404 Media

2026-07-23 15:24:36

Patreon Lays Off 20 Percent of Its Workforce

Patreon laid off 93 employees, totaling 20 percent of its workforce on Thursday morning, according to an email to creators and staff from CEO Jack Conte.

In a message sent to everyone on the platform signed up as a creator, and posted to the site, with the subject line “A Painful Update about our Team,” Conte wrote that the business is “healthy and strong” and that the core business of Patreon is not changing.

Conte included the email sent to Patreon employees in the message. In the email, he wrote that the company is undergoing both a “workforce reduction” and is “changing our organizational structure and how we work.” Specifically, he wrote, this means “we’re flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.”

Conte is careful in this email to both express that he doesn’t view AI as a replacement for the human creativity the platform is built on and profits from — devoting a section of the email to saying as much — and also that AI is fundamentally “transforming” the tech industry, noting that it has an impact on how the company operates.

“To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” Conte wrote. “The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply. That’s my personal opinion, but more importantly, it’s the foundation of Patreon’s strategy: our product vision and business are both predicated on the value of human creativity and human connection. AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.”

Earlier this month, Patreon announced that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models. “I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Conte wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.” The company later elaborated on the partnership in a blog post.

Included in the internal email shared publicly are severance details for laid-off workers, including 16 weeks of pay, remaining on payroll through the company’s August 20 vesting date, one additional week of pay for every full year worked at the company, additional cash payments for recent hires who haven’t reached their one-year cliff, healthcare coverage through the end of the year for eligible employees and families, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptops.

404 Media

2026-07-23 14:51:32

The Rise of Anti-Flock Influencers Who Make Things Up for Clout

A little over a month ago, the former American Idol contestant, country musician, and Instagram influencer Noah Orion appears to have learned about the surveillance company Flock. “Cities are now covering Flock cameras with trash bags,” Orion narrated over an Instagram post aggregating a 404 Media report. “It’s also pretty wild that we’ve just dropped stickers that say ‘Fuck Flock’ on them and it’s pretty cool that it’s coincidental that the sticker’s outside diameter is the same size as the average camera lens on a Flock camera,” he adds, showing a mockup of an AI-generated sticker featuring a surveillance camera that is not a Flock camera.

Orion had never posted on Instagram about Flock before then. But, since that post, Orion has posted dozens of reels about Flock, apparently at great personal risk to himself. A July 8 post features an image of a printed out “CEASE AND DESIST” letter purportedly sent to Orion by Dan Haley, Flock’s head of legal affairs. “It has come to the attention of Flock Group Inc. that you have engaged in conduct involving the unauthorized dissemination of photographs, videos, memes, screenshots, or other visual materials in a manner that encourages your fans to claim and place stickers that constitute a rude and unusual manner towards our company and association. You are hereby instructed to immediately cease and desist from any further use of such materials […] any further demeaning actions or posts will result in legal action. Failure to comply with this demand may result in Flock Group inc. [sic] to persecute you and your organization to the fullest extent of the law.”

The post has 73,000 likes and has been viewed millions of times. Since that post, Orion has posted the same letter 16 separate times on Instagram, and is now posting about almost nothing besides Flock. On Tuesday, he posted a reel stating “I could go to jail soon, and I am not afraid of that. I am pushing a movement against Flock cameras.” In that video, he said he’s starting a “bail fund” in case he’s arrested and goes to jail. Collectively, these posts and videos have hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views.

But the cease-and-desist is not real; it is a wholesale fabrication created by the influencer for attention, likes, and clout. He is at zero risk of persecution or arrest for speaking out about Flock (though he may be at risk for forging a fake cease-and-desist letter.) In the meantime, Orion has gotten more than 30,000 new followers in the last month according to the Instagram tracking website NotJustAnalytics, a period in which he has posted essentially only about Flock and, primarily, about his stickers and his cease-and-desist letter.

This constant focus on his apparent legal trouble is a relatively typical pattern for Orion; before Flock, he was posting endlessly about how his modified bus with massive speakers was going to be impounded by the authorities. Before that, he was talking about how he was going to be evicted from the space in which he modified the bus.

Over the last few months, we have seen the rise of various anti-Flock influencers and activists, and increased scrutiny from journalists, YouTubers, and independent researchers. Content about Flock has become quite popular on social media, and the vast majority of posts are from well-meaning people who are amplifying real reporting and real — if occasionally exaggerated or slightly misconstrued — information about one of the most invasive mass surveillance companies in the country. Alongside this has come lots of viral posts that either slightly misunderstand or oversell what Flock is doing or is capable of, or get, for example, the exact mechanics of how ICE may obtain Flock data wrong.

On balance, most of these posts are at least directionally correct. There is room in the movement against mass surveillance for hyperbole, satire, comedy, stunts, and misunderstandings done by well-meaning people, especially if there is a broader point.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Noah (@noahorion42)

That is not what Orion and some of his copycats are doing, however. Most charitably, Orion is making people aware of Flock and could be making people more likely to do more research into the company or is making them more likely to take political or direct action to prevent surveillance. He’s a bro spreading the word, and perhaps his heart is in the right place. But, basically, he is making shit up to make himself and his country music career more famous by creating and sowing disinformation in a space where there are dozens of journalists and influencers working hard for more transparency, and positioning himself as being somehow at legal or criminal risk when people who are doing actual needle-moving work struggle to stand out or are actually being threatened. On every post, Orion tries to give away stickers and tells people to comment “Fuck Flock” in order to get them. This is a tactic to game the Instagram algorithm with engagement; Orion has set up a bot to automatically message anyone who comments on his posts with links to his online store which has a variety of free stickers, paid merch, and a “bail fund in case I go to jail.”

Flock and its lawyers have sent real cease-and-desist letters or otherwise threatened the creators of both DeFlock, an open-source project to map Flock cameras, and HaveIBeenFlocked, a database of Flock searches done by cops around the country. Alongside reporting by 404 Media and local journalists, DeFlock has led directly to the massive, decentralized, grassroots movement of residents in small towns and big cities pressuring their city councils to end their Flock contracts. Activists and journalists using HaveIBeenFlocked have uncovered numerous cases of police abuse and ICE surveillance that has led directly to firings and arrests, policy changes, and canceled contracts. The strategies deployed by Flock against these sites are far more sophisticated and scary than the obviously bullshit cease-and-desist letter fabricated by Orion.

Flock went after Cris van Pelt, the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, by repeatedly trying to get his web hosting revoked by its provider by claiming the site both violated the company’s intellectual property rights and by saying that the site “poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.” Flock directly warned police about this website, which led different divisions of the FBI to warn law enforcement about the site, squarely putting a target on the site. Through a third-party law firm, Flock separately threatened DeFlock by sending a cease-and-desist to Will Freeman, the creator of the site. To fend off that cease-and-desist, Freeman had to get representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, called DeFlock a “terroristic organization” in an on-camera interview with Forbes. After that interview repeatedly went viral, Langley finally apologized in a second interview with Forbes earlier this month. These are actual threats, against people actually doing the work.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Noah (@noahorion42)

It is hard to see how Orion shouting nonsense into a camera to his 800,000 followers benefits anyone but himself; after his first few viral posts, various other Instagram accounts began posting fake Flock cease-and-desist letters to promote, for example, “The Saturday Salon,” an event series in Orange County, California that largely promotes its events via AI-generated posters (Saturday Salon also created a fake Palantir cease-and-desist in January).

Benn Jordan, a researcher and YouTuber who has uncovered various Flock security flaws and has become one of the most important voices speaking out against Flock, made a video about Orion’s fake cease-and-desists in which he said “Can y'all just eat Tide Pods or something and stop making this fight even harder than it already is?”

“If you get sued for doing this, I have absolutely no sympathy for you, because if somebody made a fake cease-and-desist or lawsuit letter from me and forged my name and posted it online for attention making me look bad, I would sue the fuck out of them,” Jordan said. “More importantly, Flock frames me like Jake Paul, like a hyperbolic YouTuber who’s just doing magic tricks and making things up to make the company look bad for my own personal gain, and by doing so, they’re able to squash and make it seem risky to read real reports about security vulnerabilities, or Fourth Amendment right violations. And I can guaran-fuckin-tee you that they will use these fake letters as an example to lump in with actual, meaningful critical research about police surveillance.”

Haley, Flock’s chief legal officer, told me in a LinkedIn message that “of course they are fake.” Haley added via a spokesperson that “We’re aware of at least two forged letters circulating on the internet, including this one [referring to Orion’s], that purport to be cease-and-desist letters from our legal department. To be clear: these letters did not come from me or from anyone at Flock. Flock welcomes and encourages public debate about our technology. We have not and would not seek to discourage, prevent, or prohibit such discussion and debate. In fact, we would be happy to participate in any such discussions the group in question might host in the future."

Orion did not respond to an Instagram message I sent him asking about the fake cease-and-desist letter.

Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error

Flock is going after a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com that has collated public records files released by police.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-23 13:55:45

Leaked Document Shows the Surveillance Tech at ICE’s Fingertips

A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someone’s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.

It is rare for the public to see such a large list of ICE’s technology capabilities in a single document. 404 Media has published the whole document, called “ICE Wide Analytical Tools,” below.

When sent screenshots of the document and asked for comment, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told 404 Media “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts.”

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

Some notable entries in the document include:

• Accurint: a LexisNexis tool for locating people that contains all sorts of personal data like addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and more
• Chameleon: a tool which provides “Anonymized means to conduct online investigations, web research, and undercover work”
• Locate X: a tool that lets ICE search a massive database of location data harvested from smartphones. Made by Babel Street, the tool uses data sourced through ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones or the advertising ecosystem. 404 Media previously reported how the tool could be used to track phones at abortion clinics after privacy advocates gained access to the technology. “It allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area from mobile data sources,” the document reads
• Cobwebs: a social media tracking tool. 404 Media previously reported Cobwebs also includes Webloc, which can monitor phone locations in entire neighbourhoods
• ISO ClaimSearch: a database that contains property and casualty insurance claims and medical bills. The database is nearly all encompassing and contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills

Screenshots from the document.

The document is dated May 2024 so is out of date, meaning ICE may not have access to every one of these capabilities at the time of writing. ICE has continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on peoples’ personal data and new surveillance technology. And the document does not include surveillance or investigative capabilities only specific parts of ICE may have access to. For example, it doesn’t mention ELITE or ImmigrationOS, two Palantir-made tools that 404 Media previously revealed. Instead it mentions RAVEn, a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) system developed in-house before the agency contracted Palantir to build a new suite of tools. RAVEn IGP, for example, is described as ICE’s “Geospatial Platform.”

“Allows identification of patterns and trends using interactive maps to view complex events through geographical locations and time. Available to all ICE employees,” the document adds.

You can see the document here.

Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People

Internal Palantir Slack chats and message boards obtained by 404 Media show the contracting giant is helping find the location of people flagged for deportation, that Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” and how Palantir is addressing empl…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-23 13:17:40

Orcas Explode Fish Into Confetti, Possibly for Fun, In ‘Astounding’ New Video

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Scientists have discovered a previously unknown behavior in orcas that involves one member of a pod holding up a massive dead sunfish while another charges and rams it, resulting in the dramatic explosion of the carcass into fleshy fragments, according to a study published on Thursday in Frontiers in Ethology.

Orcas often ram or strike prey as a hunting tactic, and some pods are also notorious for ramming boats. But the new study is the first to report such explosive results and sheds light on the mysterious lives of orca pods in the Gulf of California. The hold-and-ram strategy allows juvenile orcas to feed on smaller chunks of tissue and may also serve as a form of social learning and play in these highly intelligent marine mammals.

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Erick Higuera, a wildlife cinematographer and marine biologist, first observed orcas detonating a sunfish in 2021. The tactic was captured in follow-up footage by marine biologist Kathryn Ayres in 2024, as well as video from another event in 2025, filmed by Héctor Franz, who works in ecotourism.

“The first time I witnessed it, at that moment, the energy of the impact was astounding because we could hear the sound when the orca ran into the sunfish,” said Higuera, who co-authored the new study, in a call with 404 Media. “Seeing a multi-ton predatory mammal striking a massive fish—because sunfishes can go up to two meters depending on the species—with such a fast speed is breathtaking, and immediately we knew that we were witnessing something highly unusual due to the magnitude of the tissue explosion.”

Orcas are social animals that form tight-knit matrilineal pods that in turn belong to broader “ecotypes” with their own unique cultures and ranges. In the Northeastern Pacific, there are three genetically distinct lineages: resident orcas that primarily eat fish, transient orcas that mainly eat marine mammals, and offshore orcas that prey on sharks.

But less is known about the feeding behaviors of orcas at lower latitudes near the equator, which don’t seem to fall into such clear ecotypes. For years, Higuera and his colleagues have been capturing footage with drones and underwater cameras to better understand the mysterious pods that roam in the Gulf of California. That’s how they were able to fortuitously capture the explosive hold-and-ram strategy on film.

