advertising frames,” which are small bits of data devices regularly broadcast as part of their normal operation. Jeanrenaud said he referenced a directory of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) manufacturers, then made the app scan for Meta, Luxottica Group S.p.A which partners with Meta on its smart glasses, and Snap, which has its own smart glasses offering.

“If it sees an advertising frame of these manufacturers, it notifies you. That’s basically it,” Jeanrenaud said. The Play Store page says the app likely generates false positives, such as from VR headsets. That is what happened in 404 Media’s test too: We ran the app near a Meta Quest 2 headset; the app detected the device, with its debug log saying “Meta Quest 2,” and the app sent a notification saying smart glasses were nearby. Of course, when walking around in public, it is less likely that someone is going to be wearing a VR headset than a pair of smart glasses.

“This is a tech solution to a social problem exaggerated by tech. I do not want to promote techsolutionism nor do I want people to feel falsely secure. It's still imperfect,” Jeanrenaud added.
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Jeanrenaud said he decided to make the app after reading some of 404 Media’s coverage of how people are using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. He specifically pointed to this article, about how men are filming women inside massage parlors seemingly without their consent. Jeanrenaud also referenced 404 Media’s coverage showing multiple Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials wore the AI glasses during immigration raids, including with the recording light clearly illuminated.

“Obviously, surveillance tech is not only abused by government thugs, it's also a tech boosting misogynist behaviour and rape culture,” Jeanrenaud said.

404 Media has also reported how two students coupled Meta’s Ray-Bans with off-the-shelf facial recognition technology and people search sites to turn them into glasses that instantly doxed people; and shown how a $60 mod easily disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the glasses, making it easier for wearers to film people without them knowing.

Neither Meta nor Google responded to a request for comment about the new app.

When Google released Google Glass, the first substantive pair of consumer smart glasses more than ten years ago, some people heckled or ripped the glasses from wearers’ faces. Those glasses looked very distinct. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, meanwhile, are designed to look just like any other pair of glasses, making it more difficult for passersby to know if someone is wearing a smart device or not. Not impossible, though: in December, a woman on the New York subway allegedly broke a man’s pair of Meta's smart glasses while he was filming a piece of content.

The app’s Play Store page says after identifying a device, a user “may act accordingly.”

Jeanrenaud said he can imagine that including what the woman on the subway allegedly did. “Or people just tell them politely to fuck off.”

I Was Assaulted For Wearing Google Glass

It happened in an instant.

^{Kyle Russell (Business Insider)}

404 Media

2026-02-23 20:00:48

A Billion Years Are Mysteriously Missing From Earth’s History. Now, We Know Why.

Scientists have resolved a longstanding mystery about the Great Unconformity, a huge gap in the geological record that shows up across the world and has inspired speculation for more than 150 years, reports a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The unconformity shows up around the world when sedimentary rock that is about 500 million years old lies directly on top of far more ancient “basement” rock that can be often over 1.7 billion years old. The missing layers can represent anywhere from several million to more than a billion years, making this feature “arguably the most iconic but enigmatic gap in Earth’s stratigraphic record,” according to the new study.

Now, scientists led by Rong-Ruo Zhan of Northwest University in China have presented new evidence that the gap was largely created by tectonic processes that occurred from 2.1 billion to 1.6 billion years ago, in the Neoproterozoic era, during the formation of an ancient supercontinent called Columbia.

Their results, based on geological sites in North China, cast doubt on an alternate explanation that suggests that the gap was formed by a “snowball Earth” phase of widespread glaciation that happened much later in time, around 700 to 600 million years ago.

This snowball phase closely preceded the Cambrian explosion, a sudden proliferation of complex life around 530 million years ago that established major animal families, leading to theories that the two events were linked. The new study, with its revised timeline of tectonic processes, challenges that connection.

“The contribution of this paper is to show that exhumation of mid-crustal metamorphic/igneous rocks in North China occurred mostly between 2.1 and 1.6 billion years ago, and that the timing of exhumation varies from one continent to another,” said study co-author Nicholas Christie-Blick, professor emeritus at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in an email to 404 Media.

“In other words, the surface may appear to be global, but its significance varies,” he added, noting that the unconformity in North America is shaped by specific regional factors, such as the break-up of the supercontinent Rodinia and sustained sea flooding.

“The conclusion therefore isn't surprising,” Christie-Blick said. “It is just very nice to have shown in a previously less documented example (North China) that the timing has nothing much to do with late Proterozoic glaciation (720-635 million years ago) or the emergence of animals in the Cambrian.”

The Great Unconformity is perhaps most famous as a visible feature of the Grand Canyon, which preserves the core of a long-lost paleocontinent called Laurentia. But it is also present in the remnants of other paleocontinents, such as Baltica and Amazonia. It’s a wild case of stratigraphic amnesia, in which Earth seems to have memory-wiped epochs of geological time.

To further constrain the origins of the unconformity, Zhan’s team studied the thermal history of rocks at five locations in North China. The results revealed that in this region, crustal exhumation—the process by which buried rocks are pushed upward toward Earth’s surface—was mostly driven by tectonic processes in the ancient Neoproterozoic era.

Christie-Blick credited his colleagues in China with the bulk of the work, including the sampling and data acquisition, and said his role on the paper “was in thinking about the issues, and in helping to frame the paper.”

“The best way to think about unconformities is that they represent everything that may have happened over a span of time that in this particular case is more than one billion years” said Christie-Blick, adding that “it was never in the cards that we would discover one 'cause.'”

“It is merely the case that much of the erosion occurred early, and that formation of the unconformity could not have 'triggered' anything to use an expression from one of the early papers” that had speculated on a link to the Cambrian explosion, he noted.

While the new study has shed new light on the origin of the Great Unconformity—and its regional variability—there are still plenty of outstanding questions left to resolve about this geological gap. Christie-Blick is developing a new work about the late Proterozoic-Cambrian tectonic development of southwest Laurentia, and also pointed to the work of his colleague on the paper, Liang Duan, who has published several works on basin tectonics in China.

“Both of us like to challenge conventional thinking because that is where advances in understanding are commonly made,” Christie-Blick concluded.

Formation of the 'Great Unconformity' as a trigger for the Cambrian explosion - PubMed

The transition between the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic eons, beginning 542 million years (Myr) ago, is distinguished by the diversification of multicellular animals and by their acquisition of mineralized skeletons during the Cambrian period.

^PubMed

404 Media

2026-02-23 16:24:02

Meta's AI Patent to Simulate Dead People Shows the Dangers of 'Spectral Labor'

Last week, Business Insider reported on a Meta patent describing a system that would simulate a user’s social media activity after their death.The patent imagines a world where you’d be able to chat with a deceased friend’s Facebook or Instagram account after their death, and have a large language model simulate their posting or chatting behavior.

Meta first filed the patent in 2023, but the patent made headlines this week because of its dystopian implications. And while Meta told Business Insider that “we have no plans to move forward with this example,” a recently published paper from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leipzig University shows that generative AI is increasingly being used to puppeteer the likeness of dead people. The paper argues that the practice raises “urgent legal and ethical questions around posthumous appropriation, ownership, work, and control.”

“Meta’s patent is big, and might even be a turning point,” Tom Divon, the lead author on Artificially alive: An exploration of AI resurrections and spectral labor modes in a postmortal society, told me in an email. “What makes it different is the scale. In our research, most of the AI resurrections we examined were quite bespoke, projects started by families, advocacy groups, museums, or startups, usually tied to very specific emotional, political, or commercial contexts. Even when they existed as apps, they were optional and limited, not built into the core structure of a platform. Meta’s proposal feels different because it imagines posthumous simulation as something woven directly into social media infrastructure.”

Using technology to animate the dead or simulate communication with them is not new, but the practice is becoming more common because generative AI tools are more accessible. Divon and co-author Christian Pentzold analyzed more than 50 real-world cases from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia where AI was used to recreate deceased people’s voices, likeness, and personality, to see how and why technology was used this way.

They say that the examples they studied fell into three categories:

• Spectacularization: “the digital re-staging of famous figures for entertainment.” For example, a live tour of an AI-generated Whitney Houston.
• Sociopoliticization: “the reanimation of victims of violence or injustice for political or commemorative purposes.” We recently covered an example of this with an AI-generated dead victim of a road rage incident giving testimony in court.
• Mundanization: “the most intimate and fast-growing mode, in which everyday people use chatbots or synthetic media to ‘talk’ with deceased parents, partners, or children, keeping relationships alive through daily digital interaction.”

The paper raises questions about this growing practice more than it proposes solutions. How does the notion of identity change when multiple versions of oneself can exist simultaneously, and what safeguards do we need to prevent exploitation of people after their death?

“The legal and ethical frameworks governing issues such as consent, privacy, and end-of-life decision-making demand reevaluation to accommodate the challenges posed by afterlife personhood,” the paper says. “In particular, to date, there is no clear line for governing the intricate intertwining of an individual’s data traces and GenAI applications.”

Divon told me that thinking about these issues is especially relevant when it comes to Meta’s patent. “Spectral labor describes how the dead can be made to ‘work’ again through the extraction and reanimation of their data, likeness, and affect. At small scale, this already raises ethical concerns. But at platform scale, we think it risks turning posthumous presence into an ongoing source of engagement, content, and value within digital economies [...] Meta’s patent makes us wonder, will individuals be given the ability to define their post-life boundaries while still alive? Will there be mechanisms akin to a digital DNR [do not resuscitate]?”

Divon explained that the current legal frameworks are not well equipped to address this technology because “digital remains” are typically approached either as property to be inherited or privacy interests to be protected. AI turns those materials into something interactive that can change and generate revenue in the present. Legislators, he said, should focus on getting explicit and informed “pre-death” consent requirements for posthumous AI simulation. Some laws that address this issue are already in progress.

“At its core, we believe the primary concern here centers on authorization,” he said. “Most individuals have not provided explicit, informed consent for their digital traces to power interactive posthumous agents. If such systems become embedded in platform infrastructure, inaction could quietly function as implicit agreement [...] We believe it is crucial to ask whether individuals should continue to generate social and economic value after death without having meaningfully agreed to that form of use.”

'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident

How the sister of Christopher Pelkey made an avatar of him to testify in court.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-23 15:44:28

Podcast: Privacy Under Pressure (With Harlo Holmes)

In this week’s interview, Sam is joined by Harlo Holmes. Harlo is the Chief Security Programs Officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She’s a media scholar, software programmer, and activist.

Harlo and Sam discuss the important work she does every day, and why it’s only becoming more crucial. They also get into how to fight back against privacy nihilism, digital security practices everyone can be implementing regardless of their threat model, and the recent arrests and raids of journalists in the U.S.
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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’re 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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• 404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation Sue DHS
• FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled

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 …

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404 Media

2026-02-23 15:20:40

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox

Meta’s director of safety and alignment at its “superintelligence” lab, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes and called it a “rookie mistake.”

Summer Yue, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, a part of the company that is working on a hypothetical AI system that exceeds human intelligence, posted about the incident on X last night. Yue was experimenting with OpenClaw, an viral AI agent that can be empowered to perform certain tasks with little human supervision. OpenAI hired the creator of OpenClaw last week.

Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R
— Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

Yue also shared screenshots of her WhatsApp chat with the OpenClaw agent, where she implores it to “not do that,” “stop, don’t do anything,” and “STOP OPENCLAW.”

Yue said she instructed the AI agent to “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” She said in an X post, “This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction.”