Sunfish are large, but easy to hunt, making them a popular target for orcas and other ocean predators. However, these animals have tough and rubbery flesh that is difficult to tear apart, especially for young orcas. For this reason, Higuera and his colleagues speculate that the ramming technique is primarily intended to loosen nutritious tissue from the carcass for juveniles to consume, noting that the adults focused on eating organs and meat from the body itself, leaving the fishy ejecta for their young. The behavior may also just be fun, as orcas often play with their food.

“Orcas are highly encephalized predators that frequently engage in object manipulation and play behavior with their prey,” Higuera said. “That is very globally well known. Because sunfish are slow-moving and defenseless, they present a low-risk opportunity for the pod, especially subadults, so they can practice strike precision and reinforce social bonds. It's social play and learning.”

The team plans to continue tracking the pod to better understand the behavior, and to learn whether the sunfish’s microbiome and enzymes might contain special nutrients for the orcas. At the same time, Higuera emphasized that human interactions with orcas should remain as limited as possible, especially since whale watching in the region has become a popular tourist activity.

“This groundbreaking insight was only made possible through a vital collaboration between expert scientists, eco-tourism operators, and citizen scientists equipped with drones and cameras that are willing to provide their footage to us so that we don't spend that much time in the field,” Higuera said.

“If we can protect these animals by maintaining a respectful distance,” he concluded, “this ongoing partnership will allow us to safely document hidden mysteries of marine life that would otherwise remain completely closed to science.”

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Frontiers | Fragmentation of sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) caused by high-impact ramming behavior in orcas (Orcinus orca)

Orcas exhibit highly specialized behavioral and cognitive adaptations that enable them to hunt large marine prey, including the largest teleosts, the sunfish...

^{Kathryn A. Ayres (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2026-07-23 11:52:00

Our New FOIA Forum! 7/30, 1PM ET

It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Thursday, July 30th at 1PM ET. That's in just one week today! Add it to your calendar!

So, what’s the FOIA Forum? We'll share our screen and show you specifically how we file FOIA requests. We take questions from the chat and incorporate those into our FOIAs in real-time. This time we're particularly focused on city council meetings. Jason watches a lot of these and has tips for more quickly navigating and finding information within them. He then does a bunch of public records requests based on what happened in the meeting. He'll explain all of this, from Flock to other topics too.

If this will be your first FOIA Forum, don’t worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too.

Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join.

We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along!

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Our New FOIA Forum! 7/30, 1PM ET

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-22 14:03:02

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

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YOU'RE INVITED! 404 Media is turning three, and we're throwing TWO separate events in NYC to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast with a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and an open-bar bash on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events. Not a 404 Media Supporter yet? Sign up, and get all the party details here.

For weeks, Verona, Wisconsin tried to get Flock to remove the three automated license plate cameras that its city council had voted to stop using. Flock told city employees not to remove the cameras, and a Flock employee told city officials that they were unsure whether the cameras could be remotely disabled, which led the town to decide to put black plastic trash bags over them until Flock eventually removed the cameras itself, according to emails obtained using a public records request by 404 Media.

The emails give insight into the process cities face while deFlocking themselves after voting not to renew a contract with the AI surveillance company. As we’ve previously reported, multiple cities around the country have decided to put black trash bags over their Flock cameras while they wait for them to be removed; this is in part because, until the cameras are physically removed by Flock, cities are unsure whether they have the legal right to remove the cameras themselves and are not sure whether they can disable their recording operations. The emails show Verona city officials telling each other that they had made multiple requests to Flock to have the cameras removed, and show a work order from Flock in which the cameras were set to have maintenance performed on them rather than being removed.

In February, Verona mayor Luke Diaz told the Wisconsin Examiner that Flock didn’t remove the cameras even after several requests: “They weren’t removing them,” he said. “We kind of looked at the contract, talked it over amongst staff, and the thing we felt most comfortable with was just covering them so they could stop spying on people … I’m 100% certain that they were still working,” even after the contract ended, he said. The emails obtained by 404 Media give more insight into what was happening behind the scenes, and why it took so long to get Flock to remove the cameras.

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that the discrepancy occurred because Verona voted to not renew its contract rather than outright canceling it mid-term. It is clear from emails obtained by 404 Media, however, that Verona city officials wanted the cameras to come down as quickly as possible.
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On November 10, the Verona Common Council voted to terminate its contract with Flock because of reporting from 404 Media and others that showed Flock was regularly sharing surveillance information with federal agencies, often because local police departments were using the Flock system on behalf of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. At the November 10 meeting, Verona Common Council members repeatedly said that they trusted the Verona police department, but not Flock: “Unfortunately, Flock is not trustworthy, no matter what kind of guarantees they have given you,” Verona council president Mara Helmke told Verona police officials at that meeting. “I just don’t trust it … Flock has assured us that our data is ours, right? But we can’t trust that. We simply can’t,” alderman Spencer Harrison said.

The day after the meeting, alderman Beth Tucker Long asked city employees to tell Flock that the contract would not be renewed. “Per the Council’s vote last night, notice of non-renewal of the Flock contract should be sent to Flock today,” she wrote. “Please copy me on the notice or send me a copy if it has already been sent. This is time-sensitive as the contract auto-renews for two years if non-renewal notice is not received 30 days before the December 14th auto-renew date. Additionally, please let me know when Flock will be removing their equipment. Are we able to turn off or disable the Flock cameras in the meantime?”

By mid January, the cameras had still not been disabled or removed, which was noticed by a Verona resident.

“I hope you are well. I spoke to you awhile back about the Flock cameras in Verona and also spoke at the council meeting that evening. I applaud the vote to discontinue the cameras,” one resident emailed a city councilmember on January 15, more than two months after the city voted not to renew its Flock contract. “However, I’ve noticed that at least two cameras (by Costco and by the park and ride) are still in place. Are they operating? My understanding was that the vote was to discontinue their use. While there’s maybe a delay in removal, the cameras should at least be covered by an opaque bag to ensure that they are not being operated (perhaps unknowingly) by Flock.”

On January 16, Flock sent the city an automated alert saying it was going to “replace equipment” at one of its camera locations. Police chief David Dresser took this to mean that it was going to remove the equipment: “I’m hoping below is the work order to uninstall the cameras,” he wrote. “We have asked them to uninstall the cameras at least twice. We will follow up with Flock if the cameras remain after next week.” This message was forwarded to Mayor Luke Diaz, who said “Is there anything that would prevent us from just taking down the cameras and holding them at City Hall until Flock picks them up? I’m at the point where I think it’d just be easier to just take them down ourselves.”
youtube.com/embed/6xSes4VMVyo?…
At this point, the city’s mayor, Luke Diaz, began instructing city employees to plan to remove the cameras. “Do we have the capability to remove the Flock cameras and put them in a location where they could be picked up? I know about the work order from Flock, but Mayor Luke would like them removed now if possible,” one of his staffers wrote to city employees. A public works employee responded and said “We would have time tomorrow to remove the cameras and solar panels and store them here at public works. I will need how many and their locations, also let me know if we are removing the poles or post they are mounted on, those may need to wait til spring.”

After hearing that the city could remove the cameras itself, Diaz wrote, “Great. I don’t see anything in the contract that would prevent us from removing them. Also, the contract is now expired anyhow.”

But before the cameras could be removed, a police officer asked the city to hold off on removing the cameras until after he had a call with Flock, in which he said they would give the company a one-week deadline to remove the cameras. “If they object to us taking them down ourselves, I will demand they remotely disable the equipment immediately and remove the cameras themselves as quickly as they can. I’ll inform them we will remove their equipment regardless of their objections by the end of next week if they cannot remove everything by then,” the officer wrote.

The same police officer updated the city the next day, saying that Flock did object to the city removing the cameras, and stating that he wasn’t sure if they could be remotely disabled: “I just finished up my meeting with Flock Safety. They did object to our removing their equipment; however, he assured me he was going to put in an expedited removal order on the cameras. The rep I spoke with has never had to do that before, so he was unfamiliar with the process, but he said he would update me by 9am tomorrow morning and hopefully be able to give me a timeframe for their removal. I also requested immediate termination of the camera network via remote, and I received the same answer. He was not sure if that was possible or how to do it, but he would explore that option and get back to me tomorrow by 9am.”

“I think, for the time being, if you or someone on your crew has availability to secure black plastic bags (or something else) over the cameras, that would be great,” he added.

“We’ll bag them tomorrow,” public works responded.

“When they’re bagged, please take a photo and send it to me. One of the alders is receiving daily emails,” a city administrator said.

“The cameras are covered. See the pictures attached,” public works wrote on January 23.

Even after all of this back-and-forth, Flock sent the city multiple automated emails about “work orders.” One of the emails stated that a work order had been canceled and that, “after further investigation of the issue, the Work Order has been resolved. Your device should not be functioning normally.” Another email, called “Work Order Created,” listed that two of the city’s three cameras were slated for “equipment removal,” but the other camera was slated for “regular maintenance.” Flock’s work order stated that the company performs removals “within two-three weeks, but service times may vary … thanks so much, and stay safe.”

In an email sent by one police officer to other police officers after the baggings called “RIP Flock Cameras,” officers were informed not to be alarmed by the bagged cameras. “If you see black plastic bags (or similar) covering our Flock cameras, they were put up by our DPW department, so there is no need for you to take any action or report them as covered or vandalized. Obviously, after the cameras are covered, they will not be reading plates. Flock will be removing the cameras at the earliest opportunity,” the officer said. “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Flock eventually removed the cameras on February 4. A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that “Flock Safety leases its cameras to customers and manages the installation, maintenance, and removal of the hardware as part of its service. Under Flock's customer agreements, all camera hardware remains the property of Flock and is removed when an agreement expires or is terminated.”

The company added that it has a “defined offboarding process,” and that cameras can be remotely deactivated. “Our team works directly with the agency to schedule the physical removal of the hardware. If an agency requests that cameras be turned off before they are removed, Flock can remotely deactivate them at any time.”

“Regarding Verona specifically, the City Council voted not to renew its agreement with Flock rather than canceling it mid contract,” they added. “The city had two agreements, one for two LPRs and one for one LPR, which expired in April 2026 and July 2026, and after the agency requested that the cameras be removed, Flock coordinated their removal in accordance with its standard offboarding process. Mid-term contract cancellations follow a separate process.”

Membership

404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.

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404 Media

2026-07-22 13:56:17

Podcast: Flock is Tracking People, Not Just Cars

We start this week with Joseph’s story on how cops are using Flock to track actual people, not just cars, with searches like “male with tattoos.” After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the company that is explicitly selling mountains of books to AI companies and promising to keep the sales a secret. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us how he learned about the Suno hack and what it showed us.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠
• ⁠How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars⁠
• ⁠AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop⁠
• ⁠Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius⁠

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

2026-07-22 13:14:27

You Opened a Credit Card. ICE Now Knows Where You Live

When you open a new credit card, you necessarily give the credit card company your address. You probably expect that information to remain with your bank.

But when you open a new credit card or change your address on file, your address leaves your credit card provider, travels through a web of middlemen companies, and ends up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which can then search, analyze, or pair that data with other pieces of information about your life without a warrant.

404 Media has mapped out this supply of data by reviewing U.S. government procurement records and internal documents from companies providing the information. It highlights the sometimes unexpected ways ICE is gaining access to peoples’ personal information as the agency continues to acquire and leverage all sorts of data.

The agency is buying information not just for immigration enforcement but to also investigate what the administration describes as ‘voter fraud.’ ICE officials have also repeatedly attempted to intimidate legal observers of ICE activity.

“No one signing up for a credit card thinks they're giving data brokers a thumbs-up to sell their personal information to ICE. Not only is it an outrageous violation of our privacy, it's impossible for Americans to opt out,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Here’s how that data supply chain works:

You Open a Credit Card

Whenever you open a credit card, or update your personal information, the credit card company provides your data to credit bureaus.

Credit Header Data

This is the personal data included at the top of your credit report. While the credit report itself has stronger legal protections, the credit header data does not.

Full Name SSN Phone Number Address Email address

Credit Bureaus

These companies are tasked with tracking peoples' credit. Experian and Equifax are mentioned in the documents 404 Media obtained. TransUnion is another credit bureau, but it has its own data selling product.

CLEAR

The credit bureaus provide the credit header data to Thomson Reuters, which incorporates it into CLEAR. CLEAR is the company's investigative data product. It brings together all sorts of data from different sources so customers can locate individuals. Thomson Reuters sells access to CLEAR to law enforcement agencies.

ICE

ICE buys access to CLEAR and is able to query its data without a warrant. CLEAR is also integrated with tools that ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to raid, including ELITE, a system worked on by Palantir. ELITE gives ICE a "confidence score" of a person's current address.

Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media “Most people are shocked to learn that anytime they open a credit card or phone account, their home address and other personal information is exposed to anyone willing to pay for it on the data broker market. Anytime we update our home address on these accounts, credit bureaus get the updates within 24 hours and share it broadly with other data brokers, thanks to legal loopholes that leave our personal information open to misuse and abuse.”

“The unregulated trade of credit header data hurts all of us, but it especially harms communities that are overpoliced, like Black and Brown people, immigrants, and people seeking reproductive care, enabling stalking, harassment, and even arrest and deportation. In our current climate, militarized immigration forces leverage credit header data to locate community members without a warrant. This is a blatant abuse of our personal data and lawmakers need to step in to rein it in,” she added.

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Do you work at ICE, CBP, or a company selling data or technology to those agencies? 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.

Credit header is the information at the top of your credit report, including your name, address, and contact information. You give this information to financial institutions, who in turn give it to the country’s credit bureaus that keep track of everyone’s credit.

Those bureaus then repurpose the data and sell it or provide it to other companies. In this case, that includes Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is known for the Reuters news service, but it is also a data broker and sells an investigative tool called CLEAR to private and government clients.

404 Media obtained an internal list of the data suppliers that feed into CLEAR. It included “Equifax Credit Header Records” and “Experian Credit Header Records,” indicating that CLEAR gets its credit header data from those two credit bureaus. 404 Media verified this data supply chain with a Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to protect them from retaliation.

Thomson Reuters then sells access to CLEAR to various government agencies, including ICE. This month 404 Media reported ICE plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to CLEAR to investigate immigration fraud and what the agency describes as “voters fraud.” 404 Media’s report on this sale came a day after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden press conference about election and voting security. Commentators widely believe this is Trump laying the groundwork for undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections.

Armed with this and other data, ICE is then able to use it to find where people the agency is interested in may live. An internal ICE user guide for ELITE — a Palantir-made app ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to raid — lists CLEAR as a source for its address “confidence score.”
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The data in CLEAR may not always be accurate though, potentially leading to ICE targeting the wrong location. “The data quality is way worse than people expect,” the Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR told 404 Media. “Combining disparate data sources into singular profiles is fundamentally a difficult problem, and a lot of superfluous stuff comes along. Stuff like the data we get from other sources might be bad, like your name showing up on a relative’s address because of a shared bill and suddenly you live there.”

“There is a ton of data out there about everyone, but organizing it is very much not a solved problem,” the source added.

When reporting about Thomson Reuters’ sale of CLEAR access to ICE, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson originally told 404 Media “It’s inaccurate to connect CLEAR to ICE and its deportation and enforcement operations.” After we asked for comment on the more recent $125 million contract, the spokesperson said, “We prohibit the use of CLEAR for the purpose of identifying and locating noncriminal immigrants or undocumented individuals with the intention of deportation solely on the basis of the individual’s immigration status. We take this restriction seriously, and we enforce it. We continue to work with our customers to provide technology and services that support investigations into areas of national security and public safety, such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking, and fraud/financial crime.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was taking steps to close the sale of this sort of credit header data, but the Trump administration gutted the agency. “President Biden's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule to close this loophole, but Trump killed it, along with the rest of the bureau, last year. There’s growing agreement in Congress that it’s time to close this loophole,” Senator Wyden, who has long tried to close this data buying avenue, added.

Neither Experian nor Equifax responded to a request for comment. When contacted recently about its investigative capabilities, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said, “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts.”

How Trump’s address was bluntly aimed at destabilizing the US electoral system

US president using office and intelligence agencies to try to undermine confidence in elections before midterms

^{Sam Levine (the Guardian)}

404 Media

2026-07-21 17:17:45

What Does Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Have to Do With Voting Rights?

When I was 20 years old, I went to my hometown Olive Garden with one goal in mind: For less than $10, I would attempt to eat so much bottomless pasta in their so-called Never-Ending Pasta deal that either the staff would be forced to stop me and my idiot friends from putting the franchise into the red, or I would die trying. In either scenario, I planned to get a serious bang for my buck. No one asked to see my ID.

I ate a ton of linguine alfredo (probably four bowls — not heroic and definitely not financially devastating to Olive Garden), shamefully tapped the mat, and went back to my friends’ place to smoke too much weed. The next morning, on the four hour drive back to my college town, I started feeling a burning, cramping pain in my abdomen. By that evening, I was curled up in pain and could barely walk. I drove myself to the emergency room, confessed my sins, and learned I had a handful of gallstones that the buckets of creamy, fatty, carby pasta had aggravated into an attack.

Should I have been carded before carrying out such a reckless crime against my own wellbeing? Maybe. But this week, right-wing groups and Republicans have started repeating a lie that Olive Garden’s promotional deals are more secure than the country’s elections.

I’m telling this humbling story because this morning, a clip of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise went viral where he claimed Olive Garden is more secure than the voting system of the United States of America. On a CNBC Squawk Box segment, the House Majority Leader said, "For God's sake, you can't get pasta at Olive Garden without a picture ID! Why not be able to show a picture ID to vote?” He was speaking in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act, which conservatives have been attempting to pass since 2024 and would require voters to show specific kinds of government-issued identification at the polls.

A lot of people, myself included, have been dunking on Scalise’s comment. Of course you don’t have to show ID to eat pasta at Olive Garden under normal circumstances, unless you’re doing something especially 18+ to the pasta, at which point I assume they’d just throw you out anyway. Right? But this line — the polls are less secure than an Olive Garden — is something Scalise is repeating from many Republican leaders who want to see the SAVE Act pass. Mike Lee, Eli Crane, Todd Rokita and RNC-affiliated groups have repeated this line on social media over and over in the last few days. It’s a false equivalence, of course, but nowadays, unlike in my naive youth, you do actually have to show ID to access Never-Ending-Pasta-land.

They’re all talking about it because Olive Garden brought back Never-Ending Pasta on July 16, and this time around, it requires you to show an ID that matches your “pasta pass,” I assume to prevent people from trying to never-endingly feed a big table with one deal. “The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is only for use by the Passholder whose name is printed on the Pass,” Olive Garden wrote on X, in response to someone asking if they could use it for their family. “Passes are personalized and non-transferable. Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering.”

No. The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is only for use by the Passholder whose name is printed on the Pass. Passes are personalized and non-transferable. Passholders must present a valid photo I.D. along with the Pass at the time of ordering.
— Olive Garden (@olivegarden) July 16, 2026

404 Media’s Matthew Gault went directly to the source: an Olive Garden on his lunch break today. He said he had to speak to three employees, who he described to me as “confused and frightened,” before getting an answer about Olive Garden’s pass system. “The [pasta pass] card doesn't come back until the end of August, they have no idea how it's gonna work,” he said.

I reached out to Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, to see if they could provide more clarity or comment on the situation. I’ll update if I hear back.

Voting rights experts say the SAVE Act would severely and unnecessarily restrict everyone’s voting rights, not just people who don’t hold ID. “Every American, including people who have been registered for decades, would need to appear in person at an election office with qualifying documents,” nonpartisan voting rights nonprofit Vote.org says in a FAQ about the act. “Online voter registration, which 42 states currently rely on, would be upended or eliminated. Mail registration would end entirely. Voter registration drives would become functionally ineffective, since they depend on reaching people at events and public spaces where no one carries a passport or birth certificate.”

Simply having a driver’s license or other form of photo ID wouldn’t be enough. The SAVE Act requires a valid U.S. passport or passport card, a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, Vote.org explains. If you have a different name today than what’s on your documents — for example, if you got married and changed your last name — you could also have to show your marriage certificate or other documentation.

Voting rights advocates agree that election fraud is not currently a widespread concern. But ahead of the midterms, the Trump administration has been rekindling false conspiracies about election fraud, fake ballots, and foreign interference.

Some Republicans are pushing back on the SAVE Act, too. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote in an op-ed that the act would severely chill voting rights in Alaska because of its vast geography and limited election infrastructure. Alaska is a stark example, but this would be the case in much of the rest of the country, too.

We can discuss the chilling effects of Olive Garden’s vague and potentially confusing identity verification requirements another day. At least it’s probably more secure and less privacy-invasive than a lot of the age verification laws in place in most of the country today.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-21 15:20:10

Apple Fixes Hide My Email Vulnerability After 404 Media Coverage

Apple says it has fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email feature which let essentially anyone figure out a user’s real email address which was supposed to be protected by the feature. Apple only fixed the vulnerability after 404 Media wrote about it at the start of July, despite Apple knowing about the issue for more than a year.

The news also follows the filing of a class action lawsuit against Apple over the vulnerability.

On Wednesday Apple told 404 Media it deployed a patch for the issue on July 3, which the company says has fully resolved the issue.

Hide My Email is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ product. It lets customers quickly create a new, anonymous email address they can then use to sign up to websites, services, or email people with. The generated email addresses typically contain two random words followed by a number and the @icloud.com domain. I use it heavily so hackers may have a harder time cross-referencing my activity and accounts across data breaches, for example.

💡
Do you know about any other privacy issues like this? 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.

Tyler Murphy, co-founder of EasyOptOuts, discovered he was able to find the real email address of Hide My Email users. At the time, Murphy said, “We don't know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable.” That included mine, which we tested.

Murphy first reported the issue to Apple in June 2025. Over the subsequent months, Apple said it was looking into the issue and said it had fixed it; Murphy found it was still exploitable; and Apple again said it was looking into it. Murphy, thinking Apple may not fix the issue at all, then contacted 404 Media, around a year after Apple learned of the vulnerability.

When 404 Media first covered the issue several weeks ago, we did not include any details on how it worked because Apple had not fixed it. Meaning, if we published more specifics, third parties might figure out how to exploit it and reveal peoples’ real email addresses.
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Now Apple says it has been fixed, we can add that, in simple terms, it required sending a target Hide My Email user a message that got rejected as spam. “We don't know how often hidden email addresses were leaked in email logs. For many major email hosts, the leak was triggered simply by an email being automatically rejected as spam, even if it was a legitimate message. Such emails probably didn't make it to your inbox, so you can’t review your spam folder to learn whether you were affected,” Murphy and EasyOptOut co-founder Ben Weiner said in a new statement.

“The bug that caused Apple's Hide My Email to leak hidden email addresses to senders has been fixed. However, we don't think the risk to Hide My Email users has been eliminated. Because non-malicious emails could bounce, revealing your hidden email address, and because mail transfer logs are often retained, we'd assume that any hidden email address linked to a Hide My Email address created before July 7, 2026, may have been exposed and could still be in third-party logs,” they added.

The class action lawsuit against Apple seeks full recovery of the subscription costs customers paid for the feature and an injunction against Apple for its “deceptive conduct,” PCMag reported.

EasyOptOuts - Personal Data Removal Service | Just $19.99/year

Remove your personal information from data brokers. 100% automated. Proven as effective as services costing 5-10x more.

^EasyOptOuts

404 Media

2026-07-21 13:51:39

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.

“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...] “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, the numerical commercial book identifier and barcode on the back of most books. For years, ISBNdb helped book sellers, libraries, and distributors manage their inventory and find and sell books, but the generative AI boom has made it valuable to AI companies. In addition to selling access to book metadata, ISBNdb now helps AI labs source bulk printed book purchases of between 1,000 to 1 million books per order. ISBNdb’s data makes it easier for AI companies to methodically acquire, scan, and turn printed books into training data while avoiding duplication.

AI companies’ attempts to hoover up printed books for training data got wide attention in January after a copyright lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic revealed internal documents detailing its plan to obtain and scan millions of printed books, and destroy them in the process. The Washington Post article found that Anthropic was buying books from one company called Better World Books, one of several marketplaces where libraries, retailers, and individuals can sell their books. Google was recently sued by book publishers for similarly training Google Gemini on copyrighted books.

ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret.

“Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.”

ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

One professional bookseller who specializes in selling foreign language books on these marketplaces told me that, starting in April, he and other booksellers noticed a historic spike in sales. This bookseller asked to remain anonymous so he can continue to do business on these platforms.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller, who suspects he’s sold hundreds of books to AI companies for training data, told me. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they’ll be even harder to obtain.

The seller told me that, normally, on a good week, he’d sell about 20 books. Since April, he has regularly sold hundreds of books a week. While the seller didn’t have clear evidence that the purchases were being made by AI companies, the purchases made him suspect that they were. First of all, he said, the kind of books he sells are specialized and are usually bought by schools and libraries. Purchases from these organizations have been trending downward because of reduced funding, he said. Bulk purchases also usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. I have not seen any evidence that this bookseller’s recent sales were facilitated by ISBNdb or that the client was an Anthropic or another AI company.