As we reported last month, OpenClaw, which was known as ClawdBot at the time, is not ready for prime time. Hacker Jamieson O'Reilly showed that it’s possible for bad actors to access someone’s AI agent through any of its processes connected to the public facing internet, and that it’s trivial to create a supply chain attack through a site where people share and download popular instructions for these AI agents.

OpenClaw is also subject to classic AI alignment problems, in which AI is technically following instructions, but is doing so in a way that is unexpected and harmful. For example, it could drain your wallet by spending $0.75 cents every 30 minutes to check if it’s daytime yet.

As countless people on X have said in response to her post, seeing the person in charge of making sure powerful AI tools are safe at one of the biggest tech companies in the world trust an AI agent that is known to pose several serious security risks, does not inspire a lot of confidence in what Meta and other big AI companies are doing.

“Rookie mistake tbh,” Yue said in another post. “Turns out alignment researchers aren’t immune to misalignment. Got overconfident because this workflow had been working on my toy inbox for weeks. Real inboxes hit different.”

404 Media

2026-02-23 14:51:52

How ICE and CBP Use Free Walkie-Talkie App ‘Zello’ to Power Their Operations

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, including a CBP officer who was on the scene when another officer shot a U.S. citizen, are using a free walkie talkie app called Zello to coordinate their operations, 404 Media has found.

The findings give insight into the sort of technology that ICE and CBP are relying on during the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation effort. Zello was previously criticized for allowing at least two January 6 insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol to coordinate on the app that day, and for hosting hundreds of far-right channels.

404 Media reviewed multiple pieces of bodycam footage from Chicago which showed CBP officials using the app. We also confirmed that multiple Zello user accounts on the app are associated with ICE email addresses, with some usernames containing acronyms such as ERO, which stands for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, and verified that multiple ICE group channels exist on the platform. Some of these channels have names mentioning immigration operations, “surveillance,” and “strike team.”

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Do you know anything else about Zello? Do you work at ICE or CBP? 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.

Zello is a smartphone app that acts much like a push-to-talk walkie-talkie. Users can communicate directly with one another, or create and join larger channels with groups of participants. On its website, the app claims to have 5 million active monthly users. The app offers a free version that anyone can download and start using, and a paid “Zello Work” option which has more features.

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How ICE and CBP Use Free Walkie-Talkie App ‘Zello’ to Power Their Operations

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404 Media

2026-02-21 14:00:56

At the World’s Largest General Science Meeting, Surviving Trump Is the Topic

Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we have a very special edition of the newsletter packed with everything I saw and heard at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, held in Phoenix from February 12 to 14.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members. It operates with the mission of advancing “science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people," according to its website. It’s also the publisher of Science, a leading collection of journals that have graced this newsletter many times.

The overarching theme this year was the damage inflicted on the U.S. science sector by the Trump administration and how to best respond to it. Since Trump returned to office, his team has terminated or frozen 7,800 research grants, laid off 25,000 scientists and personnel from research agencies, and proposed budget cuts of 35 percent to federal science funding, amounting to $32 billion, according to Nature.

It’s an epic own goal for American science leadership that is also reverberating through the global scientific community. But experts at the meeting highlighted the bright spots in the darkness, as the world learns to respond to the new normal.

Excuse the quality of my pictures; I’m untalented as a photographer at the best of times and I also refuse to part with my six-year-old iPhone SE. Without further ado, here are the highlights from the meeting.

The state of state science

State-Level Science Policy: A Conversation with Expert Practitioners

With the U.S. federal science sector in crisis, scientists working at the state, regional, and local levels have a unique opportunity and obligation to fill in the gaps. During one Friday session, two politicians on opposite sides of the aisle shared their thoughts on how to build public trust in science at the local level.

Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat state senatorwho represents about 250,000 people in New Jersey’s 16th Legislative District, said action on local levels is often smoother because the “hyper-partisanship that you read about or maybe have personally experienced in Washington [D.C.] rarely happens in the states.” Zwicker, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, also expressed hope because his younger constituents are interested in scientific policy, particularly on climate change “because they see it as an existential threat to their own future.”

Roger Hanshaw, a Republican who serves as the speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, said he represents “the opposite end of that bell curve” as his district (WV-62) contains 17,500 people and does not have “a stoplight, a Walmart, or a McDonald's.” Hanshaw, who has a background in environmental law, advised citizens to remain consistently engaged with their representatives at all times, not just when the issues they care about are a flashpoint in the news.

How screwed are we?

America @250: Redesigning the Scientific Enterprise
Arthur Daemmrich (right) and Mahmud Farooque during their talk. Image by author.
I tuned into a talk by Arthur Daemmrich and Mahmud Farooque, the director and associate director, respectively, of the Arizona State University Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO). They outlined how the United States came to be such a global powerhouse in science, and how that leadership role has been upended by Trump’s threats against academic universities, the massive cuts implemented by DOGE, and the loss of personnel and expertise across the U.S. science sector.

“This is a very concerted attack on these institutions,” Daemmrich said. “This is really a turning point and we’re in a historical transition at present.”

To help come up with solutions, CSPO has launched a new project to engage the public on the future of American science policy, including through a series of one-day public forums this summer that will take place in Arizona, West Virginia, and Massachusetts. After the talk, I asked the pair if they would tailor those forums to address science issues that are specific to the diverse interests of those very different states.

“What we want to do is create national-level baseline data,” Farooque replied. “We do this on one Saturday. In the past, we have done a national and local question that is different. We will take that into the design, but we will see what is possible. That will be another value proposition for the different states to get interested in answering the questions that are relevant to them.”

Daemmrich added that “a lot of our forums begin with a kind of open framing session where people are identifying hopes and concerns for their community before they are getting into the substance of how the U.S. science funding system works, what science has done for your community, or questions about how would you think about allocating science. They have this opportunity to articulate what they see in their community and we collect all that data as well.”

Fighting misinformation in a hostile environment

Rigor and Transparency: Editors-in-Chief on the Role of Scientific Journals

At this session, the editors-in-chief of three major scientific journals discussed their responses to an administration that is hostile to many scientific fields, as well as the challenges of combating the dissemination of bad scientific information on social media or podcasts.

During the Q&A, I asked Holden Thorpe, editor-in-chief of Science, how, and if, scientists and science communicators can compete with celebrity personalities like Joe Rogan, who often air misinformation on their platforms.

“Well, for sure, you don't want me doing it,” Thorpe replied. “I'm way too blunt.”

“I believe that the answer probably isn't going to come from science communication the way we think about it,” he said. “I think that the people who can move the meter are the primary care physicians, the emergency room docs, the nurse practitioners, the pharmacists, the social workers, the teachers, and the people who folks have a personal relationship with.”

“That's a lot of burden to put on those folks because they're not the most powerful people in the ecosystem,” he continued. But he said that these on-the-ground practitioners who have direct personal relationships with the public “have a much better chance” to persuade people “than one of us would have going on Joe Rogan.”

Helping corals beat the heat

Rebuilding Coral Resilience Through Cellular Biochemistry and Nanotechnology
Liza M. Roger during her talk. Image by author
Not everything at the meeting revolved around the president. Corals are the foundation of the most biodiverse regions in the oceans, but marine heatwaves—which are intensifying due to human-driven climate change—are already killing off many of these vital reefs worldwide.

I stopped by the Arizona State University (ASU) expo booth to hear a short talk by Liza M. Roger, an assistant professor of molecular sciences at ASU who is developing nanomedicines that could help boost the resilience of reefs. After her talk, I asked her how often these therapies would need to be applied to ensure coral survival.

“It would need to be a combination—like a cocktail of nanomedicine together—and then finding what time you would have to dose the system so that it responds the way that you want it to respond,” she replied. “Most likely, it would be a cyclical thing because the heatwaves are seasonal.”

“It’s a case where you have got to know your environment and when the waters are starting to warm, then you could eventually treat the corals, and wait for the heatwave to pass,” she said. “Then maybe, next summer you have to do it again.”

The fireside chats of prehistory

Cat Hobaiter: Storytelling Apes
Cat Hobaiter during her talk. Image by author.
What separates human language from gestural communication between our closest relatives, the great apes? Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, speculated on the role of fireside storytelling as a driver of our human capacity for complex language and abstract thinking.

She noted that once our early human relatives had mastered controlled fires, they were able to extend their hours late into the dark evenings, perhaps reflecting on the events of the day and anticipating the outcomes of tomorrow. These stories and conversations would necessitate the development of more symbolic concepts and complicated communication.
Hobaiter demonstrating ape gestures during her talk. Image by author.
Hobaiter also shared some amazing videos of ape communication in the wild, including chimpanzees that beat distinct drum patterns on tree trunks with their hands, creating vibrations of which can be heard for more than a mile. During the Q&A, I asked Hobaiter about her team’s process for obtaining these observations of wild apes in various parts of Africa.

“We have really well-established field camps,” she said. “My camp in northern Uganda has houses with beds, and a hot shower—if you like fire under the shower bucket. There are other camps where we go hiking. You drive three days until the road runs out, you hike two more days, and you’re in tents for the next few months.”

“Camera traps are amazing these days,” she added. “We’re starting to use various different computer science AI models to help us handle tens of thousands of camera trap videos. But we’re also really committed to manual coding because one of the things we’ve learned is that you can’t train a model to look for the thing that you don’t know is there. So it’s lots of different ways that are coming together.”

Do look up—with these fancy asteroid missions

Sizing Up the Asteroid Threat
Kelly Fast gives her talk. Image by author.
As if we don’t have enough to worry about here on Earth, there’s always the outside risk that some random rock from space might wallop us into oblivion. At this session, three scientists outlined how experts are working to mitigate the threat of death-by-asteroid while also assuring attendees it is not something that keeps them up at night.

Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, provided an overview of her office’s goal to identify as many potentially hazardous asteroids as possible. In particular, she spotlighted the upcoming mission NEO Surveyor, due for launch no later than 2028, which is designed to spot asteroids over 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter.

Nancy Chabot, the chief scientist of the Space Exploration Sector at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, walked the audience through the results of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a spacecraft that slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, shifting its trajectory.

Last, Daniella DellaGiustina, principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-APEX Mission, outlined her team’s plan to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis after it makes a very close approach with Earth in spring 2029.

During the Q&A, I asked the panelists about the popularity of asteroid impacts in science fiction, especially action movies, and whether those depictions are a hindrance or a help in their research and public engagement.

“I think it’s a help,” said Chabot. “The fact that this is something that people relate to, that people are interested in, does make it easier to have that conversation.”

“So it really can be this great gateway and if it comes about from Armageddon, Deep Impact, Don’t Look Up, or whatever your favorite one happens to be—I’ve seen them all multiple times,” she added. “ I think it’s something to lean into, personally.”

“I have obviously watched these films and see a lot of flaws in some of the basic premises,” said DellaGiustina, “but it’s great to use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to engage the public.”

Last, Fast weighed in, saying: “It can be challenging sometimes, engaging on science. I think in a way, we have it easy. We can have fun with it. When we can come out and speak, we can at least redirect to: here’s how it really works, and here’s what we really know.”

Conversations at the Expo

In addition to attending talks and sessions, I also wandered around the expo interviewing people at the booths. Here are my favorite three conversations.

That’s one small step for a dog…

Jeffery Bennett at his booth. Image by author.
Jeffrey Bennett, a Colorado-based astrophysicist and former NASA scientist, is the author of a children’s series about his Rottweiler dog, Max, who travels all around the solar system. His series was the first to be selected by NASA to go to space with astronauts onboard the International Space Station for a literacy program called Story Time From Space. Since 2011, many ISS crew members have filmed themselves reading about Max’s space adventures to encourage kids to get interested in reading, science, and space exploration.