“It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” the bookseller told me. “I've had library orders before, and usually they're mostly confined to a single subject or maybe a slightly broader range of subjects. But basically, almost every library in the world has lost their budget. I know all the U.S. college libraries don't buy much anymore. The Australian libraries don't buy much anymore. The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.”

“Is it just me, or has there been an uptick in the number of AutoBuy orders since the tail end of last year?” one bookseller wrote on the forums for Alibris, another marketplace for selling books, in February. The AutoBuy function allows a customer to flag books they want to automatically purchase once they become available for sale on Alibris. “Any comment on what is happening? Is an AI going to read every single book? Any insight into how the selections are made? They seem to vary quite a bit in condition, format (hardcover and softcover), price and so on.”

“We have a couple of new bulk buyers that are scooping up trade books so lots of sellers are getting lots of orders,” Mike Feldman, director of client services at Alibris, responded.

One bookseller told me that similarly large orders of books were coming through another marketplace called Biblio. Customers can provide Biblio with a spreadsheet of ISBNs they want to purchase and the company takes it from there.

In June, a publication in the Netherlands talked to several rare booksellers who reported similar large bulk purchases they assumed were coming from AI companies.

It’s hard to say for a fact that the books are being bought for training data and possibly being destroyed by AI companies because ISBNdb and book marketplaces like Biblio and Alibris keep the identity of the buyer hidden. Large bulk purchases of books are first sent to distribution centers where, for example, Alibris checks the quality of the books before sending them off to the client.

Internal Anthropic documents about its plan to scan millions of books, revealed in the copyright lawsuit, don’t make clear why the company wanted to destroy the books in the process. A deposition of Tom Harvey, who Anthropic hired to lead the project and who previously helped create Google Books, shows that one company Anthropic contracted to scan the books was Datamation, which offers both “high volume destructive and non-destructive book scanning” services. In a destructive book scanning process, the spine of the book is cut so the pages can be fed into a scanning machine, which is faster and cheaper than non-destructive book scanning.

Regardless of its original intentions, the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed.

“Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy,” Alsup wrote in his ruling. “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”

This, Alsup said, was “clearly transformative” and therefore qualified as fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

ISBNdb’s site advertises this legal argument to AI companies as well.

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

“Responsible physical sourcing is not book burning,” ISBNdb’s site in a section about why it’s crucial to recycle the destroyed books. “It is the completion of a book’s lifecycle: from tree to knowledge to tree again.”

ISBNdb and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training

Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’

^{Emma Loffhagen (the Guardian)}

404 Media

2026-07-20 14:37:38

New Orleans Cops Published Policy Document Allowing Weaponized Drones

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YOU'RE INVITED! 404 Media is turning three, and we're throwing TWO separate events in NYC to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast with a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and an open-bar bash on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events. Not a 404 Media Supporter yet? Sign up, and get all the party details here.

The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) looked at ways to arm quadcopter drones with weapons, according to a draft version of its drone manual shared with 404 Media. A draft version of the manual, which was live on the NOPD website in June, said that the department’s drones could only be equipped with weapons with written approval from the Superintendent of Police.

The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft.

“The manual published on July 1 is the current published version of the policy. Earlier versions were draft versions that were presented for review before adoption of the current policy,” NOPD told 404 media. “NOPD has made it clear we are not and will not be equipping drones with weapons or other hazardous materials.” NOPD didn’t answer follow-up questions about how or why the draft version of the manual was published.

But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones. New Orleans has long been a pioneer of camera and drone driven policing and the cops have used controversial tactics to get around public scrutiny and regulations. It shows that what the police are circulating amongst themselves and thinking about privately, what they perhaps want to happen, does not match public policy.

NOPD has a history of finding creative ways to work around public policy and scrutiny when it comes to surveillance tech. A private company called Project New Orleans operates a network of cameras that provide live facial recognition to the city’s cops. The company operated in secret cooperation with NOPD for two years before the Washington Post exposed it in 2025. According to the ACLU, NOPD has continued to use Project New Orleans in contravention of local laws and has stonewalled public records requests.

Federal Aviation Authority regulations prohibit the operation of drones equipped with a “dangerous weapon.” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that he didn’t see how the police arming drones could possibly be legal. But the FAA regulation was written in 2018 and things have changed a lot in just the last few years. Last month, Guariglia argued that “we have precious little time” to stop police from arming their drones, and that the industry was moving that way.

One of the companies selling NOPD its drones is Skydio. The US-based manufacturer of quadcopter drones has done very well since the Trump administration banned the sale of foreign-made drones last year. Skydio has always marketed itself as a drone company for first responders and had a cozy relationship with police departments around the country.
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In 2020, Skydio wrote “we will not put weapons on our drones and will oppose fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.”

But Skydio CEO Adam Bry walked this back in a June 15 interview on Decoder. “So this is an area where I think I’ve gotten some things wrong. We’ve said some things previously that led some folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones,” Bry said.

“It’s not our place to tell them what they can and can’t do,” he said. “It should be up to the folks who’re putting their lives on the line to decide how to use it.”

He added that terrorists don’t follow terms of service. “They don’t care what our policy says,” he said. “I think when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say: this is good, this is bad, more often than not you’re going to end up on the wrong side of moral questions.”

Guariglia also pointed to a planned pilot project in Georgia that will test “less lethal” armed drones to nominally stop school shootings. He noted that in recent years many drone regulations have been ignored or relaxed.

“You used to have to have line of sight of your drones and now law enforcement [...] are phasing that out or offering exemptions,” Guariglia said. “If you want to police divisions a few years ago, they were selling drones capable of flying miles and miles in a couple of minutes and you’d ask them about the line of sight rule and they would just shrug. They are preparing for the day when law enforcement gets whatever they want.”

“Clearly they’re thinking about it,” Guariglia said of the NOPD manual that included a provision for armed drones. “Drones have always been a bit of a solution in need of a problem. There are few things that police say they need drones for that they cannot get by other means, and I think by putting other tools on them, they are still on a quest to figure out what drones are really good for.”

Arming drones could lower the bar for police to use force. “We have seen how consequence-free it can be for officers to deploy force at somebody who’s standing in front of them when they have to confront the fact that it’s a fellow human and they still have to draw their night stick or their Taser or their gun,” Guariglia said. “That would become so much easier and so much less emotionally and physically burdensome if they can deploy force by pressing a button.”

All this tech costs a lot of money. “Cities are spending an astronomical amount on drones and for maintenance of the drones. They're hiring all these drone pilots. They have to have special infrastructure to fly all these drones, and companies are getting rich. But really, there is no problem in policing that drones have straight up solved yet,” Guariglia said.

On June 24, the New Orleans city council approved a $250,000 budget request to expand Skydio’s reach in the French Quarter. The funds will purchase a massive docking station and support a “drones as first responders” (DFR) program, meaning that people who call 911 in the French Quarter may see a quadcopter drone before they see a police officer. NOPD told the city council that these drones won’t run facial recognition software and will not be armed.

The existence of the draft that was “presented for review” stands out. On February 7, 2024, NOPD first published an operations manual for drones. It was unequivocal: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons of any kind.”

Two years later, in 2026, NOPD asked for money for more Skydio drones and the city council questioned the cops about the program in a public meeting on April 16.

“Are these drones or any current drones in the French Quarter armed with any type of weapons?” Councilman Freddie King asked.

“No,” NOPD captain Samuel Palumbo said.

On June 24, 2026, the city council voted 4 - 3 to fund the expansion of the DFR program in the French Quarter.

Around that time, a revised version of the NOPD drone manual that allowed for the use of weaponized drones with the Superintendent’s written permission was live on the NOPD website. The revised version of the manual is dated June 21, 2026. The new manual caught the attention of Eye on Surveillance, a Louisiania activist group. The group said it started calling city council members to alert them to the new language.

Then, on June 30, the operations manual with the weaponization language vanished and a third version of the manual appeared. “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” a revised version of the drone manual dated July 1, 2026 said.

It’s an odd sequence of events from a police department that hasn’t been forthcoming about its use of surveillance tech. “Police have yet to demonstrate that they can responsibly handle the data collection and surveillance capabilities of drones. Choosing to arm already unaccountable sky cameras is a threat on top of a threat, a misuse of public resources, and risks introducing more unaccountable weapons into a city enjoying a decline in gun violence,” Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at Center for International Policy — a non-profit that studies emerging technologies — told 404 Media.

Skydio did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

NOPD: Violent crime at lowest level since 1969; what’s behind the decline?

New Orleans has seen a sharp decline in violent crime and homicides. Here's what police, community leaders and data suggest is contributing to the trend, and why concerns about gun violence remain.

^{Thanh Truong (https://www.fox8live.com)}

404 Media

2026-07-18 10:00:29

Ancient Princesses Were Weapon-Wielding Badasses, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that loosed arrows, made sacrifices, prepared for battle, and took the hit.

First, a bunch of ancient princesses were buried with weapons. Did they know how to use them? You bet! Then: a deadly Inca ritual, animal war games, and the mystery of the dinosaur-killer.

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.

Disney princesses…OF DEATH

Hashesh, Zeinab et al. “Bioarcheological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the late middle kingdom (c. 1850 to 1700 BCE).” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Egyptian princesses who lived nearly 4,000 years ago were skilled archers and likely handled other deadly weapons, including maces and daggers, according to a new study that revisits their mummified bones and upends expectations about gender in the ancient world.

For more than a century, archaeologists have puzzled over the remains of ancient royals entombed in the Amenemhat II pyramid complex located in Egypt’s Dahshur necropolis.

Four of these mummified bodies have been identified as the daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II, known as Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and Princess Sathathormeryt.

These women were buried with weapons, including bows and maces, which are grave goods normally found in male burials; Princess Ita’s tomb also contained a stunning dagger. Another pair of royals, Princess Noub-Hotep and her father King Hor, are buried in the same complex with weapons in their graves, and were also part of the study.

The presence of weaponry in the graves has led to a debate over whether the items were selected for symbolic purposes, or if the women used them in life. To resolve this question, researchers conducted a thorough re-examination of the mummified remains using osteological analysis, X-ray imaging, and advanced spectroscopy.

The results revealed that all of these individuals showed signs of bodily strain associated with repeated use of bows and melee arms, suggesting that not only King Hor, but the five princesses, knew their way around a weapon.

Pronounced muscle attachments across the mummified upper limbs “indicates repetitive, high-intensity actions consistent with archery and weapon use,” said researchers led by Zeineb Hashesh of the University of Beni-Suef.

“This evidence directly informs long-standing debates about the function of weapons in female burials,” the team continued. “Rather than purely symbolic objects, these items appear to have been actively used, as reflected in skeletal adaptations such as asymmetry, muscle hypertrophy, and metacarpal modification. Princess Noub-Hotep provides a particularly clear example, where skeletal changes align with the presence of arrows in her burial.”

In other words, these women don’t appear to have been the damsels in distress depicted in traditional princess stories. The mummification of their bare arms hints that they did, in fact, bear arms.

In other news…

The last days of the sacrificial children

Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al. “Pilgrimage to sacrifice: Mechanisms, causes, and time of death of the Western Andean Capacocha of the Southern Tawantinsuyu.” Science Advances.

We’re not wrapped up with the mummy beat just yet. In another new study, scientists took a fresh look at the mummified bodies of three young victims of human sacrifice in the Inca empire, who were ritually killed as part of a ceremony called the Capacocha in the 15th century.

“Selected for their perceived purity and exceptional beauty, the individuals chosen for sacrifice were either taken from their home communities or offered by local authorities” and “undertook a long, final journey to sacred mountain summits, where they were ritually killed,” said researchers led by Verónica Silva Pinto of the University of València.
The Boy of Cerro El Plomo. Image: Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al
The results revealed that the Boy of Cerro El Plomo, a child of about 8-years-old discovered at an elevation of nearly 18,000 feet, was likely killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and not by hypothermia or strangulation as previously proposed. Using advanced imaging, researchers discovered a cranial lesion that may have been inflicted by “a blunt-lobed lithic star-shaped mace,” according to the study.

Meanwhile, the team found that two female victims found at Cerro Esmeralda, aged roughly 9 and 18, had an indeterminate cause of death, despite strangulation being put forward as the likely explanation.

In all three cases, the victims were brought from distant homelands and traveled for several months prior to their killings, according to isotopic analysis of the elements in their remains. The enormous effort invested in these pilgrimages, combined with the careful placement of the bodies in special costumes and poses after death, demonstrate the significance of the Capacocha in Inca statecraft and cosmology.

The art of war for animals

Arbon, Josh & Radford, Andrew. “Pre-emptive behavior in a landscape of intergroup conflict.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Humans have a rather catastrophic habit of getting into wars, but at least we aren’t alone in our military misery. A diverse array of species—from ants, to woodpeckers, to chimpanzees—also engage in violent intergroup conflicts that require careful preparation for success.

Scientists have now helpfully pulled together a comprehensive review of how animals ready themselves for battle in part “to provide insights into our own conflict ancestry,” according to their new study.
A group of meerkats standing together in the face of an outside threat. Image: Andy Radford, University of Bristol
Many behaviors are eerily similar to our own: Chimpanzees surveil rivals from hilltops, patrol perimeters, and march in single file. It is also common for animals to invest a lot of time and energy into sizing up their opponent’s force, including by carefully monitoring scent marks.

Some animals “travel considerable distances to eavesdrop on the contests of other groups to gather social information that is used only days or weeks later, as seen in acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus),” said study authors Josh Arbon and Andrew Radford of the University of Bristol.

But by far the most memorable prep work comes from the Nevada termite, which erects “faecal fortresses” as barriers to intrusion by larger colonies. For all the fancy weaponry we’ve devised as humans—from guns, to nukes, to drones—how did we overlook the ultimate obstacle: poop barricades?

The case of the killer carbonaceous chondrite

Makhatadze, Georgy V. et al. “The origin of Cretaceous-Palaeogene impactor revealed by nickel isotopes.” Science Advances.

Deadly princesses, human sacrifice, widespread warfare. Let’s close with something lighter: The apocalyptic extinction of almost all life on Earth. It’s time to revisit the longstanding mystery of the dinosaur-killing space rock that smashed into our planet some 66 million years ago, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out about 75 percent of all animal and plant life at the time.

For decades, scientists have debated the nature of this epic deathbringer, which is known as the Chicxulub impactor. Now, a team has narrowed down the possible source to a class of asteroid called carbonaceous chondrites by studying nickel isotopes embedded around the impact crater in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Concept art of Chicxulub impactor and its soon-to-be victims. Image: Donald E. Davis
The identification of the impactor as a likely carbonaceous chondrite “is possible given nickel’s high abundance in primitive meteorites compared to the Earth’s crust and the distinct isotope compositions they record,” said researchers led by Georgy V. Makhatadze of Université Paris Cité.

“Our study highlights the extraterrestrial origin of the K-Pg mass extinction and the isotopes of nickel as a well-suited tool to characterise the nature of extraterrestrial material on Earth,” the team concluded. “Finally, it opens the door for further research into the connection between the impact and the mass extinction.”

Mummies, war, and doomsday. You’re welcome for the beach reads.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

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404 Media

2026-07-17 16:15:53

You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!

404 Media is turning three years old! We've come a long way with your support, so let's hang out.

We're throwing TWO separate events to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast and a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and a big open-bar party on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events!

Check your membership status or become a paid supporter of our work here.

On Thursday, Sept. 3, meet us at WNYC's Greene Space for 404 MEDIA LIVE! We'll discuss what we've accomplished in the past year, and what's next for our independent, human-made journalism. We'll also welcome a few very special friends to the stage: Matthew Gault joins us for a chat about AI datacenter resistance, and The Abstract's Becky Ferreira hits us with the coolest science to come out this year so far.

Supporters get 50% off their ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! Don't forget to check your membership status here and subscribe as a paying member for access to 50% off a full price in-person ticket.

Can't make it in person in NYC? Join us on the livestream! Grab an access ticket, donate what you're able, and watch for the link we'll send to your inbox before the event.

404 MEDIA LIVE! TICKETS HERE

The next night, join us for a bash to celebrate our three year anniversary at Threes Brewing Gowanus.Have a beer, wine or seltz on us, plus light bites throughout the night. Buying a ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! gets you 50% off a ticket to the afterparty Friday night. Supporters get in to the party FREE!

PARTY TICKETS HERE

All of us—Sam, Emanuel, Jason, and Joseph—will be there to celebrate 404 Media growing another year. We love these parties because it's a chance to connect with the people who make all of this possible: you, our subscribers.

Thank you for all the fun you've helped us have this year.

Supporters, scroll to the bottom of this page to reveal your promo codes.

We can't wait to celebrate with you this year.

Questions? Email sam@404media.co

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404 Media

2026-07-17 16:07:19

Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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 AI music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization.

EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point to pull the curtain on our story selection process. Usually, we do this when we explain the reasoning behind the decision to write a story we already published, but today I want to talk about a story I didn’t write (yet).

For the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X.

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Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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404 Media

2026-07-17 15:35:37

ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media. The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest.

The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security on Thursday, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows ICE fatally shooting 2 people in a week.

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404 Media

2026-07-16 18:00:10

Scientists Discover Planet Has Everything to Host ‘Earth-Like Life’ In Breakthrough

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Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star for the first time in history, signalling a major breakthrough in the search for alien life, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

The planet, known as LHS 1140-b, is about 5.6 times more massive than Earth and orbits a small dwarf star about 48 light years from our solar system. While scientists have discovered atmospheres around many giant gas planets in our galaxy—and even a few rocky exoplanets outside the habitable zone—the new detection of helium in the skies of LHS 1140-b marks the first direct evidence that a habitable-zone rocky world can host an atmosphere, which is a critical factor for assessing their potential to support life.

“For rockier Earth-like planets, it has been a huge challenge in the field to detect any atmospheres at all,” said Collin Cherubim, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media. “This has been a huge question in the field that so much time and energy has been devoted to answering.”

The new discovery “is really the first claim ever of any rocky exoplanet atmosphere in the habitable zone that could potentially have liquid water and really support life,” added Cherubim, who conducted the research while he was a PhD student at Harvard University. “That's what sets it apart and makes it really exciting.”

Scientists have previously inferred that some rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone might have atmospheres based on indirect evidence, such as measurements that show that their day and night temperatures are more moderate than expected, which could be explained either by an atmosphere, or other planet-wide effects. However, spotting an atmosphere around these rocky worlds is tricky because they tend to be so small compared to their stars, which is a challenge for precision observations.

Cherubim came at the problem with a new approach: He first developed theoretical models of rocky exoplanets that focused on mass fractionation, a process by which lighter molecules and atoms in the atmosphere escape into space, while heavier ones are left behind. These simulations predicted a new type of planet with thick skies closer to the surface, and a thinner upper atmosphere that allows helium to escape to space.

“Hydrogen is the lightest element and it's the easiest to blow off into space,” Cherubim explained. “My model was predicting that if your planet is in this sweet spot where you're blowing enough hydrogen away, but not too much that you're dragging helium, which is a bit heavier, along with it, then you can actually create a helium-dominated atmosphere over time.”

“This is a newly-predicted class of planets, which should have very unique chemistry,” he added.

Cherubim realized that this escaping helium might be detectable from Earth, and that the LHS 1140 system would be a prime candidate to test out the hypothesis. To that end, the team observed LHS 1140-b and another planet in the system, LHS 1140-c, over the course of 2024 and 2025 with the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile.

The 2024 results revealed a strong signal of helium at LHS 1140-b, but no detection in 2025, which may mean that the helium escape varies over time. The team predicts that the planet has probably had its atmosphere for billions of years. The other planet, LHS 1140-c, did not show any signs of an atmosphere, which was also expected based on its orbit and characteristics.

The momentous discovery proves that atmospheres can exist around rocky worlds, including around dwarf stars, which are far more common than more massive stars like the Sun. Cherubim and his colleagues think it’s quite likely that LHS 1140-b has large amounts of liquid water on its surface, another key ingredient for life as we know it on Earth.

“When we think about habitability, we think about three high-level things,” Cherubim said. “We think the planet needs to be rocky for the most part. It can't be a gas-rich thing where the surface is molten, or like Jupiter where it's just all gas. It's got to be the right temperature to support surface liquid water, at least for Earth-like life, and it needs an atmosphere to hold that water in and to shield the surface from radiation.”

“With this discovery, we now know LHS 1140-b has all three of those things, which is really exciting,” he added. “And it just happens to be a very nearby system to Earth, so it's very accessible.”

Whether alien life exists on LHS 1140-b remains an open question, but scientists have already been looking for signs of life, known as biosignatures, in its skies using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, the search hasn’t turned up any obvious signs of life, but future efforts may be able to peer at this world in more detail.

“I think this is the best place to be looking for biosignatures,” Cherubim concluded. “We're really excited to see what comes out of that.”

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2026-07-16 13:56:48

How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.

The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search.

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404 Media

2026-07-15 15:58:34

Podcast: We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’

We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains why he bought a $3,000 suit that electrocutes your muscles. Yep.
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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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• ⁠We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’⁠
• ⁠Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun⁠
• ⁠I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back⁠

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

2026-07-15 13:59:38

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built. Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs. As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.

The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this.

The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music.

Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts.

It is unclear from the files seen by 404 Media exactly how Suno scraped files from each of the other platforms. Pond5 is a stock music and sound effects library owned by Shutterstock in which customers pay to access songs individually or can access a limited number of songs per month with a subscription. Pond5 claims it has 2.5 million music tracks; Suno’s data suggests that it scraped a substantial amount of the entire library. Genius, meanwhile, does not host songs directly on its website but allows Apple Music subscribers to play music through the website or to play samples of songs through Apple Music.

In one of its lawsuit filings, Suno said that its “training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions,” and that it was “constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings gathered from publicly available sources.”

“For Suno specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies into Suno’s AI models so they can generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings,” the RIAA wrote in its lawsuit against Suno. “And to make matters worse, Suno obtained those copies in the first instance by unlawfully ‘stream ripping’ them from the popular streaming platform YouTube, and circumventing the technological measures designed specifically to prevent such unauthorized copying.”

In a statement, a Suno spokesperson said “As we have stated in public filings and disclosures, Suno’s AI models have been trained on publicly available music files and related metadata accessible on third-party websites on the open Internet. In November of 2025, we determined that Suno had been the subject of a limited security incident that was quickly contained. At the time, we immediately conducted an investigation and verified that the incident primarily involved outdated source code that is no longer in use at Suno and that no sensitive personal information was compromised. Importantly, Suno does not have access to customers’ full credit card numbers in Stripe.”

“Based on the limited nature of the customer information believed to be involved, we determined that individual notifications were not warranted under applicable privacy laws,” the Suno spokesperson added. Suno also sent a training data disclosure required under California law.

The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno’s customer list, which included customers’ emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said “I like to hack anything and everything.”

404 Media has previously reported on leaked materials that showed Nvidia and Runway ML scraped YouTube en masse. For the most part, AI companies no longer deny training on copyrighted materials and instead make the argument that they are allowed to scrape artists’ work under fair use carveouts in copyright law.

Last month, The Atlantic reported on several music databases that are widely used in AI training, consisting of millions of tracks: “Three of the datasets I found are distributed as a list of links to songs on YouTube or Spotify. AI developers download the actual audio using tools that automate the job, some of which allow developers to bypass logins, advertisements, and mechanisms that might earn money or subscribers for creators. Such tools violate the terms of service of these platforms. (The fourth dataset, the Free Music Archive collection, is distributed with MP3s.),” the author of The Atlantic piece wrote. It is unclear whether Suno used any of these datasets.

The Suno spokesperson added that the company has worked to try to prevent users from generating songs that sound like existing songs. One of the contentions of several of the lawsuits was that Suno could be used to output songs that are nearly indistinguishable from existing works. “Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design.’ For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work,” the spokesperson said. “We believe artists deserve both new opportunities and strong protections. That's why we've invested in safeguards designed to help prevent impersonation, and other forms of misuse, while continuing to develop technologies for AI identification.”

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of Suno, said on a podcast last year that he believes the “majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music

"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-14 15:05:20

Is the Best Game of the Year a Failure? (With Rob Zacny)

If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March.

But as much as we’re enjoying it, and there are thousands of players who feel the same, Marathon so far has failed to find the audience we’d expect from the developer that made Halo, Destiny, and which a few years ago acquired by PlayStation for more than $3 billion. It’s bad news for Marathon fans and a good sign for how much the video game business has changed over the years.
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I wanted to have Remap Radio host Robert Zacny on the podcast because much like me and Joe, he’s been obsessed with Marathon as well. One of Rob’s greatest skills is dissecting how and why games get their hooks into us, and what a game’s popularity, or lack thereof in Marathon’s case, might reveal about the state of the industry and culture more broadly.
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404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

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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

2026-07-14 13:20:54

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever

Freya Holmér's had this idea in her head for a long time—Tetris, but the whole board rotates. The game developer and Unity tool maker started making the idea real and built out a prototype. Holmér posted a 50-second clip of it to social media in mid-March and asked: "Is this anything?" It was, according to the people who responded. The posts got hundreds of replies from people desperate for a playable version.

"You can watch [the gameplay] happen and you understand the full extent of it, while still seeing the complexity and interesting parts of it," Holmér told 404 Media. "Most people know about Tetris, so you can shortcut all those concepts—it's a visually compelling concept—and you get the idea very quickly."