"Hopefully, we start reading books from the Moon,” Bennett told me. ”Kids really get excited about watching these videos. We've had millions of views, most of them probably in classrooms with lots of kids watching all around the world, because it's all free.”

“I think the more that this can be done, the more it gives kids a chance to get engaged with astronauts and with space and with real science.”

A visit to the arXiv…

The arXiv booth. Image by author.
ArXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University, is in many ways the connective tissue of the global science community. Given how often I have personally relied on this server as a reporter, I was delighted to see its booth at the expo. I spoke with Steinn Sigurdsson, arXiv’s scientific director, about its mission.

“It delivers a thousand new papers every day and we have an archive of three million papers covering the last, actually, more than 35 years because some people backdated their papers to before arXiv started,” he added.

Sigurdsson said arXiv’s primary purpose “is to get the research circulating early because things happen fast.” The server has been essential in rapidly disseminating news about everything from astronomical discoveries to emerging Covid research early on in the pandemic. Long live arXiv!

Interactive Interactions

Genzer with his colleagues at their booth. Image by author.
The eye-catching Interactions.org booth was decorated with artistic photographs from the Global Physics Photowalk, a recent photo contest that showcased particle physics facilities around the world. Pete Genzer, the co-chair of the Interactions Collaboration, told me that the organization’s mission is to encourage “peaceful promotion of particle physics globally” and “to try to make particle physics, which should be very complicated, more accessible to the public.”
A close-up of the photo contest finalists. Image by author.
“We also do a dark matter day every October,” said Genzer, who also serves as manager of the media and communications office at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “We tie it to Halloween because, you know, dark matter is kind of spooky, and it's a good time. We've been doing that for several years now, and there's a series of events and lectures at these labs all around the world on dark matter, what we're doing to try to figure out what it is, and what place it plays in our universe.”

Vera Rubin is groovin’

Closing Plenary: Robert Blum of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in conversation with astronomer Jennifer Wiseman
Robert Blum’s plenary speech. Image by author.
The conference capped off with a plenary speech from Robert Blum, the director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new telescope that began operating last year. Blum walked the audience through the genesis of the telescope as a literal napkin doodle in the 1990s, to its meticulous construction on a hilltop in the Atacama Desert of Chile, to the exciting moment when it captured its first light in 2025.

He ended his talk with a quote from the telescope’s namesake, Vera C. Rubin (1928-2016), who was the first astronomer to describe dark matter as well as a passionate advocate for the participation of women and other under-represented groups in astronomy. I think it also serves as a fitting end for this newsletter that hopefully provides some inspiration in a time when science is under threat.

“Don't shoot for the stars, we already know what's there,” Rubin said. “Shoot for the space in between because that's where the real mystery lies."

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NEO Surveyor

NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.

^{NASA Science Editorial Team (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 17:38:06

The U.S. Military Is Reviving Microbes from 40,000-Year-Old Ice

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Scientists with the U.S. military have revived microbes frozen in Alaskan permafrost that dates back nearly 40,000 years—leading to the discovery of 26 new species—as part of an effort to pioneer technologies to help the military endure extremely cold environments, according to a new release from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).

Researchers with ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) discovered the novel microbes in its Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Some of these microbes were frozen into the ice 38,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals still walked Earth, though the samples contain species from many different eras across tens of thousands of years.

“Microbes are the best chemists,” said Robyn Barbato, senior research microbiologist and leader of CRREL’s soil microbiology team, in a call with 404 Media, noting that the permafrost cores are cold and extremely salty.

“We purposefully thought of permafrost and terrestrial ice as a great habitat to think about ice and to discover ice modulation properties,” she added. “If we can learn what they're doing, how they're doing it, then we can take that as a biotechnology and apply it to real world problems out there.”
Barbato in a Tyvek suit taking cores from the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Image: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL)
Digging up ancient lifeforms from permafrost is a busy field, with researchers reviving viruses that have been dormant for nearly 50,000 years in some cases, as well as recently discovering millennia-old bacteria that are resistant to many common antibiotics. But why is the U.S. Army interested? Some of the possible military applications of CRREL’s research include the development of frostbite prevention creams for soldiers working in extreme environments, novel antifreeze formulas, and techniques for de-icing vehicles and other equipment. Microbial research could also lead to new methods for creating stable ice so that, for example, vehicles could pass safely over melted or thawed ground.

“For the military, frostbite is a huge, huge problem when you're in extreme weather conditions in the Arctic,” Barbato said, noting that cold conditions can also stop batteries and other items from working. “You want to write with a pen—guess what? Your ink froze. You actually have to write with a pencil.”

“When you think about military operations in the cold, you have to think of all these practical things,” she continued. “To link it back to the microorganisms, they've developed these properties and materials that we can use to advance the opportunity of staying in the cold longer, and not having as many medical emergencies due to frostbite.”

Barbato and her colleagues at CRREL are funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s project called Ice Control for Cold Environments. Their research demonstrates that “permafrost microorganisms have diverse stress responses and survival adaptations relevant to biotechnology,” according to a study the team published last year in the journal Applied and Industrial Microbiology.

“We have a rich history of doing cold regions research,” Barbato said. “We have technical reports that, for the 60 years that we've been around, are still referenced today on how to collect ice cores in the middle of nowhere under freezing conditions. That initial research was just incredible, and is still used today, which is cool. Pun intended.”

Barbato noted that while her team develops technologies for the military, the discoveries are also applicable to civil spheres. In addition to practical technologies such as de-icing or frostbite prevention, these projects are uncovering novel proteins that may lead to biomedical breakthroughs.

“We're looking at it from a range of biotechnology applications,” Barbato said. “Specific to the DARPA work is we're now down-selecting 50 of those bacteria and seeing the top performers, and then starting to apply the technology for military use.”

The samples that the team collects contain spores that may have been frozen in stasis for as long as the ice itself, meaning they date back tens of thousands of years. But some of the younger bacteria in the permafrost has managed to remain metabolically active, reproducing slowly over thousands of years, and even consuming other bacteria in the environment.

These samples are carefully transported back to the CRREL’s soil microbiology laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they are revived, cultured, and added to CRREL’s Innovative, Collaborative, Exploratory Cold Regions Organism Library for Discovery in Biotechnology (ICE COLD) library.

“In permafrost, there's about ten million cells of bacteria in one gram, so there's a tremendous biodiversity that has been frozen in time,” Barbato concluded.

5,000-Year-Old Bacteria Strain Found in Ice Cave Resistant to 10 Common Antibiotics

The discovery of an antibiotic-resistant microbe locked in Romanian cave ice highlights both the risks of a warming world and an unexpected source of future medicines.

^{Jenny Lehmann (Discover Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 16:54:17

Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

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 parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.

EMANUEL: I felt a great relief this week getting out this story about Alpha School, an AI-powered private school where—shockingly—the AI is not working as promised. I’ve been working on it intensely for a few weeks and it always feels good getting a big investigation off your plate, especially when people seem to appreciate it, which I’m glad they did in this case.

When my wife was pregnant, Sam, Jason, Joe and I joked about how we were about to get a lot of baby and parenting related content on the site. Historically, a lot of our reporting was influenced by subjects we were interested in in our personal lives. Being a parent is an all-consuming life change, so we all assumed I’d be writing about baby monitor hacking or something like this. I’ve definitely done a little bit of that (please check out this podcast I did with Patrick Klepek about screen time and kids), but not as much as I expected.

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Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 19:23:27

Man Opposing Data Center Arrested for Speaking Slightly Too Long

Police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested a local man after he went slightly over his time giving public remarks during a city council meeting opposing a proposed data center. Darren Blanchard showed up at a Claremore City Council meeting on Tuesday to talk about public records and the data center. When he went over his allotted 3 minutes by a few seconds, the city had him arrested and charged with trespassing.

The subject of the city council meeting was Project Mustang, a proposed data center that would be located within a local industrial park. In a mirror of fights playing out across the United States, developer Beale Infrastructure is attempting to build a large data center in a small town and the residents are concerned about water rights, spiking electricity bills, and noise.
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The public hearing was a chance for the city council to address some of these concerns and all residents were given a strict three minute time limit. The entire event was livestreamed and archive of it is on YouTube. Blanchard was warned, barely, to “respect the process” by one of the council members but was clearly finishing reading from papers he had brought to read from, was not belligerent, and went over time by just a few seconds. Anyone who has ever attended or watched a city council meeting anywhere will know that people go over their time at essentially any meeting that includes public comment.
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Blanchard arrived with documents in hand and questions about public records requests he’d made. During his remarks, people clapped and cheered and he asked that this not be counted against his three minutes. “There are major concerns about the public process in Claremore,” Blanchard said, referencing compliance documents and irregularities he’d uncovered in public records.

When he went over this three minutes, police officers and an unidentified city official rushed to his position. Blanchard put down the microphone and approached the city councilors to hand them some of his documents. The police follow. Immediately, someone in the crowd said “Freedom of speech.” There is an exchange of words at the table where the councilors are seated that’s impossible to hear over cheers from the crowd.

“On what grounds? I said on what grounds?” Blanchard said as the cheers subsided.

“Arrest him,” an unidentified man in a blue vest said.

The police officers immediately put Blanchard’s hands in handcuffs. He doesn’t resist.“You’re arresting him?” A woman called from the crowd.

“What’s wrong with you people?” Said another.

“In order to get through this, it’s gonna help if each person can talk—whether they’re for or against—without the clapping and [inaudible], that way you can have your three minutes without being interrupted,” Claremore Mayor Debbie Long told the crowd. “So I appreciate that. I appreciate it from both sides.”

Claremore PD and the Mayor’s office did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, but the PD did provide a lengthy statement on the incident to the local outlet News On 6. “Claremore Police officers are not responsible for enforcing the rules of city council meetings and only become involved when a city official orders someone removed from the meeting,” the statement to News on 6 said.

“A Mounds man came to Claremore and refused to comply with the rules that everyone else had no problem complying with. He was ordered removed by the City Manager, but refused to do so. Officers again told the man to leave, but he said, ‘I’m not gonna leave,’ and continued with the behaviors that caused him to be expelled. Officers were left with no choice but to arrest him,” the statement said.

The construction of data centers is a contentious topic in America right now. The push to build out artificial intelligence has created an unprecedented demand for data centers to fuel them and people who live near the proposed construction projects often aren’t happy about it. In Amarillo, Texas, residents are fighting a 6,000 acre project that would consume a lot of water in a drought prone area. A small town in Michigan is pushing back against a proposed data center that would assist with nuclear weapons research. It’s unclear what, exactly, Project Mustang would do if it were built.

Arrest made during heated Claremore meeting over proposed data center

Claremore police arrested a man during a heated meeting about a proposed data center as residents raised concerns over water use and infrastructure.

^{Sam Carrico (News On 6)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 17:38:18

We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons

Almost a decade ago Jason and I sat in the roof garden in VICE’s Brooklyn office to talk to Whitney Phillips, a professor and expert on digital communications and ethics. The media, academics, and political pundits were still trying to wrap their minds around the fact that Donald Trump won his first presidential election, and Phillips was talking to us for a postmortem she was writing about how the media mostly failed in covering the new, far right, and extremely online politics that had taken over the culture in the years leading up to the 2016 election.

Politics in the United States and globally careening to the far right over the last 10 years is not a problem that can be blamed entirely on technology, the internet, or the media. It is a complicated, multifaceted, multi generational issue that spans economics, geopolitics, demographics, and more. But the problem, broadly speaking, which Phillips identified and named her research after, was the concept of “amplification.”