Freya Holmér (@freya.bsky.social)
been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything
Bluesky SocialFreya Holmér

It was a promising response for a commercial game developer that quickly turned unsettling. Within days, someone responded to her post with a vibecoded version of Holmér's prototype: "This can be built into a game by tomorrow." Another popped up in mobile app stores. Holmér said she saw up to four vibecoded versions of her prototype. Generative AI has made the work of plagiarizing an idea a lot simpler. A person vibecoding a game doesn't need any programming or design experience. They input ideas and instructions into a generative AI application and it writes the code and builds out the user interface. The vibecoder can tweak the game in conversation with the generative AI program until it suits their needs. As you might expect, the process doesn't necessarily produce elegant results.

The two vibecoded versions of Holmér's game, for instance, lack the finesse of her carefully crafted animations. There's a story behind every decision she made. That may not be true for the vibecoded versions of the game. Charlie Greenman, who told 404 Media he saw Holmer's idea on social media and wanted to do a spin on her prototype, said it took him several prompts and roughly a day to make his version, Rotris. Greenman said he doesn't think there are any ethical concerns with what he did. "I really can care less about the game," he said. "No one was interested."

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"I feel like I had this brand new creation," Greenman said. "When it gets to that point, is one song copying another? Is one game copying another? Whoever created Blox, Jenga, is that a copy of Tetris?"

404 Media reached out to the developer of another copycat, Blockfall, which also popped up within days of Holmér's post, but did not receive a response.

"It disincentives me from [posting about my work,]" Holmér said. "You get this anxiety anytime you post anything, someone is going to come in to finish it for you and then monetize it and steal the whole concept. It used to be the case that this stuff took a look of effort [to steal], because it requires skill and skillful execution and effort and knowledge. But now with AI, there's a general devaluing of skill and knowledge."

Papers, Please developer Lucas Pope expressed a similar sentiment on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast in April—that he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing much about what he’s working on publicly, lest it gets “slurped by AI” and copied by someone else.

There's always been some risk of sharing ideas and concepts too early on social media; grifters looking to swipe ideas have always been around. Holmér's experience with generative AI clones of her game idea is just exacerbating a dupe industry that's pervasive on digital video game marketplaces. As video game companies both big and small compete for attention in a culture that's kept the same five games, like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto 5, on the most-played lists for years, some companies are forgoing original ideas entirely, opting instead to co-opt anything popular or trending to make a quick buck. These sorts of schemes are prolific on the App Store and Google Play Stores, but are behind much of the slop on console digital stores, too.

It's big business. Several companies have had huge success flooding the market with knockoffs designed to confuse players looking for games to play. One strategy for these clone developers is taking a popular console or PC game and publishing a clone on mobile app stores—often before a developer has been able to make a port themselves. It's been massively successful for studios like Voodoo, a French mobile game maker that's been accused several times of making copycat games. 404 Media reached out to Voodoo for comment, but did not hear back. In 2018, Voodoo received a reported $200 million from Goldman Sachs, and in 2020, Tencent became a minority stakeholder valuing the company at a whopping $1.4 billion. Voodoo both makes and publishes mobile games, often low effort free-to-play games that generate money through ads.

"The incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction"

In 2018, game developer Ben Esposito accused the company of copying Donut County, which was unreleased at the time. Voodoo's version, Hole.io, reached the top of app store charts. It remains one of Voodoo's most popular games. Several other indie games have seemingly been cloned by Voodoo, too. Ironically, Voodoo doesn't want other game developers aping their clone games; it sued another mobile giant, Rollic Games, in a French court and won. The court found that Rollic Games' Wood Shop, in which players carve a spinning block of wood, copied Voodoo's Woodturning. The important piece of this story is, however, that Rollic Games was released before Voodoo's. Its copying accusations were related to an update Wood Shop made to their game.

Copycat and clone games have proliferated since, and generative AI is only making the problem worse.

"We shouldn't be surprised that people are using AI to do this kind of thing, because the incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction," University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of media and cultural studies Jeremy Morris told 404 Media. "This is a problem that's existed for as long as these platforms existed, so I don't think AI creates something new here. It just amplifies the amount that people can do."

Moldova-based Midnight Works is one company flooding console and mobile digital storefronts with clone games that players quickly deem scams. Founded by Cătălin Țiței and Roman Gaina in 2015, according to an archived version of the Midnight Works website, Midnight Works created apps before entering the games market in 2017. Since then, Midnight Works has grown to employ 300 people, per an archived version of its website. (The website now only hosts a landing page with almost no information.) . "Midnight.Works is a visionary game development and publishing company that thrives on nurturing creativity and innovation within the gaming industry," the company said, according to an archived version of the website. "Our diverse and passionate team is dedicated to collaborating with both burgeoning and accomplished game creators to bring unique, engaging gaming experiences to players across the globe."

Midnight Works claimed that 80 percent of the games it publishes pass $1 million in revenue, while 15 percent make over $100,000. The remaining five percent, it said, "don't achieve significant milestones."

A Moldovan game developer close to the company, told 404 Media that Midnight Works is "one of the largest" game developers in Moldova. Its big success was acquiring Hashiriya Drifter, a popular mobile racing game, from an external game developer. "[It] became their flagship project and, from what I know, the main financial foundation that allowed the company to grow," the developer said. 404 Media granted this developer anonymity so they could speak freely about Midnight Works.

"I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."

Luke Wild, a YouTube creator who investigated Midnight Works in a series on his channel, told 404 Media that he believes the company is a "massive global scam." Wild started looking into the company while playing through slop games on the Nintendo Switch eShop on YouTube. (Midnight Works retaliated against him, Wild said, by demanding employees to report his videos," he claimed.) He noticed that a lot of the games he was playing were coming from a small pool of developers that all seemed to stem from Midnight Works. He spent years documenting the connections between the slop factories. Each of these studios uploaded the same games, maybe with slightly different titles. If a game got removed from a digital storefront, it'd get uploaded later under a different developer or publisher. Most of the games, Wild said, are simulator games—because they're easy to create a template for—that copy whatever the algorithm is favoring. When TCG Card Shop Simulator, from OPNeon Games, was released into early access in 2024, for instance, Midnight Works released its own, Card Shop Game Store Simulator, months later. (The Nintendo Switch store page for this game is listed as being made/published by VRCForge Studios, but a game with the same name and key art is listed as being published byThe Midnight—with Midnight Works email addresses—on the Microsoft Store.)

"Midnight doesn't have the best reputation, and unfortunately that already affects how people perceive other studios from our country as well," he said.

Midnight Works has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Sometimes, Midnight Works' and studios in what Wild calls Midnight Works' "Web of Deceit" directly copy games, down to the source code and assets. One developer, who goes by the name Steelkrill Studio online, told 404 Media that his found footage horror game The Backrooms 1998 was stolen almost in its entirety. "I never imagined something like that would happen," Steelkrill Studio said. "The wildest part is that I only discovered it because someone commented on one of my videos accusing me of re-releasing the same game myself, which is how I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."

The Backrooms 1998 is a found footage horror game published in 2025. It’s played through the lens of a camcorder’s viewfinder. One of the unique pieces of the game is the implementation of the player’s actual microphone—the monsters can hear breathing and other sounds. It’s Steelkrill Studio’s own take on the backrooms genre, which was born of creepy storytelling on forums like Reddit, like Kane Parsons’ 2026 film Backrooms. There are a lot of other backrooms-inspired games, the most popular of which is Escape the Backrooms.

Steelskrill Studio thinks Midnight Works used a decompiler to take the source code. Looking through the files, he found that most everything matched his game. "It even had my personal videos when I was younger and family VHS tapes that I had included in my game [that] were still present in their stolen version," he said.

The stolen version of The Backrooms 1998 was taken off the console storefronts, and that publisher, Cool Devs, has seemingly been banned. 404 Media has reached out to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to confirm the reason for the removal and subsequent bans, but didn’t hear back.But its games now appear on the Nintendo Switch eShop and other storefronts once again, sometimes under different publisher names. The Bad Parents, an egregious copy of Bad Parenting, published originally by Cool Devs is now listed on the Nintendo store by TrueMotion Interactive—a studio that's published and is still selling near exact copies of Peak, Supermarket Simulator, and Bodycam.

A former Midnight Works employee, who asked for anonymity, told 404 Media that the studios' "long-established" scheme was to recreate a trending game and make a "stripped down clone" in a few months—just give it a similar name and style, sometimes using assets ripped from the original games. "All of this was done in the hope of confusing buyers so that they would purchase our awful knockoff instead of the original," the former employee said. The former employee said that generative AI was used "at every step" to speed up development: "Literally from banners and screenshots to UI and 3D models," they said.

Once a game is ready to be published on digital storefronts like the Nintendo eShop or PlayStation Store, the company blasts its game name and page with keywords in an attempt to beat the algorithm. "A lot of the optimization for game developers was similar to the way it was for early stages of music and podcasts, which is keyword stuffing," Morris said of general clone game tactics. "It's the basic kind of search engine optimization, at the discovery level." Another strategy, Morris said, is constant updates. It's one of those things that Morris called "algorithmic imaginaries," or myths about how these platform algorithms work. "One of the big ones is that the more frequently you update your app, the more often it would look like it was new and would get recommended more," he said. "One example I point to is the Bible app, and there's a Bible app that's updated every 12 days. I thought it was funny because it's a text that obviously is not changing."

Game sellers and app stores are incentivized to have a lot of content to sell; they get a cut of everything purchased there. Many have policies about copies and clones, but complicating that is determining what is a copy or clone. In the case of The Backrooms 1998, it's seemingly an easy decision to take the game off the store for violating copycat policies. Attorney Michael Wang, who researched Chinese copycat games, told 404 Media that developers and publishers can't copyright or patent ideas. If exact technology and assets are stolen, that's fairly cut and dry. But ideas that are similar—even really similar—are often fair game.

Where does inspiration stop and copying begin? Without PUBG Battlegrounds, there would be no Fortnite. And without the classic Japanese film Battle Royale, there would be no PUBG Battlegrounds. It's a question that's come up a lot in games. In 2014, a firestorm of controversy: Italian game developer Gabriele Cirulli was accused of copying indie game Threes! with his own game, 2048. Threes!, by game makers Asher Vollmer, Jimmy Hinson, and Greg Wohlwend, was released in 2014 and had success on the App Store. Then the clones came. One of those was 1024, which was also released on the App Store shortly after Threes! Cirulli's 2048, which he said was inspired by 1024, became the biggest of them all.

Cirulli, 19-years-old at the time, told 404 Media he saw a game called 2048 on a forum he posted to, based on another game called 1024. "I had no commercial intentions so I just started coding up my own version of the game," Cirulli said. He wanted to challenge himself to create an algorithm for a game like this. He struggled with it and almost gave up. He posted a finished version of the game, playable in a browser, to the forum. Someone saw it there and posted it to Hacker News, where it blew up. Thousands and thousands of people started playing it. Within days, a company called Ketchapp created a mobile version of 2048, called it 2028, and published it on the App Store. (That's the version that's generated millions of dollars in revenue per month, per reports. Ketchapp, like Voodoo, has been accused of egregiously copying other games. Ubisoft acquired the company in 2016. Cirulli said the only gripe he has with Ketchapp is that its version of 2048 has bugs that let you cheat. He's since released a commercial version of the game that's never quite reached Ketchapp's level of success.)

Then the accusations started. "I didn't publish 2048 with the intention of going virtual, nor did I expect that I would," Cirulli said. "At the time, I felt much more insecure with my place in the world and about myself as a professional. It was very difficult to deal with, and it affected me pretty deeply, even from an emotional perspective. It challenged my perspective of myself, meaning I was asking myself, Am I the bad guy in this scenario? Am I doing something unethical or bad?"

He's no longer interested in litigating the ethics of it all. But he would do something differently: "I think the only thing I would change is my mental health aspects, relating to the amount of stress it cost me," Cirulli said. "I think that was entirely optional."

He continued: "I still have that strong drive to build things that will affect people's lives in some small way, so that hasn't gone away. It gave me a lot of perspective and I feel very privileged to have had that opportunity."

Like Cirulli, software engineer Vittorio Romeo was inspired by a game he loved, Super Hexagon, to create his own version. He played Super Hexagon on his phone, "even during lessons at school," he said. Super Hexagon didn't have a PC version. So he tried to make one using the programming language he was learning, C++. "I did manage to replicate the game mechanics quite quickly and have a working version, obviously not as polished or well-crafted as the original, and it was doing the job," he told 404 Media. The mistake, he said, was releasing his free, open-source version of the game on PC before Super Hexagon developer Terry Cavanagh did.

"I never really wanted to compete with the original," he said. "I wanted it to be, like, we're fans of the original. We love the mechanics. We have played the original a lot, and we want more. I wanted to build a platform where people can iterate over the ideas the original had and build on top of it."