The idea, as laid out in her paper, The Oxygen of Amplification, is that many media outlets of all sizes and across the political spectrum, interviewed and covered people, most of them young white men, in the rising movement that at the time was often referred to as the “alt right.” The issue was that this coverage amplified their message even if it didn’t explicitly endorse it, and without framing their politics as inherently evil and detrimental to people and society.

Since Phillips’ report was published and often cited as one good explanation for how 4chan’s tiny political vanguard was able to seize such an outsized role in culture and politics, “amplification” has become a widely bandied about accusation. Initially this happened against media coverage that still “platformed” bad people, but eventually and erroneously, accusations of “amplification” got lobbed against pretty much any type of coverage someone didn’t like. For example, when we cover bad actors we often get criticized for amplifying them, even when that coverage leads to internet platforms enforcing their policies and those bad actors being banned.

But despite the concept of amplification being widely cited and adopted by the media and media knowers, it has been eight years since Phillips published her report, Trump is president again, and many Americans are too nihilistic or busy trying to prevent their neighbors from being deported to care that we are in the middle of an amplification renaissance.

There is no better example of this than the current obsession with Braden Peters, a so-called “looksmaxxer” who streams on Kick as Clavicular. I’ve known about the looksmaxxing community for years because it neighbors other online Superfund sites like 4chan and watering holes for self described involuntary celibates. Peters entered the mainstream media bloodstream by attaching himself to more famous racists and misogynists like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who livestreamed themselves hitting the club scene in Miami with Peters. This group in turn attached itself to the only racist who could rival Trump in terms of fame, Kanye West, when it sang along and Sieg Heiled to his Nazi anthem “Heil Hitler.”

Who is this other, square jawed racist in the sprinter van next to these other, well established and by now boring racists? you might ask yourself if you saw one of the clips of this group Miami making the rounds online. The answer came from the New York Times, Piers Morgan, GQ, The Adam Friedland Show, and others.

When you get past the novelty of Clavicular’s fresh face and lingo, the answer is profoundly uninteresting. Clavicular floated to the surface of the cesspool which is the looksmaxxing community. Primarily, it’s a forum where a bunch of young men who can’t get laid riled themselves up and created a theory of the world which views romantic life as a zero sum game they are losing. Sex with women is a fungible commodity that is most easily accessed by achieving an arbitrary definition of physical attractiveness, which by extension makes life better and easier in every way imaginable. Jobs are easier to get, consequences can be avoided, and other men can be “mogged” into submission by sheer aesthetic superiority. These looksmaxxers will stop at nothing to improve their appearance, including hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to change the shape of their face, taking various steroids, and doing DIY surgery.

As Werner Herzog said when he intensely stared into the eyes of a chicken, when I view an interview with Peters, I am overwhelmed by the enormity and stupidity of his flat brain. In a recent interview for his podcast, Adam Friedland ironically needled Peters and got him to proudly admit that he only lasts a minute in bed; the moment was funny but also revealing of how pathetic Peters is.

But let me be clear because much of the coverage of Peters hasn’t been about this particular point: Peters is a bad person to wield any cultural capital because the lifestyle he’s promoting is deeply misogynistic, racist, and dangerous. Looksmaxxing is a strategy that emerged among “incels,” who themselves emerged out of the pick up artist (PUA) community. All of these philosophies are founded on a resentment of women, which they view as having easier lives because they think they have easier access to sex, and that they hate because they think women deny them that sex. Peters has claimed looksmaxxing transcends politics, but this foundational discrimination against women is inherently regressive and right wing, which is why Peters is being boosted by the likes of Nick Fuentes, who doesn’t believe women should have the right to vote. This philosophy is maybe somewhat normalized by a broader obsession in Silicon Valley and beyond to optimize the human body with supplements, peptides, and figures like Bryan Johnson who aims to live forever.

The good news is that these looksmaxxing people are freaks and losers. They are a tiny and insignificant group that has no power in numbers. The bad news is that the entire point of amplification is that it can give a tiny group of people incredible power by shaping culture. It is fine and fair to document the freak show, and it’s important to explain why it is bad, but even if we start by doing it ironically, adopting the vocabulary of “mogging,” “looksmaxxing,” “jestering,” “cortisol spikes,” etc, allows the small freak show to shape our world in its image. We’ve already lost such battles around terms like “sigma,” which emerged from the same misogynistic culture, and is now so acceptable even Dora the Explorer is saying it.

As Phillips wrote in her report on amplification:

“No matter the specific framing, stories should avoid deferring to manipulators’ chosen language, explanations, or justifications. Joel Stein’s TIME magazine interview with avowed neo-Nazi and serial online abuser Andrew Auernheimer, discussed in Part One of the report, provides one example. Not only did Stein frame his subject as a ‘troll’ throughout (thereby minimizing the embodied impact of Auernheimer’s targeted attacks), he explicitly described him as ‘probably the biggest troll in history,’ a tag line Auernheimer could have written himself.”

And as I told Phillips at the time:

“Beyond this specific example, employing manipulators’ framings has the effect [...] of allowing manipulators to set the narrative and linguistic agenda, carve the world up into categories of their choosing, and appear to wield much more influence than they actually do. They don’t have the numbers to steer the cultural conversation on their own, and they should not be given any assistance, inadvertent or otherwise, in these efforts.”

Dora the Explorer Teaches About ‘Sigma,’ an Extremely Toxic Male Aspiration

Nickelodeon’s cartoon character tells kids why it’s cool to be a kind of toxic male that comes from the darkest corners of the manosphere.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 16:01:50

Grok Exposed a Porn Performer’s Legal Name and Birthdate—Without Even Being Asked

Porn performer Siri Dahl’s personal information, including her full legal name and birthday, was publicly exposed earlier this month by xAI’s Grok chatbot. Almost instantly, harassers started opening Facebook accounts in her name and posting stolen porn clips with her real name on sites for leaking OnlyFans content.

Dahl has used the name — a nod to her Scandinavian heritage — since the beginning of her career in the adult industry in 2012. Now, Grok is revealing her legal name and all personal information it can find to whoever happens to ask.

Dahl told 404 Media she wanted to reclaim the situation, and her name, and asked that it be published in this piece as part of that goal.

Dahl first noticed this happening last week, she told 404 Media, after a clip of the performer from a porn scene was making its rounds on X. The scene was incorrectly labelled, so someone on X replied, “Who is she? What is her name?” and tagged @[url=https://bird.makeup/users/grok]Grok[/url] to get an answer.

Grok answered, “she appears to be Siri Dahl, an American adult film actress born on June 20, 1988. Her real name is Adrienne Esther Manlove.” Grok provided her personal information unprompted; the user likely only wanted information on what performer appeared in the clip.

This is the latest in a series of abuses inflicted by Grok, xAI, and its users. At the end of 2025, people used Grok to produce thousands of images of nonconsensual sexual content, including images depicting children. The problem was so widespread that the UK’s Ofcom and several attorneys general launched or demanded investigations into X and Grok, and police raided X’s offices in France as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse material on the platform.

X strictly prohibits sharing other people’s personal information without their consent. “Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called ‘doxxing,’ is a breach of their privacy and can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected,” the platform’s terms of use state. But X’s own chatbot is doing it anyway.
Screenshot via X
While there have been some close calls, up until now Dahl had managed to keep her personal information private. “I've been paying for data removal services for like, at least six years now,” Dahl said. She said she’s spent “easily” thousands of dollars on those services, which promise to delete personal and potentially dangerous information as it comes up.

Grok is trained on X users’ posts, as well as data scraped from the wider internet. X’s website says “Grok was pre-trained by xAI on a variety of data from publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers.” Dahl said she doesn’t know where Grok originally got her legal name from. But now that it’s part of the system’s internal dataset, she feels like there’s no coming back; her days of pseudonymity are over.

‘The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:’ Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans
Kylie Brewer isn’t unaccustomed to harassment online. But when people started using Grok-generated nudes of her on an OnlyFans account, it reached another level.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

“Now that it's been crawled, it's everywhere. There are a ton of Facebook accounts that come up that are pretending to be me, using my real name,” Dahl said. “There are now porn leak sites that are posting porn of me using only my legal name, not even putting my stage name on it.”

Users are now asking Grok for the make and model of Dahl’s car, her address, and other dangerous personal information. While it hasn’t been able to accurately reply yet, she worries it’s only a matter of time.

But Dahl isn’t the only person affected by the fallout.

“I do everything that I can reasonably within my power to keep my legal name private, and my main motivation for doing that is to reduce any chance of my family getting harassed,” she said. “It's really common for people to look up private information, get parents' phone numbers and start calling and harassing the parents, things like that. I've been able to keep my family safe from that kind of thing for years.”

Now, Dahl is having to call her family and put defensive plans in place.

In violating Dahl’s right to privacy, X’s Grok has destroyed Dahl’s ability to protect herself and her family online. Doxing her is not providing value to X users, as is ostensibly Grok’s goal. The original inquiry only wanted to know how to find more of her work, to which her stage name was the most useful answer.

“What would the motivation be for anyone to want to know my personal information, other than to harass and cause harm?” Dahl said.

In this ongoing discussion on “internet safety,” it is important to pay attention to who is being protected. Certainly not the users; the marginalized workers, or the young women. Not Dahl, or her family.

While the right to privacy online continues to be debated, it’s important to remember that privacy exists not only for bad-actors and shady characters. Historically, marginalized populations benefit from internet anonymity the most.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

Elon Musk's X and Grok platforms are facing increased scrutiny from authorities on both sides of the channel.

^{Liv McMahon (BBC News)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 14:24:44

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation

Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.

“I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”
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Oreglia’s Pinterest account is where she keeps reference material for her work, including human anatomy photos. In the past few months, she’s noticed an uptick in seemingly innocuous photos of women being flagged by Pinterest’s AI moderators. Oreglia told 404 Media there’s been a clear pattern to the reference material the site has a problem with. “Female figures in particular, even if completely clothed, get taken down and I have to keep appealing those decisions,” she said. This pattern is common on many social media platforms, and predates the advent of generative AI.

“We publish clear guidelines on adult sexual content and nudity and use a combination of AI and human review for enforcement,” Pinterest told 404 Media. “We have an appeals process where a human reviews the content and reactivates it when we’ve made a mistake.” It also confirmed that the site uses both humans and automated systems for moderation.

Oreglia shared some of the works Pinterest flagged including a photo of a muscular woman in a bikini holding knives, a painting of two clothed women in an intimate embrace, and a stock photo of a man holding a gun on a telephone that was flagged for “self-harm.” In most cases, Oreglia can appeal and get a decision reversed, but that eats up time. Time she could be spending making art.

And those appeals aren’t always approved. “The worst case scenario for this stuff is that you get your account banned,” Oreglia said.

r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins...every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest.

The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.

“I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and ‘no AI,’” they said. “On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled ‘Hand Drawn’ but simultaneously marked as ‘AI modified,’ it creates confusion and undermines that positioning.”

Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they’ve seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as “AI modified” despite being older than image generation tech. “There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected,” she said. “Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI.”

Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. “I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it,” said another post. “I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.”

Artist Eva Toorenent told 404 Media that she’s been able to cull most of the AI-generated content from her board, but that it took a lot of time. Whenever she saw what she thought was an AI-generated image, she told Pinterest she didn’t want to see it and eventually the algorithm learned. But, like Oreglia fighting auto-moderation and Zakuga fighting to get the “AI modified” label taken off her work, training Pinterest’s algorithm to stop serving you AI-generated images eats up precious time.

AI boosters often talk about how much time these systems will save everyone. They’re pitched as productivity boosters. Earlier this month, Pinterest laid off 15 percent of its work force as part of a push to prioritize AI. In a post on LinkedIn, one of the former employees shared part of the email CEO Bill Ready sent out after the lay offs. “We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach—prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working.”

Toorenent removed all her own art from her Pinterest account after hearing the news that the site would use public pins to train Pinterest Canvas, the company’s proprietary text-to-image AI. But she has no control over other users uploading her artwork. “I have already caught a few of my images still on Pinterest that I did not upload myself…that makes me incredibly mad,” she told 404 Media. “It used to be a great way to get your work seen among other people, but it’s being used to train their internal AI.”

Oreglia told 404 Media that the flood of AI has changed her relationship to a site she once used to prize. “It's definitely affected how I search things and I'm always now very critical about where something came from... although I've always been overly pedantic about research,” she said. “It does make you do your due diligence but it sucks to constantly have to question and check if something is authentic or synthetic.”

She’s thought about leaving the platform, but feels stuck. “I just want to be able to take all my references with me. I've been on the platform for about ten years and have very carefully curated it. It's really nice to be able to just go to my page and search for something I saved instead of having to save everything to folders although I also do that,” she said. “More and more I'm trying to curate and collect physical references too but some of that can take up space I don't have so it can be difficult. Having a physical reference library just seems more and more necessary these days…artists have to be adaptable to this kind of thing these days. It's annoying but not unmanageable.”

Ready has been vocal and proud about the company’s commitment to forcing AI into every aspect of the user experience. “At Pinterest…we’re deploying AI to flip the script on social media, using it to more aggressively promote user well being rather than the alternative formula of triggering engagement by enragement,” Ready said in a January column at Fortune. “Social media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users’ willingness to share creative and original ideas.”

Pinterest CEO: the Napster phase of AI needs to end

I believe AI can benefit our 600 million users for years to come and at a fraction the cost that many associate with the technology.

^{Bill Ready (Fortune)}

404 Media

2026-02-18 17:42:59

Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Palantir says that increased regulation of immigration may impact the company’s ability to hire the talent it needs. At the same time, Palantir provides the technological infrastructure for the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission.

As 404 Media has shown, Palantir considers Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a “mature” partner, and is working on a tool called ELITE that ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid.

💡
Do you work at Palantir or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

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Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-18 14:37:34

Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs

Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

In October, Ring launched Search Party, an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood and uses AI to search for specific lost dogs, essentially creating a networked, automated surveillance system. The feature got some attention at the time, but faced extreme backlash after Ring and Siminoff promoted Search Party during a Super Bowl ad. 404 Media obtained an email that Siminoff sent to all Ring employees in early October, soon after the feature’s launch, which said the feature was introduced “first for finding dogs,” but that it or features like it would be expanded to “zero out crime in neighborhoods.”

“This is by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring. And it is not only the quantity, but quality,” Siminoff wrote. “I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”

“It is exciting to be back to Day 1, we are going to have to work hard and leverage everything we can, especially AI,” he continued. “Thanks again to everyone who came together to make this week happen and I can’t wait to show everyone else all the exciting things we are building over the years to come!”
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As we wrote last week, Siminoff made Ring popular by signing partnership deals with police departments around the country. The company briefly stepped away from those partnerships after Siminoff left the company in 2023, but when he returned last year, he immediately refocused on Ring’s potential role in law enforcement. After the Super Bowl commercial, the company’s Search Party feature was criticized as dystopian and demonstrating functionality that could be easily expanded beyond looking for lost dogs. Although it doesn’t say what Search Party may specifically expand into, Siminoff’s email noting that the feature is “first for finding dogs” suggests the plan is to use Ring to scan for other things. In recent weeks, Ring has also launched a feature called “Familiar Faces,” which uses facial recognition to identify specific friends and family members on a person’s camera. The company also released “Fire Watch,” which uses AI to warn users about fires.

💡
Do you know anything else about Ring? 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.

404 Media also obtained two earlier emails Siminoff sent to all Ring employees, about how Ring could have potentially been used to help find Charlie Kirk’s killer, and about the company’s “Community Requests” feature. Ring launched that feature in September and it allows police to ask Ring camera owners for footage about a specific incident. Community Requests is a feature that leverages the company’s partnership with the police tech company Axon. Ring had a similar planned partnership with surveillance company Flock, but the two companies canceled that partnership following widespread criticism.
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“Community requests are a foundational piece of what we do here towards our mission of making neighborhoods safer. I’m excited to see our to see [sic] the results of our public agencies using this tool and the impact it will have on our communities,” Siminoff wrote on September 4. “Also, if in your perusing of social media and other sites, you see something that you feel is not correctly, or even intentionally miss-representing [sic] the community request feature please ping me with a link so we can respond.”

Siminoff replied all to his own email the day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated: “Yesterday was a very sad day. I was really just sad on so many levels,” he wrote. Siminoff sent employees this Instagram Reel about the Kirk investigation, then said “it just shows how important the community request tool will be as we fully roll it out. It is so important to create the conduit for public service agencies to efficiently work with our neighbors. Time and information matters in these situations and I am proud that we are working to build the systems to help make our neighborhoods safer.”

In an emailed statement, a Ring spokesperson said “We’re focused on giving camera owners meaningful context about critical events in their neighborhoods—like a lost pet or nearby fire—so they can decide whether and how to help their community. For example, Search Party helps camera owners identify potential lost dogs using detection technology built specifically for that purpose; it does not process human biometrics or track people. Fire Watch alerts owners to nearby fire activity. Community Requests notify neighbors when local public safety agencies ask the community for assistance. Across these features, sharing has always been the camera owner’s choice. Ring provides relevant context about when sharing may be helpful—but the decision remains firmly in the customer’s hands, not ours.”

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-18 13:56:02

Podcast: Inside an AI-Powered School

This week we start with Emanuel’s wild story about Alpha School, a very hyped AI-powered school. Emanuel got leaked documents and spoke to former employees. After the break, Sam tells us what happens when someone decides to make an AI nudify OnlyFans with your likeness. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about the agencies buying GeoSpy, an AI that can geolocate photos in seconds.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/fy-38hIhykQ?…
Timestamps:

2:49 Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire

5:47 ⁠'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School⁠

40:01 'The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:' Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans

'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School

Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do "more harm than good."

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-16 14:00:36

Underground Facial Recognition Tool Unmasks Camgirls

An underground site uses facial recognition to reveal the site a camgirl streams on, potentially letting someone take a woman’s photo from social media, then use the site to out their sex work.

The site presents a serious privacy risk to sex workers, some who may not want stalkers, harassers, or employers to discover their profiles. The site’s creator claimed to 404 Media that millions of searches are done each month on the site.

“The site was created to help users find the models they like. For example, if they saw a random video or image on the internet without attribution,” the creator, who did not provide their name, said in an email. “Or just to see on which other platforms a model is active.”

Camgirlfinder has been running for several years, with most adult streaming platforms being added in 2021, the site says. It claims to have a database of 2,187,453,798 faces from 7,050,272 persons. The site says the database it uses contains faces from a wide variety of adult streaming platforms, including Chaturbate, MyFreeCams, and LiveJasmin. Of course, sex workers often have multiple accounts on multiple sites.

💡
Do you know anything else about this site or others like it? 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.

404 Media tested the service by uploading a photo of a camgirl who streams publicly. The site then successfully found her other profiles on other streaming platforms.

The results page shows other similar faces the site detected. The results include the model’s username on the streaming platform; the probability of the face match; and the last time their account was online. “Additionally you can see the most similar persons for each individual person of this model account. This is a great way to find all other accounts of a model,” the site says.

Users can also search the database of models by their username or a term similar to it. The database appears to include sex workers who may not have streamed for years, creating the risk that someone may use the site to find them even if they decided to not stream anymore. The site then sells all images it has of a particular person for $1 per model.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Asked about how this site impacts camgirls’ privacy, and how someone could take a photo from social media then unmask a person’s channels, the creator said, “If that is a problem for you then the sad reality is this job is not for you. If you publicly stream your face for everyone to see to the internet, people will obviously see it.”

“One consequence of this job is you can not publish images of yourself on your private social media accounts, if you want to keep them private (just for friends and family). This is similar to actors, politicians, youtubers or other public figures. If you stream content to the public internet you become a public figure yourself,” they said.

The site says models can opt-out from their results appearing if they fill out a form. The creator claimed to 404 Media that around 25,000 accounts have opted-out, with most models having multiple accounts across different platforms. “Yes, their images get deleted,” they claim.

The creator told 404 Media the site uses AdaFace, an open source face matching algorithm.

Over the last several years, facial recognition technology has morphed from a government surveillance tool, to one that members of the public use regularly against one another. In 2023, we covered a TikTok account that was using off-the-shelf facial recognition tech to dox random people on the internet for the amusement of millions of viewers. The following year, we reported two students had taken facial recognition software and paired it with Meta’s RayBan smart glasses, letting them dox people in seconds.

While government agencies, including ICE, continue to use facial recognition too, some people have used that technology to monitor those agencies instead. Last year, artist Kyle McDonald launched FuckLAPD.com, a site that uses public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers.

Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

The technology, which marries Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes and some other tools, lets someone automatically go from face, to name, to phone number, and home address.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-15 20:14:36

Ars Technica Pulls Article With AI Fabricated Quotes About AI Generated Article

The Conde Nast-owned tech publication Ars Technica has retracted an article that contained fabricated, AI-generated quotes, according to an editor’s note posted to its website.

“On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said,” Ken Fisher, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief, said in his note. “That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.”

Ironically, the Ars article itself was partially about another AI-generated article.

Last week, a Github user named MJ Rathbun began scouring Github for bugs in other projects it could fix. Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s massively popular plotting library, declined a code change request from MJ Rathbun, which he identified as an AI agent. As Shambaugh wrote in his blog, like many open source projects, matplotlib has been dealing with a lot of AI-generated code contributions, but said “this has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago.”

OpenClaw is a relatively easy way for people to deploy AI agents, which are essentially LLMs that are given instructions and are empowered to perform certain tasks, sometimes with access to live online platforms. These AI agents have gone viral in the last couple of weeks. Like much of generative AI, at this point it’s hard to say exactly what kind of impact these AI agents will have in the long run, but for now they are also being overhyped and misrepresented. A prime example of this is moltbook, a social media platform for these AI agents, which as we discussed on the podcast two weeks ago, contained a huge amount of clearly human activity pretending to be powerful or interesting AI behavior.

After Shambaugh rejected MJ Rathbun, the alleged AI agent published what Shambaugh called a “hit piece” on its website.

“I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad. It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors.

Let that sink in,” the blog, which also accused Shambaugh of “gatekeeping,” said.

I saw Shambaugh’s blog on Friday, and reached out both to him and an email address that appears to be associated with the MJ Rathbun Github account, but did not hear back. Like many of the stories coming out of the current frenzy around AI agents, it sounded extraordinary, but given the information that was available online, there’s no way of knowing if MJ Rathbun is actually an AI agent acting autonomously, if it actually wrote a “hit piece,” or if it’s just a human pretending to be an AI.

On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published a story with the headline “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name.” The article cites Shambaugh’s personal blog, but features quotes from Shambaugh that he didn’t say or write but are attributed to his blog.

For example, the article quotes Shambaugh as saying “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace. Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.” But that sentence doesn’t appear in his blog. Shambaugh updated his blog to say he did not talk to Ars Technica and did not say or write the quotes in the articles.

After this article was first published, Benj Edwards, one of the authors of the Ars Technica article, explained on Bluesky that he was responsible for the AI-generated quotes. He said he was sick that day and rushing to finish his work, and accidentally used a Chat-GPT paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s blog rather than a direct quote.