But unlike Cirulli's situation, Super Hexagon creator Cavanaghsaid he was "basically alright with [Open Hexagon,]" though a little upset it was released before Super Hexagon came to PC. As an open source game, Romeo didn't make money from Open Hexagon at the start, but he put it on Valve's Steam platform in 2021. It costs $4.99 to purchase, so Romeo does make a little bit of money from it. But more importantly, he said, is that the Steam Workshop lets players more easily create new levels. "That's been going on and people are still adding levels to this day," Romeo said. "There's a small community that is still developing content."

It's absolutely a different sort of clone than the likes of Midnight Works, which seems to be motivated not by admiration or learning but by profit. The end products, too, are certainly more high quality than the big budget slop machines that churn out more and more low quality clones.

At the platform level, companies like Nintendo are seemingly making changes to its digital store not necessary to moderate what shows up on the store, but to push down the slop games to the margins. Nintendo now forces the Best Sellers section to rank games by revenue and not total downloads. Ranking by downloads was a problem because these low effort games are often extremely cheap. People are willing to give something a try for $2 or less, so they sell a lot. Still, the cat-and-mouse game is on across every platform that sells games.

Holmér, whose Tetris-like is also an iteration, is still working on the game. She's got a lot of design decisions to make. What's the scoring system? Is there a failstate? Does she make it feel more like a toy? How do blocks clear? Does she share more about its development online?

"Most things right now have a pretty short life cycle when it comes to attention online," Holmér said. "The attention on that video I posted has tapered off to the point where I feel a lot more calm. In the very beginning, that first week, just every day there was a new AI clone. I was like, OK, well fuck me, I guess. But there's way less engagement, and I feel more in the clear to take my time to actually make something right, something good I can be proud of, and not just get it out there as soon as possible."

You Cloned My Game? I Ain't Even Mad, Bro

Another developer might have gone into a rage. A bigger company might have issued a cease and desist. But the creator of Super Hexagon was more level-headed than you or I might have been at the theft of our hard work.

^{Ryan Rigney (WIRED)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 19:23:39

Podcast: Liberation, Eroticism, and Sex in Public (with Angela Jones)

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.”

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss.
youtube.com/embed/19R-f4SKPd4?…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

Cash/Consent | Lorelei Lee

When feminists call for the criminalization and delegitimization of sex work, they do not ally themselves with sex-working women.

^{n+1 Interns (n+1)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 17:18:26

LAPD Regularly Pulled Over Innocent People Because License Plate Readers Flagged Their Cars As Stolen

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly "investigated" 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen.

The news that LAPD pulled over 161 innocent people in two months because of improper tagging in the department’s system comes after several high-profile incidents in which people in other states were accosted by police because of data entry or clerical errors in ALPR systems. Joel Feder, an editor of the car journalism website The Drive, detailed a harrowing tale in which he was tracked for days and ultimately pulled over by police in Minnesota because the license plate of the car he was reviewing for the website had been entered into the Flock system as stolen by a police department in California. Monday, the website MotorBiscuit wrote about an innocent woman who was jailed for 13 days because she drove a black Dodge Durango and police searched the Flock system for a Black Dodge Durango suspected of being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.
Image: LAPD OIG
A new report by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) suggests that instances of people being falsely pulled over because their license plates have shown up on an ALPR “hot list” are very common, and that the surveillance of people on hot lists that ultimately result in no action from police is staggering. Many ALPR systems have this “hot list” feature, which is where police enter a license plate and get a ping or notification about the vehicle’s whereabouts whenever it passes a connected ALPR camera. In a two-month period between August 1 and September 30, 2025, the LAPD’s cameras generated more than 210.5 million license plate reads, according to the report.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The report notes that this happened because of “inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences,” and that in many cases, license plates remained on a hot list after a stolen vehicle had already been recovered or was reported as not stolen, meaning the cops are in some cases pulling over the lawful owner of the vehicle.

Notably, the report states that when police get an ALPR hot list hit, the department generally considers any subsequent action to be a “high-risk” stop, meaning the risk of confrontation or potential danger is greatly increased from routine traffic stops for running a red light or speeding.

“When a license plate matches with a vehicle of interest on a Hot List, an alert will appear on the police vehicle’s Mobile Digital Computer,” the report reads. “Often, officers will approach the vehicle with extreme caution or conduct a ‘high-risk’ stop. This involves calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle.” The report says, “department policy requires officers to attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop,” but that often does not happen. The report also states that, on the vast majority of hot list hits, no action is taken by police meaning that specific people are being subjected to tracking and surveillance for no readily discernible reason. In the two-month audit period, 5,911 different license plates were tracked. No action was taken against 4,575 of those cars.

The LAPD said in response to the report that cars improperly flagged as stolen “generally result from the timing of record updates outside of the Department’s control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted.” In other words, LAPD is often relying on other police departments to remove license plates from a hot list, highlighting the problems with networking different surveillance systems together.

The LAPD OIG report, which appears to have directly led the LAPD to allow its Flock contract to expire, studied the use of three different ALPR systems the department has been using, including static, pole-mounted cameras from Motorola and Flock and cameras in police cruisers made by Axon. In total, the department has nearly 2,000 ALPR cameras; LAPD accesses data for both Flock and Axon systems through Flock’s backend thanks to a data sharing partnership between Axon and Flock, according to the report. The report said the department was able to recover 337 stolen cars during the two months and that ALPR data led to 74 arrests total.

Both the OIG and the LAPD determined that the ALPR system needs to be reconsidered. The OIG suggested that the LAPD “suspend the deployment of new ALPR cameras and the execution of new ALPR-related contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices” and “strengthen oversight of ALPR data access.” The LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend, and said it would not enter into new contracts until going through a full audit process.

Innocent 23-Year-Old Jailed for Fatal Crash Because She Drove a Dodge Durango

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and Flock cameras are supposed to help law enforcement catch the bad guys. But what happens when the technology

^{Rahaan Mazumder (MotorBiscuit)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 14:32:05

I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back

Putting on the $3,000 Katalyst suit is like sliding around with an electric eel. First you lay out the vest, shorts, and arm straps (on a towel if you don’t want to make a mess) and spray their electrode pads with a lot of water. “More water is better,” Katalyst’s CEO Brendan Kennedy told me. You then clip the vest and shorts together, creating a single, dripping suit. After wrapping those around your body and zipping up, you put on the arm straps and connect them to the main suit with a pair of delicate cables. You slip a battery pack into a pocket near your thigh, snap its magnetic plugs to the vests and shorts, and you’re ready to work out, soaking wet and maybe cold if you took too long to assemble the contraption.

The pitch is that Katalyst will essentially supercharge your workouts. The suit electrocutes your muscles while you do basic movements alongside a virtual instructor in the accompanying app. Think lunges, squats, and the movement of a deadlift. You can get the equivalent of a 2 hour strength session in just 20 minutes, Katalyst says. George Clooney has praised the suit, telling Esquire “my arms are twice the size they’ve ever been. It’s crazy.” Bloomberg Businessweek has covered the suit too, writing, “here’s the thing: The Katalyst suit worked.”

I already own a bunch of exercise and wellness tech, from smart swimming goggles to the Oura ring. I often plan my workout time as efficiently as I can. That’s one reason why my main form of exercise is rowing, which uses a lot of muscles at once, and why I sometimes wear resistance gloves during swimming to squeeze out as much benefit as possible. So, as a tool that promised super-efficient sessions even if the price tag is obviously insane, I really wanted to like Katalyst. I thought it might be the secret to finally branching out from rowing and swimming to more strength-focused routines.

But it wasn’t. It gave me pins and needles in my feet for days at a time and made my limbs numb and cold, derailed my other workouts, and it simply wasn’t fun in the way good and long-lasting exercise habits ideally should be. Instead, slipping into the $3,000 cyber suit for around a month made me reassess my obsession with fitness, optimization, and efficiency. It made me consider which of those concepts were actually helping me, and which were ultimately holding me back. What the fuck am I even doing? I eventually thought to myself, dripping water all over my apartment floor.

I wasn’t the only one. “Legit you are the craziest person I know,” 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg said after I sent a photo of the soaking wet suit to our group chat. They compared me to an Infinite Jest character, with Sam Cole saying “we’re laughing IRL over here.” Jason Koebler added: “As your friends and colleagues and cofounders. This is not normal. The bit has gone too far.”

Images: 404 Media.

Katalyst is an electro muscle stimulation, or EMS, suit. The pads send electrical pulses that make your muscles contract. At first, as the suit and app ramp you into a workout, the pulses feel like a light tingling sensation. Then, a solid block of electricity across your arms, legs, and abs. You wet the pads, and sometimes the base layer of shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt, because the water helps conductivity between the electrode and your skin, Katalyst says.

“That was absolutely insane,” I texted the rest of 404 Media after my first workout.

At some points, your limbs may lock in place due to the intensity of the blast. I tweaked my settings so I could complete the movements fully and with a good amount of difficulty and resistance, while not completing locking my legs or arms out. The app encourages and makes this easy to do: during a workout there are buttons in the app you can quickly press to increase or turn down the intensity of the pulses. The instructor in the pre-recorded video will often bring up the power during the workout to reach an electrocuting crescendo. It can take a few of the recommended three or so workouts a week to find your ideal baseline.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Katalyst’s instructors recommend you breathe out while the suit pulses. You perform a squat, or a lunge, or another movement for four seconds while the suit shocks you. Then you rest for four seconds. You keep doing that through different motions and intensities. In 20 minutes, the workout is over.

This timesave is obviously the big attraction of the Katalyst; the idea that you can somehow squeeze hours of work into mere minutes without even leaving your home. “I'd been trying to go back to the gym a dozen times over the preceding 2-3 years with no luck. The time savings/mental ease of EMS training really is a blessing,” AustinAfter40, a YouTuber who makes EMS-related videos, told me in an email. Within the first few months of getting an EMS suit in 2023, Austin says he gained 10 pounds of muscle. In the years since that’s gone up to 20 pounds, without, Austin says, really touching anything heavier than a 15lb dumbbell. “My bone density has increased significantly, body fat has lowered, and back pain I've dealt with much of my life is now a distant memory,” he says.

Images: 404 Media.

If you scroll the Katalyst subreddit, you find many people saying much the same thing. But navigating the world of EMS can feel like the Wild West. Austin makes money from his EMS-related videos with affiliate links, so viewers need to keep that in mind when watching whatever suit he is currently making videos about even if the information is sincere and helpful (he has since moved onto TitanBody, a Katalyst competitor). The intensity and metrics of EMS suits are not standardized, so you don’t really know what you’re getting. An intensity rating of, say, 200 on a Katalyst is probably not going to be the same on a TitanBody suit. Or a VisionBody suit. Or any of the other EMS suit companies that have clearly bought Google Search ad space when you look for anything EMS-related.

Katalyst is FDA-cleared. That is not the same as FDA-approved. The Katalyst suit falls into Class II of the FDA’s different groups for devices, putting it in the moderate risk category. Being cleared means Katalyst can sell the suit, but the FDA is not saying everyone should slip it on.

On the Katalyst subreddit, people have historically complained about the company’s customer service or suit delivery times (the customer service was very good for me, with a dedicated Zoom call to talk through the issues I was facing). Kennedy, through his company Mont y Mer, acquired Katalyst in 2025. He said the previous CEO and Katalyst’s founder, Bjoern Woltermann, had “essentially bankrupted the company twice in six years,” and had taken orders and payment from more than 1,000 customers but hadn’t created any suits. Kennedy said he then went around the world meeting with different suppliers to produce those original 1,000 suits. For me, it took around five months for my suit to arrive when I ordered it in 2025. Kennedy said Katalyst has inventory now and has “sort of solved that problem.” Woltermann acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

Beyond the anecdotal, the science suggests EMS suits can work. Professor Yong-Seok Jee at Hanseo University, who has researched EMS, told me in an email that while athletes often use EMS to target specific muscle groups, he says the suits can also help normal people. Like me, presumably. “For non-athletes or the general population, EMS can be particularly useful as a time-efficient and low-impact training option, especially for beginners, older adults, or individuals with limited mobility,” he continued.

But EMS is not some magic tool you can use instead of actually working out and exercising normally. “That said, EMS is not a shortcut or replacement for exercise. Its effectiveness depends heavily on appropriate intensity, supervision, and program design, and there are safety considerations (e.g., avoiding excessive stimulation),” Jee said.

Casey Johnston, who runs the lifting-focused newsletter She’s a Beast and author of A Physical Education, told me in an email Katalyst is “definitely in no way a replacement or even effective complement to strength training.”

“If anything, similar to the drag suit argument, wearing a thing like the Katalyst would probably hamper your ability to effectively learn strength training movements and form, which is a huge cornerstone of translating strength to real life, before it would be additive in any meaningful way with, I can't put enough quotes, ‘muscle stimulation,’ or whatever term they use,” she added.