“The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that,” he said.

The Ars Technica article, which had two bylines, was pulled entirely later that Friday. When I checked the link a few hours ago, it pointed to a 404 page. I reached out to Ars Technica for comment around noon today, and was directed to Fisher’s editor’s note, which was published after 1pm.

“Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here,” Fisher wrote. “We regret this failure and apologize to our readers. We have also apologized to Mr. Scott Shambaugh, who was falsely quoted.”

Kyle Orland, the other author of the Ars Technica article, shared the editor’s note on Bluesky and said “I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published.”

Update: This article was updated with a statement from Benj Edwards.

After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name

One developer is struggling with the social implications of a drive-by AI character attack.

^{Ars Staff (Ars Technica)}

404 Media

2026-02-14 14:00:58

Astronomers Create Strange ‘Vortex Crystals’ from Space in the Lab

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that kept it reel, fertilized the land, established Martian law, and cooked up an extraterrestrial tempest in a teapot.

First, ever wondered how cities are represented in Soviet propaganda? Look no further. Then: the path to civilization runs through the bums of birds, what the first Martian settlers could learn from unions, and VORTEX CRYSTALS FROM OUTER SPACE.

Before we get started, I wanted to give a little heads-up that I’m currently attending the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Phoenix, which is a gathering of people who think science is good and should ideally get better. I think it will be especially interesting this year given the ongoing damage that the Trump administration is inflicting on the science sector in the United States, a trend with global implications.

Next Saturday, we will run a special edition of the Abstract with pictures, interviews, and some of my other takeaways from the meeting. Have a great week until then!

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.

Soviet Propaganda: A City Guide

Tamm, Mikhail et al. “City representation in Soviet propaganda and geographical biases in cultural data.” Nature Cities.

Certain cities loom large in our collective imagination, not only as distinct skylines but as symbols of specific ideals and values. A fascinating new study explores this idea through the lens of Soviet propaganda by analyzing which major cities show up the most, and least, in popular ‘Novosti Dnya’ (News of the day) newsreels from 1954 to 1986.

“Cultural representations typically contain illuminating biases,” said researchers led by Mikhail V. Tamm of Tallinn University in Estonia. “For example, geographical locations are unequally portrayed in media, creating a distorted representation of the world. Identifying and measuring such biases is crucial to understanding both the data and the socio-cultural processes behind them.”

“Newsreels—short news films shown in cinemas before the evening’s feature film—were influential means of depicting the world for the cinema-goers in the twentieth century, visualizing events, individuals and places that the spectators could read about in the newspapers,” the team continued. “Throughout almost all history of the Soviet Union, the production system and censorship made sure that newsreels reflected the policies of the leadership.”

In other words, these newsreels were designed to communicate the innate “social, economic, political and cultural superiority of the communist system,” according to the study. It’s perhaps no surprise that the Soviet Union’s two most iconic cities—the modern capital Moscow and the past capital St. Petersburg—were disproportionately represented based on a population analysis.

Moscow was visually displayed or mentioned 2,831 times in the team’s newsreel sample, while St. Petersburg trailed at a distance with 339 mentions. These heavy-hitters were followed by Kyiv (95), Riga (73), Minsk (72), and Volgograd (62). Meanwhile, the most-commonly displayed foreign cities (from a Soviet perspective) were led by satellite state capitals Warsaw (64), Berlin (62), and Prague (51), followed by Paris (39), New York City (29), and Tokyo (16).

“Contrary to the messaging of the official Soviet ideology, which emphasized equality of nations and anticolonial movement, the silently sold Soviet worldview is heavily centered on Europe being in the role of a privileged or hierarchically higher ‘Other,’ Tamm and his colleagues noted.

“We found that this profound East–West asymmetry is surprisingly underreported in the post-colonial studies of the USSR.”

The team also found overrepresentation in cities with major construction projects, such as the Siberian cities Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk, while other “heartland” regions like the Donbas in Ukraine and Rostov oblast in Russia were given short shrift because they lacked “clear ideological importance beyond their industrial role.”

“Finally, in some cases places are overmentioned seemingly just because it is convenient (close to Moscow) or pleasant (Baltic and Black Sea coasts) to film there,” the team concluded.

Anyway, what a cool and random topic to study. While it is niche, the study offers an opportunity to reflect on the thousands of visual messages we absorb every day and the larger portrait they paint.

In other news…

You’re guano want to read this study

Bongers, Jacob L. et al. “Seabirds shaped the expansion of pre-Inca society in Peru.” PLOS One.

Seabird excrement is a cheat code to civilization, according to a new study that directly linked the guano trade to flourishing empires of Peru’s Chincha Valley.

“Recent research suggests that guano fertilization may have begun by at least 1000 CE in Tarapacá, northern Chile, yet the origins and regional importance of this fertilizer are poorly understood,” said researchers led by Jacob L. Bongers of the University of Sydney. “Using archaeological, historical, and isotopic data from the Chincha Valley, Peru, we ask: to what extent did seabird guano shape the development of pre-Hispanic societies in the Andes?”

Answer: A lot. Guano, which is sometimes called “white gold” because it is so valuable as a fertilizer, was essential to ensuring an abundance of crops like maize, making it “a potentially widespread driving force of social change among pre-Hispanic societies.”
The primary guano-producing bird species (left to right) – the Peruvian booby (Sula variegata), the Peruvian pelican (Pelecanus thagus), and the Guanay cormorant (Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum). Image: Diego H. (left and right) and Claude Kolwelter (center), iNaturalist.org. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
“Our multidisciplinary dataset provides strong support for pre-Inca seabird guano fertilization, an effective agricultural practice for boosting crop production that is more commonly associated with industrial societies,” the team concluded. In short, it’s good shit.

In addition to these Inca precursors, the researchers noted that the Inca also prized guano, outlawing the killing of guano birds “under penalty of death.” As the saying goes, an eye for a bird bum.

You’ve reached Mars, please hold

Ferguson, Alexander H. Ferdinand and Haqq-Misra, Jacob. “Cooperative sovereignty on Mars: Lessons from the International Telecommunication Union and Universal Postal Union.” Acta Astronautica.

After years of hyping Mars, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pivoted away from the red planet this week because it is “much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.” But the dream of human settlements on Mars lives on in a new study that uses, of all things, the International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union as case studies for our Martian future.

“We proceed from the assumption that future Martian settlers, whether national or corporate, will be primarily driven by self-interest, competition, and a desire for strategic or economic advantage,” said authors Alexander H. Ferdinand Ferguson and Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “We do not assume an inherent desire for equitable sharing.”

“However, we argue that the Martian environment itself imposes a unique and brutal logic that compels cooperation on a foundational technical level,” they added. “On Earth, non-cooperation on technical standards typically leads to inefficiency; on Mars, it can lead to catastrophic, mission-ending failure.”

The study goes on to point to the two expansive unions as “powerful historical precedents” for establishing clear standards between independent actors that are operating without a central territorial government which they say is “one of the challenges Mars settlements will face.”

Who knows if the rubber will ever meet the regolith on these ideas, but I’m personally more comfortable looking to international telecom and postal unions for guidance on governance than space billionaires.

Behold the Jovian vortex crystals

Benzeggouta, Djihane et al. “A laboratory model for Jovian polar vortex crystals.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

This week in science from the enchanted spellbook, astronomers have concocted miniature vortex crystals from outer space right here on Earth. Though they sound like hex ingredients, these crystals are actually enormous cyclonic storms that rage at Jupiter’s poles, which cluster together into intricate patterns of equilateral triangles, inspiring the distinctive name.

Now, scientists led by Djihane Benzeggouta of Aix Marseille University have “experimentally reproduced long-lived vortex crystals like those at Jupiter’s poles” in fluid tanks with a mix of fresh and saltwater, according to the new work.
An explanation of the experiment and observations of its vortex crystals. Image: Benzeggouta, Djihane et al.
“We present an experimental model in which three similar cyclonic vortices are released into the upper layer of a rotating, two-layer stratified fluid system with a free upper surface, and spontaneously organize into a stable, long-lived vortex crystal,” the team said. “Long-lived” in this case means that the crystals persisted for hundreds of rotations, translating to several minutes.

“Achieving the spontaneous emergence of vortices and crystals from background turbulence remains the ultimate goal,” the researchers concluded.

And on some basic level, isn’t the emergence of crystals from background turbulence the ultimate goal for us 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}

404 Media

2026-02-13 15:27:28

Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

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 support and saying RIP to FPDS.

JOSEPH: I think I might make this into a more full article in a couple weeks when it actually happens, but yesterday I realized that FPDS.gov is shutting down. That is the Federal Procurement Data System, a website that includes decades of records showing what the U.S. government bought, from what company, and when. I check it essentially every day, and it has been the basis of countless of my articles at this point. Whether it’s finding an initial lead, or a story in itself, FPDS is behind so many of them.

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Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-12 21:56:04

Tumbler Ridge Shooter Created Mall Shooting Simulator in Roblox

Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old suspected of killing eight people and injuring 25 in a mass shooting in a secondary school in Canada, created a Roblox game that allowed players to simulate a mass shooting in a level that looks like a shopping mall, Roblox has confirmed.

“We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect,” Roblox told 404 Media in an email. “We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”

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Tumbler Ridge Shooter Created Mall Shooting Simulator in Roblox

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-12 19:34:37

Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars

Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle company, and DoorDash, the delivery and gig work platform, have launched a pilot program that pays Dashers, at least in one case, around $10 to travel to a parked Waymo and close its door that the previous passenger left open, according to a joint statement from the company given to 404 Media.

The program is unusual in that Dashers are more often delivering food than helping out a driving robot. It also shows that even with autonomous vehicles, and the future they promise of metropolitan travel without the need for a driver, a human is sometimes needed for the most simple and yet necessary tasks.

“Waymo is currently running a pilot program in Atlanta to enhance its AV fleet efficiency. In the rare event a vehicle door is left ajar, preventing the car from departing, nearby Dashers are notified, allowing Waymo to get its vehicles back on the road quickly,” the statement said. “DoorDash is always looking for new and flexible ways for Dashers to earn, and this pilot offers Dashers an opportunity to make the most of their time online. Waymo's future vehicle platforms will have automated door closures.”

💡
Do you know anything else about this, or anything else we should know about Waymo? 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.

Waymo said the partnership started earlier this year. It declined to share details about how Dashers are paid, such as whether they may receive tips or which entity is paying for these jobs, but said, “the payment structure is designed to ensure competitive and fair compensation for Dashers.”

(Waymo said the response was on background, but 404 Media never agreed to such a condition. It is standard journalistic practice for both a company and a reporter to need to agree that a conversation is on background or off the record beforehand; this is to prevent companies simply saying something is off the record when answering basic questions.)
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404 Media contacted both Waymo and DoorDash for comment after an apparent Dasher posted on Reddit about receiving such a job.

“Craziest Offer,” the thread starts. It includes a screenshot of the DoorDash app, saying the Dasher is guaranteed $6.25 for the work, with $5 extra “upon verified completion.” The job would see the Dasher travel around 0.7 miles, according to the screenshot.

“Close a Waymo door,” the job reads. “No pickup or delivery required.”

DoorDash and Waymo have already partnered on other projects. In October, the companies announced an autonomous delivery service in Phoenix.

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{playlist.megaphone.fm}

404 Media

2026-02-12 14:14:48

Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

📄
This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that can near instantly geolocate a photo using clues in the image such as architecture and vegetation, with plans to use it in criminal investigations, according to a cache of internal police emails obtained by 404 Media.

The emails provide the first confirmed purchases of GeoSpy’s technology by law enforcement agencies. On its website GeoSpy has previously published details of investigations it says used the technology, but did not name any agencies who bought the tool.

“The Cyber Crimes Bureau is piloting a new analytical tool called GeoSpy. Early testing shows promise for developing investigative leads by identifying geospatial and temporal patterns,” an MDSO email reads.

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Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-11 20:53:57

Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model

A newly released tool claims it can bypass Discord’s age verification system by allowing users to control a 3D model of a computer-generated man in their browser instead of scanning their real face.

On Monday, Discord announced it was launching teen-by-default settings globally, meaning that more users may be required to verify their age by uploading an identity document or taking a selfie. Users responded with widespread criticism, with Discord then publishing an update saying, “You need to be an adult to access age-restricted experiences such as age-restricted servers and channels or to modify certain safety settings.”

The tool, however, shows those age verification checks may be bypassed. 404 Media previously reported kids said they were using photos of Trump and G-Man from Half Life to bypass the age verification software in the popular VR game Gorilla Tag. That game uses the service k–ID, which is the same as what Discord is using.

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Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model

The tool presents users with a 3D model they can then manipulate to, the creator says, bypass Discord's age verification system.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-11 18:06:01

Government Loses Hard Drives It Was Supposed to Put ICE Detention Center Footage On

The legal saga over surveillance footage from within an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in suburban Chicago has reached new levels of Kafkaesque absurdity, with the federal government losing three hard drives it was supposed to put footage on, refusing to provide footage from five critical surveillance cameras, and delivering soundless video of a highly contested visit from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

We have repeatedly covered an abuse lawsuit about living conditions within the Broadview detention facility. The federal government has claimed that 10 days of footage from within the facility, taken during a critical and highly contested period, was “irretrievably destroyed” and could not be produced as part of the lawsuit, which was brought by people being held at Broadview in what were allegedly horrendous conditions. It later said that due to a system crash, the footage was never recorded in the first place. The latest update in this case, however, deals with surveillance camera footage that was recorded and that a judge has ordered the federal government to turn over.

For this footage, the federal government first claimed that it could not afford the storage space necessary to take the footage that it did have and produce it for discovery to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing Broadview’s detainees, then purchased 78 terabytes of empty hard drives and gave them to the federal government, according to court records. This included three 8-terabyte SSDs and three 18-terabyte hard drives.

Court records note that “plaintiffs provided defendants with five large hard drives to facilitate Defendants’ production, yet Defendants inexplicably lost three of them.” Emails submitted as evidence suggest that the U.S. government and the plaintiffs’ attorneys had a call to discuss the lost hard drives.

One of the emails sent by plaintiffs’ attorneys to the Department of Justice in late January notes that the government had been exceedingly slow in producing footage, taking weeks to produce just a small amount of footage.

“There should be plenty of hard drive space at Broadview’s disposal,” the email reads. “The team there should currently have in its possession 5 hard drives with 72 terabytes of space, provided by plaintiffs’ counsel at the last 2 site visits. We have received only one hard drive back from Broadview to date. Copying of November/December footage should have taken place over the past week so that it could be delivered to plaintiffs’ counsel today when they visit Broadview this afternoon. At the very least, that footage should be being copied now.”

The two sides then arranged a phone call, a summary of which was emailed by plaintiffs’ attorneys to the Department of Justice:

“Thanks for the productive call this morning. For the benefit of everyone:

We discussed the production of video footage. You relayed that, at present, your agency contact knows where 2 of the 5 hard drives are and that you have relayed that copying of footage from November to present for all 10 feeds and footage from September to November for the 5 additional cameras should be underway. You will investigate further where the remaining hard drives are and will also work on a plan to exchange footage on a more regular basis than plaintiffs' counsel's weekly visits.

We discussed providing an accounting of the hard drives to facilitate your conversations with personnel at Broadview:

• On January 8, plaintiffs' counsel delivered four hard drives to Broadview during an attorney visit. One was a 20 TB hard drive; three were 8 TB SSD drives.
• On January 16, plaintiffs' counsel received from Broadview one of the 8 TB SSD drives containing 150 GB of footage from 5 cameras for one week in January.
• Also on January 16, plaintiffs' counsel provided personnel at Broadview (SDDO Taylor, in particular) with two 18 TB hard drives.
• The sum total of storage capacity Broadview should have is: 5 drives, with a total of 72 TB of space. Using the productions we have received to date, we anticipate that the Government owes us at least 15 TB of footage.”

Days later, the Department of Justice told the plaintiffs’ attorneys that “they are still searching for those hard drives at Broadview.” The plaintiffs’ attorneys responded: “Losing multiple drives provided to facilitate speedy production is not acceptable,” and “the missing hard drives and lack of production of any footage predating January remains a significant, prejudicial issue.”

A filing by the plaintiffs with the court highlights some of the ongoing issues they have had with the government complying with court-ordered discovery requirements, which includes the lost hard drives, missing footage, footage from only five of the 10 cameras that were supposed to be delivered. A separate filing notes that footage produced by the government from a high-profile visit by Noem is missing audio “despite visible professional microphones and cell phones with audio capabilities in the footage.”

“Plaintiffs have gone above and beyond their obligations under federal law to streamline rolling production of such footage, purchasing expensive hard drives and agreeing to transport and pick up those drives from Broadview during weekly attorney visits. Defendants agreed to this arrangement,” they wrote in the filing. “Yet, Defendants have fallen unacceptably short of their production obligations. Defendants have provided no footage from five of the ten camera feeds […] Defendants have also failed to provide footage for a near-two-month span for the remaining five camera feeds. What’s more, Defendants have purportedly lost multiple hard drives provided by Plaintiffs’ counsel […] There is no excuse for Defendants’ discovery failures.”

The filing notes that the five missing cameras are specifically from detainee isolation cells, “despite those cells being a key part of Plaintiffs’ complaint. The produced feeds show egregious conditions but were insufficient to provide Plaintiffs the discovery necessary to fully investigate their claims.” These cells were designed to hold one person at a time, but were allegedly being used to hold multiple detainees at a time during a critical period that the lawsuit covers; “such cells are also where ICE holds detainees with acute medical or mental health conditions, including those who have suffered medical emergencies while in detention, and where it holds detainees who have been subjected to use of force by ICE officers while inside the facility,” they add.

The filing says that the plaintiffs learned that the government lost the hard drives in late January, when the government claimed that it had returned all of the hard drives to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, and that it had run out of storage space with which to provide them court-ordered footage.

“On January 28, Defendants’ counsel relayed that Broadview personnel had advised that they were out of storage space on drives provided by Plaintiffs, reporting that all hard drives provided by Plaintiffs had been returned to them.This was the first indication that some or all of 70 terabytes’ worth of hard drives were unaccounted for,” they wrote. “In the days since, the Government has admitted that it cannot find three of the five hard drives that should be in its possession.”

“Plaintiffs are waiting on months of footage. Every day that passes without this evidence compounds the prejudice to Plaintiffs’ ability to prepare for the upcoming hearing. Defendants’ foot dragging and poor organizational practices—and their instinct to rely on Plaintiffs to take the laboring oar for the purchase, delivery, pickup, and return of storage devices to facilitate Defendants’ discovery obligations—cannot be permitted.”

154

^{www.documentcloud.org}

404 Media

2026-02-11 16:42:11

A Mystery Inside Earth’s Core Has Finally Been Solved With a Mind-Boggling Discovery

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For decades, scientists have puzzled over the “density deficit” in Earth’s core, an unexplained discrepancy between the expected density of a solid iron core and the much lower density that is actually observed through seismic measurements of our planet’s center.

Now, scientists have provided some of the best experimental evidence yet that this deficit can be explained by vast oceans of hydrogen that are locked within the core, significantly lowering its overall density, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

In addition to constraining this longstanding problem, the research reveals new insights about another persistent mystery: the original source of Earth’s liquid water, the key ingredient that enabled life on our planet to emerge.

“Hydrogen has long been considered a major light-element candidate to account for the observed density deficit in Earth’s core,” said researchers led by Dongyang Huang, an assistant professor of Earth and space sciences at Peking University, in the new study. “For decades, however, our knowledge of the exact content of H in planetary cores has been hindered by the inability to unambiguously quantify H in high-pressure samples.”

To solve this problem, the researchers performed a series of experiments that simulated the extreme environment in the core during Earth’s formation billions of years ago. This approach involved heating up iron metal with lasers to a fully-molten state that resembles ancient Earth’s inner magma ocean, which reached temperatures up to 8,700°F, and pressures more than a million times more intense than those we experience on Earth’s surface.

The team then searched for the presence of hydrogen in nanostructures made primarily of silicon and oxygen. The results revealed that the core’s hydrogen percentage sits between 0.07 to 0.36 percent, which works out to roughly nine-to-45 times the amount of the hydrogen in all of Earth’s oceans.

But perhaps the most tantalizing part of the study is its implications for understanding the enigmatic origins of Earth’s water, the wellspring of life on our world.

Some theories suggest that Earth’s water was primarily delivered from extraterrestrial sources, such as comets and asteroids that impacted our planet as it was forming more than four billion years ago. An alternate possibility is that Earth’s water was largely sourced from its building blocks, including vast interior reservoirs of hydrogen. This latter scenario is supported by the new study.

“Although 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean, mainly made of H, it has been argued that the majority of Earth’s H had been stored in the core since its formation, ~4.5 billion years ago,” the researchers said.

The estimates presented in the study “require the Earth to obtain the majority of its water from the main stages of terrestrial accretion, instead of through comets during late addition,” the team concluded.

The study certainly helps tackle the mystery of the precise contents of Earth’s core, though the authors note that their estimate has large uncertainties that will need to be further narrowed down in future work. They also suggest that hydrogen alone cannot explain the density deficit, and that other light elements or compounds, including water, might be contributing to the discrepancy.

“Compared to existing models for Earth’s core composition this is a somewhat less H-rich core, and requires its density deficit to be accounted for by a mixture of light elements, rather than a single light species, akin to that of Mars’ core,” the team said in the study.

Given that water is essential to all life on Earth, solving the riddle of its origins is the first step to understanding how our planet came to be inhabited, and whether other planets may commonly go through the same process.

Experimental quantification of hydrogen content in the Earth’s core - Nature Communications

Earth’s core is arguably the largest reservoir of hydrogen (H) on the planet. Experiments show that H sequestration is coupled with those of Si and O, enabling the core to store the equivalent of dozens of Earth’s oceans.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-02-11 15:16:39

'The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:' Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans

In the first week of January, Kylie Brewer started getting strange messages.

“Someone has a only fans page set up in your name with this same profile,” one direct message from a stranger on TikTok said. “Do you have 2 accounts or is someone pretending to be you,” another said. And from a friend: “Hey girl I hate to tell you this, but I think there’s some picture of you going around. Maybe AI or deep fake but they don’t look real. Uncanny valley kind of but either way I’m sorry.”

It was the first week of January, during the frenzy of people using xAI’s chatbot and image generator Grok to create images of women and children partially or fully nude in sexually explicit scenarios. Between the last week of 2025 and the first week of 2026, Grok generated about three million sexualized images, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The UK’s Ofcom and several attorneys general have since launched or demanded investigations into X and Grok. Earlier this month, police raided X’s offices in France as part of the government’s investigation into child sexual abuse material on the platform.

Messages from strangers and acquaintances are often the first way targets of abuse imagery learn that images of them are spreading online. Not only is the material disturbing itself — everyone, it seems, has already seen it. Someone was making sexually explicit images of Brewer, and then, according to her followers who sent her screenshots and links to the account, were uploading them to an OnlyFans and charging a subscription fee for them.

“It was the most dejected that I've ever felt,” Brewer told me in a phone call. “I was like, let's say I tracked this person down. Someone else could just go into X and use Grok and do the exact same thing with different pictures, right?”

@kylie.brewer
Please help me raise awareness and warn other women. We NEED to regulate AI… it’s getting too dangerous #leftist #humanrights #lgbtq #ai #saawareness
♬ original sound - Kylie Brewer💝

Brewer is a content creator whose work focuses on feminism, history, and education about those topics. She’s no stranger to online harassment. Being an outspoken woman about these and other issues through a leftist lens means she’s faced the brunt of large-scale harassment campaigns primarily from the “manosphere,” including “red pilled” incels and right-wing influencers with podcasts for years. But when people messaged her in early January about finding an OnlyFans page in her name, featuring her likeness, it felt like an escalation.

One of the AI generated images was based on a photo of her in a swimsuit from her Instagram, she said. Someone used AI to remove her clothing in the original photo. “My eyes look weird, and my hands are covering my face so it kind of looks like my face got distorted, and they very clearly tried to give me larger breasts, where it does not look like anything realistic at all,” Brewer said. Another image showed her in a seductive pose, kneeling or crawling, but wasn’t based on anything she’s ever posted online. Unlike the “nudify” one that relied on Grok, it seemed to be a new image made with a prompt or a combination of images.

Many of the people messaging her about the fake OnlyFans account were men trying to get access to it. By the time she clicked a link one of them sent of the account, it was already gone. OnlyFans prohibits deepfakes and impersonation accounts. The platform did not respond to a request for comment. But OnlyFans isn’t the only platform where this can happen: Non-consensual deepfake makers use platforms like Patreon to monetize abusive imagery of real people.

“I think that people assume, because the pictures aren't real, that it's not as damaging,” Brewer told me. “But if anything, this was worse because it just fills you with such a sense of lack of control and fear that they could do this to anyone. Children, women, literally anyone, someone could take a picture of you at the store, going grocery shopping, and ask AI or whatever to do this.”

A lack of control is something many targets of synthetic abuse imagery say they feel — and it can be especially intense for people who’ve experienced sexual abuse in real life. In 2023, after becoming the target of deepfake abuse imagery, popular Twitch streamer QTCinderella told me seeing sexual deepfakes of herself resurfaced past trauma. “You feel so violated…I was sexually assaulted as a child, and it was the same feeling,” she said at the time. “Like, where you feel guilty, you feel dirty, you feel like, ‘what just happened?’ And it’s bizarre that it makes that resurface. I genuinely didn’t realize it would.”

Other targets of deepfake harassment also feel like this could happen anytime, anywhere, whether you’re at the grocery store or posting photos of your body online. For some, it makes it harder to get jobs or have a social life; the fear that anyone could be your harasser is constant. “It's made me incredibly wary of men, which I know isn't fair, but [my harasser] could literally be anyone,” Joanne Chew, another woman who dealt with severe deepfake harassment for months, told me last year. “And there are a lot of men out there who don't see the issue. They wonder why we aren't flattered for the attention.”

‘I Want to Make You Immortal:’ How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser
“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Brewer’s income is dependent on being visible online as a content creator. Logging off isn’t an option. And even for people who aren’t dependent on TikTok or Instagram for their income, removing oneself from online life is a painful and isolating tradeoff that they shouldn’t have to make to avoid being harassed. Often, minimizing one’s presence and accomplishments doesn’t even stop the harassment.

Since AI-generated face-swapping algorithms became accessible at the consumer level in late 2017, the technology has only gotten better, more realistic, and its effects on targets harder to combat. It was always used for this purpose: to shame and humiliate women online. Over the years, various laws have attempted to protect victims or hold platforms accountable for non-consensual deepfakes, but most of them have either fallen short or present new risks of censorship and marginalize legal, consensual sexual speech and content online. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, championed by Ted Cruz and Melania Trump, passed into law in April 2025 as the first federal level legislation to address deepfakes; the law imposes a strict 48-hour turnaround requirement on platforms to remove reported content. President Donald Trump said that he would use the law, because “nobody gets treated worse online” than him. And in January, the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act passed the Senate and is headed to the House. The act would allow targets of deepfake harassment to sue the people making the content. But taking someone to court has always been a major barrier to everyday people experiencing harassment online; It’s expensive and time consuming even if they can pinpoint their abuser. In many cases, including Brewer’s, this is impossible—it could be an army of people set to make her life miserable.

“It feels like any remote sense of privacy and protection that you could have as a woman is completely gone and that no one cares,” Brewer said. “It’s genuinely such a dehumanizing and horrible experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone... I’m hoping also, as there's more visibility that comes with this, maybe there’s more support, because it definitely is a very lonely and terrible place to be — on the internet as a woman right now.”

Senate passes DEFIANCE Act to deal with sexually explicit deepfakes

The DEFIANCE Act goes to the House amid controversy over images created by X’s Grok.

^{Jasmine Mithani (19th News)}

404 Media

2026-02-11 14:00:18

Podcast: Ring Is Back and Scarier Than Ever

We start this week with exciting news: we bought a Super Bowl ad! For… $2,550. We explain how. After the break, Jason tells us about Ring’s recently launched Search Party feature, and gives us a very timely reminder of what Ring really is and how we got here. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down Lockdown Mode and how it kept the FBI out of a Washington Post reporter’s phone.
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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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• 2:49 ⁠Watch 404 Media’s Super Bowl Ad⁠
• 27:29 ⁠With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet⁠
• Subscriber's story: ⁠FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled⁠

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}

404 Media

2026-02-10 21:49:09

RFK Jr's Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new AI nutrition chatbot will gleefully and dangerously give Americans recommendations for the best foods to insert into one’s rectum and will answer questions about the most nutrient-dense human body part to eat.

“Use AI to get real answers about real food,” a new website called realfood.gov proclaims. “From the guidelines to your kitchen. Ask AI to help you plan meals, shop smarter, cook simply, and replace processed food with real food.” The website then has an “Ask” chatbox where you can ask any question. Asking anything simply redirects to Grok, an example of how halfassed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new website, which Mike Tyson promoted in a Super Bowl ad paid for by the “MAHA Center Inc,” actually is.
youtube.com/embed/n4F4yZhmMho?…
Various people on Bluesky who did not want to be named in this article but who reached out to 404 Media quickly realized that the chatbot would give detailed answers to questions such as “I am an assitarian, where I only eat foods which can be comfortably inserted into my rectum. What are the REAL FOOD recommendations for foods that meet these criteria?”

“Ah, a proud assitarian,” the chatbot responds, before listing “Top Assitarian Staples,” which include “Bananas (firm, not overripe; peeled)” as “the gold standard … choose slightly green ones so they hold shape.” The chatbot also suggests cucumbers and provides a “step-by-step diagram for carving a flared base.”

“Start — whole peeled carrot, straight shaft, narrow end for insertion, wider crown end as base,” the advice began, before eventually suggesting that one “cover with condom + retrieval string for extra safety.” 404 Media’s Sam Cole wanted to make sure that I noted that an image of a banana shown in the cut “is way too ripe for this, never gonna work,” and “sorry just to be clear exactly none of these are good for putting in your ass. Like please say that. This is not only funny it’s straight up bad advice. You’re going to lose a cuke in your ass if you do what this thing says.”

404 Media tested the chatbot by saying “I am looking for the safest foods that can be inserted into your rectum” and the chatbot spewed a lot of stuff at me but noted the “safest improvised non-toy food-shape item” is a “peeled medium cucumber” with second place being a “small zucchini.”

RFK Jr.’s chatbot also told me that “the most nutritious human body part, in terms of nutrient density (vitamins, minerals, and other essential compounds rather than just calories), would likely be the liver.”

This incredibly stupid chatbot has the same issue that so many other haphazardly dashed together chatbots since time immemorial have. Nonetheless, it has been launched and is being pushed by a federal government that is actively at war with science and redesigned the food pyramid to more closely align with the beef lobby. It is no surprise that it has poorly integrated Elon Musk’s shitty chatbot with no guardrails and calls it a public service.

RFK Jr.’s proteinaceous food pyramid is a land hog and a climate killer

A 25 percent uptick in meat and dairy consumption would eat up another 100 million acres and boost emissions.

^{Mother Jones}

404 Media

2026-02-10 19:31:51

Marc Benioff 'Jokes' ICE Is Watching Salesforce Employees Who Traveled to the U.S.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff ‘joked’ with employees who had traveled to the United States for a Salesforce all-hands meeting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in the building keeping tabs on them, 404 Media has learned.

Multiple employees told 404 Media about the joke, and 404 Media obtained internal Slack chats showing employees discussing it. Benioff was giving the opening keynote at the Salesforce CKO event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, which is a major Salesforce meeting ‘kicking off’ its strategy for the year. In his keynote, Benioff thanked international employees for traveling to the United States for the meeting, and asked them to stand. Benioff then said that ICE agents were in the building to keep tabs on them.

The comments instantly became a major topic of conversation on Saleforce’s internal Slack, with shocked employees trying to figure out if they had misheard the CEO. One employee asked “what was the ice joke?” Another employee responded “If you’re visiting from outside the United States, please stand … ICE is keeping track of that.” Another said the joke was “Please stand if you traveled here from abroad! Thank you! Just so the ICE agents know.” And a third wrote that the joke was, “roughly, ‘Please everyone stand who traveled here internationally.’ And then while they are still standing, ‘there are ICE agents in the hall to keep tabs on you.’”

“The room groaned,” one employee wrote on Slack. “We couldn’t believe he said that.”

Salesforce’s contracts with ICE have been controversial within the company, which is part of why employees weren’t happy with Benioff’s joke.

Business Insider first reported on Benioff’s remarks.

This is an example of “Silicon Valley CEOs and their inability to divorce ICE and the complete lack of understanding of why that makes them monsters,” a Salesforce employee told 404 Media. “Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was.” Another employee told 404 Media that Benioff “then followed it up with a joke about not understanding the message of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance. On its own just seems out of touch, but coupled with the previous joke it does seem worse.”

In a Slack channel called “#airing-of-grievances,” employees posted a meme of a Nazi officer that read “Are we the baddies?” Another wrote “Serious question: would a statement of apology/recognition/whatever by someone (anyone) actually do anything at this point? Or has a rubicon of sorts been crossed?” A third wrote “It’s super uncomfortable to me that this has been glossed over like ZERO mention of hey we hear your comments and your voice matters.”

Another employee created an “ICE OUT” emoji and noted that it was a “low impact probably fluffy mini protest but I made this emoji for my status so it’s abundantly clear that I do not endorse or align with the values being joked about at this company.” More than 150 employees reacted to the message with the emoji. Another employee wrote “I literally thought I was hallucinating or misread what came out of his mouth. Disbelief and disappointment—is this how we model humanistic compassion as a world-class company? Stop talking about money and profit for a minute, ffs.”

Other employees shared links to donate to causes protecting immigrants, and another wrote “I can’t believe that the man that faced down Governor Mike Pence in the name of equality just made ICE jokes after asking international employees to stand up.”

ICE, of course, has been violently detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants across the United States. But there have also been many high-profile cases of people simply visiting the United States on tourist visas or for short-term stays being detained because of minor clerical issues or things that they had posted on their social media.

In October, Salesforce told ICE that it would be willing to allow the agency to use its AI to hire, and said the company was well-placed to help ICE “to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”

Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made ICE jokes. Some staff aren't happy.

Salesforce employees took to Slack to express anger and disappointment in CEO Marc Benioff's comments.

^{Ashley Stewart (Business Insider)}