“This suit looks like the biggest scam I’ve ever seen,” Johnston wrote. She pointed to the Relaxacisor, a device from 1949 that blasted your abs with electrical pulses. “This thing is no different, and equally scammy,” Johnston said.

Screenshots of the app.

I didn’t want to replace my current exercise regime of rowing and swimming five or six times a week with the Katalyst. I wanted to slot it in. I’ve repeatedly injured myself with various strength routines, to the point where I’ve had to do physical therapy and had medical procedures done, so I wanted Katalyst to supplement my existing exercise and get more strength in there. That didn’t work.

First, obviously, you ache after blasting yourself with electricity. So much so that you (wisely) need to rest, but also so much so that you can’t then row or swim, even at a lower level. So I found myself not doing the two forms of exercise I love and get great joy from and which have drastically improved my health over the years.

Next, I started to essentially injure myself with the suit. I often got pins and needles in my hands and feet. One of the instructors in the app said pins and needles in your hands can happen and should go away quickly. But mine would last for hours, and my feet multiple days. Then my limbs would feel numb and I would be incredibly cold, so much I would start sneezing. Kennedy told me getting pins and needles for this long was “extremely abnormal.” I took his advice of wetting the pads even more, and even the base layer you put on. I also did some workouts without the arms turned on at all. That stopped the issue with my hands at least.

But it still wasn’t working for me, mentally. It made me think what was I even doing this for. To be efficient for efficiency’s sake?

There is something lost when you favor efficiency above all else. You lose the joy of just moving in a way that feels good. You lose embracing the process of exercise itself when trying to make the time spent as short as possible. You lose sight of your actual goal with exercise, which for me is to keep active and healthy, not get insanely jacked. You lose that state of everything fading away, your mind clearing, endorphins flowing, and nothing else existing but your body moving without you even thinking about it. What runners call the runners’ high, or what I get in rowing when I’m on a longer workout. Maybe some people do get that or feel good with EMS suits. The in-app instructors said you might. I know I didn’t get it with Katalyst.

The Shocking Origin Story of the Relaxacisor, the Fitness Device That Electrified Your Abs

Eschewing sit-ups for electrical impulses, the suitcase-like contraption vowed that it could deliver a tighter set of abs without you ever having to break a sweat

^{joshschollmeyer (MEL Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 14:01:35

These Are the Worst ChatGPT Flyers You've Sent Us

Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of "ChatGPT flyers," the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many terrible, brain-numbing signs for anything you could possibly imagine. I guess I got what I asked for. (Thank you, I love it).

404 Media readers were particularly passionate about their hatred for AI-designed signs. I got some of the best email responses to any story I've done here. Before I get into the AI flyer hall of shame, here's some of what I heard:

"They look like absolute DOG SHIT. Like my cat's litter box! I freaking HATE THEM. I have been posting to my Instagram begging people and businesses to stop using them. No one listens LOL. Thanks for this article. I am glad I'm not screaming into the void by myself."

"thank you for writing this story. I've evangelically shared it with everyone I know, for whatever that's worth. I had never seen a local group churn out an AI-generated flyer before this year, but in the last several months it's gotten out of control. I'm sure you're being inundated with lousy AI flyers. Sorry for adding to the deluge, but this is something that's been bothering me for months."

"This is a great article but also fuck you because you were absolutely right about 'Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.'"

Without further ado, here are some of the worst flyers we got. This represents just a small sampling of the overall number you sent me. In some cases I've provided more context from the person who sent it to me, and I've biased for ones that appeared in real life (i.e., were printed out) or that are particularly weird. Enjoy!
"Last month I was making one of my regular (miserable) visits to my rural Ohio hometown for care for aging mother. After a very long day cleaning out my childhood home, I thought I had finally snapped and lost my mind when I laid eyes on this table card at the local Mexican joint. ""I do want to warn that I have accidentally poisoned the well around New Haven. I'm a de-facto AI spotter, but it's hard to back up my assertions with vibes.""Use of generative AI in my town proliferated after it was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. This is Altadena, California. Eighteen months later, 2 out of 3 Altadenans are still displaced. Our ongoing challenges with recovery make it difficult to criticize event organizers that habitually use gen AI to create flyers, especially if the events exist to support a community in pain.""my city and our parking authority used to market a public engagement event for a new mural. The city prides itself on a growing Arts District, which is pretty rich since there is no (human) Comms team"This one is good because many of the beer company logos are wrong

404 Media

2026-07-11 14:51:18

Scientists Solve Mystery of Bizarre ‘Alien Megastructure’ Star

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that busted their butts, scaled great heights, got it right, and discovered a new world.

First, Hannibal marched an army of men, horses, and elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome. Scientists ask the question: Just how hard did they grind? Then, the mouse at the top of the world, the ancient origins of handedness, and a throwback to the alien megastructures.

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.

Try the Hannibal diet (no, not the Lecter one)

E. Berti & F. Vollrath. “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca marched an army of 46,000 men and 37 war elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome right at its doorstep. This brash advance in the Second Punic War has become one of the most legendary military moves of all time, even though Hannibal was ultimately unsuccessful in his mad dash to sack Rome.

Yet despite the prominent place of this march in history, the exact route that Hannibal took over the Alps remains unknown. Now, scientists have taken a fresh stab at the millennia-old mystery by calculating how much energy various route options would have cost the troops and elephants. Though experts have generally considered a route called the Col du Clapier to be most likely, the new results suggest an alternate route known as the Col de la Traversette would have exacted less energy from the advancing army, which might have boosted its odds as Hannibal’s choice of crossing.
“Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants.” Image: Nicolas Poussin
“Most of the discussions concerning Hannibal’s crossing were guided by philological and geological considerations, which tend to ignore the biology of the men and animals,” said authors Emilio Berti of Halle-Jena-Leipzig and Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford.

“Compared to choosing the Col de la Traversette, the routes via the Col de Montgenèvre, Col du Clapier, and Col du Mont Cenis would have required 11%, 16%, and 19% more energy, respectively, for the army as a whole,” the team continued. “Although Hannibal would not have had such accurate estimates, he may have had a qualitative understanding of the ranking of the possible routes. In which case, driven by the aim to minimize the energy costs of the crossing, he would have chosen the Traversette route.”

While this study does not resolve the tantalizing question of exactly where Hannibal hauled ass over the Alps, it sheds new light on the immense costs of this ancient act of bravado. Berti and Vollrath estimated that even if the army took the path of least resistance—the Col de la Traversette—the “elephants would have lost 4% of their body fat reserves, horses 11%, and men 19%.”

Invading Rome: The ultimate weight loss plan. Considering that half of Hannibal’s troops died during the crossing, this diet is not recommended.

In other news…

The mighty mountain mouse

Liphardt, Schuyler et al. “Adaptation across an extreme elevational gradient in Andean leaf-eared mice, the world’s highest-dwelling mammal.” Science.

Speaking of alpine survival, meet the Andean leaf-eared mouse (Phyllotis vaccarum). This little critter can live more than four miles above sea level, on the dizzying peaks of the Andes mountains, making it by far the highest-dwelling mammal on Earth.

The mouse has surpassed the “known elevational range limits of all other terrestrial vertebrates” which “were previously thought to be uninhabitable by mammals owing to severe hypoxia and frigid temperatures,” according to a new study about this mouse’s amazing adaptations.
Andean leaf-eared mouse, Phyllotis vaccarum. Image: Marcial Quiroga-Carmona
To understand how this unassuming mouse survives up in the clouds, scientists analyzed the genomes of 167 leaf-eared mice collected across their range, which spans the lowlands all the way up to high Andean slopes, and compared them to their more grounded mouse relatives. The results revealed that the mountain mice have evolved a unique set of adaptations that are distinct from many other alpine animals, including the ability to metabolize toxic plants.

“The world’s highest-dwelling mammal has adapted to habitats at both the low- and high-elevation limits of its range, and much of the elevation-related selection relates to previously unappreciated aspects of feeding ecology,” the team concluded.

Mmm…toxic salads. Keep on living the high life, P. vaccarum.

A handy discovery at the dawn of complex life

Evans, Scott D. et al. “Earliest evidence of behavioural handedness in the Ediacaran motile bilaterian Spriggina floundersi.” Scientific Reports.

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest potential evidence of a right-handed animal, though the 550-million-year-old seacrawler in question doesn’t actually have hands. Spriggina floundersi, an inch-long weirdo that lived in the Ediacaran period, has long fascinated scientists because it appears to be one of the first animals in the fossil record capable of locomotion.

When scientists took a closer look at more than 100 exquisite Spriggina fossils from South Australia, they discovered that about twice as many of them seemed bent to the left compared to the right, suggesting that the animal had a preferred direction of motion, or “handedness.” In this case, it was right-handed because the fossils are preserved in negative hyporelief, meaning that they are mirror images of the animal.
A fossil of Spriggina floundersi collected in South Australia. Image: Scott Evans / ©AMNH
“A significant number of fossil specimens are bent to the left (right in life),” said researchers led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History. “The nature of these bends does not match expectations of anatomical asymmetry and instead constitutes the oldest described evidence of behavioural handedness.”

Now, the search is on for the elusive Ediacaran leftie.

It’s never aliens

Madurga-Favieres, Cristina et al. “Evidence for a giant companion orbiting Tabby’s star.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Before there were interstellar objects and Pentagon UFO videos to ignite our extraterrestrial imaginings, there was Tabby’s Star, also known as KIC 8462852. Discovered in 2015, the star’s strange light patterns, which fluctuate significantly, sparked speculation that it might be orbited by “alien megastructures,” such as a massive solar energy plant called a Dyson sphere.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence of a huge planet transiting Tabby’s Star—meaning that it passed in front of the star from our perspective on Earth—which might help provide a natural exploration for its unusually pronounced dimming events. While reviewing observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team serendipitously “found a single unreported transit event…on 2019 September 3” that lasted 21 hours, hinting at the presence of a giant planet about ten times as massive as Jupiter.

“No transiting companion has ever been detected around this well-known star, so the potential evidence of a candidate presented in this work is significant, as its existence could explain the complexity of the system,” said researchers led by Cristina Madurga-Favieres of the University of Warwick. “The strongest theory is that a group of exocomets or planetesimal fragments are responsible for the irregular and apparently non-periodic dips…of Tabby’s star. The presence of a companion would explain why these bodies are driven to the vicinities of the star, breaking up, as it would orbitally perturb them.”

In other words, the huge planet may be gravitationally hoisting a flock of smaller bodies into orbit around the star, producing the dimming events. While it’s not quite as sensational as a colossal alien power plant, it may help resolve the decade-long mystery of this strange star.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-07-10 18:32:21

AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds

Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.

Russell and her team decided to attempt to detect what she called “narrative features” in AI- generated fiction. The detector is called StoryScope and it builds on NarraBench, a 2025 benchmark that suggested a taxonomy of narrative features in fiction. StoryScope looked at how fiction handled plot development, character descriptions, setting, and temporal structure to determine if something was written by a human or an AI.

“It was my first attempt at getting 'under the surface' and focusing more on ideas,” Russell said. “We wanted to see how close to typical AI-detection we could get by only relying on the narrative features, to understand if this sort of structural difference really even exists. This method also adds some interpretability to detection, which is an open question in the field. Using narrative features, we can point to certain tangible features (such as the number of subplots included in a story). I think this is why it's struck a chord recently, people can really say ‘ah these are some of the underlying traits of how AI writes fiction.’”

To test StoryScope, the researchers selected 10,272 human-written stories then reverse engineered them into writing prompts using Gemini 2.5. Then it took those thousands of prompts and fed them into Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Kimi K2.5, and GPT 5.4. All of the data — including the prompts and the resulting AI stories — are available on Hugging Face.

To source the stories, the researchers used the Books3 dataset — a database of 183,000 books collected from pirated ebooks. The dataset is the subject of several lawsuits and has been used to train an unknown number of LLMs. The StoryScope study included more than 10,000 of some of the most famous short stories ever written, many of them pulled from popular anthologies. There’s Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, Charlotte Perkins, and Harlan Ellison. All have been rendered down to their base elements by AI and then regurgitated into a different LLM to see if it can replicate them.

Russell told me the dataset was controversial. “Hence why we do not release it to the public,” she said.

The study itself contained a disclosure. “We acknowledge the copyright issues related to the Books3 dataset and do not endorse its use for model training or commercial text generation,” it said. “The use of the dataset in our paper is restricted to academic purposes only and is meant to understand the narrative differences in human-written and AI-generated text to help inform discussions on AI-detection, authorship, and copyright policy.”

The various AIs, of course, can’t possibly replicate the prose of O. Henry. So what, according to StoryScope, are the narrative quirks of LLM-written simulacra of English’s grand works of fiction?

AI tools tend to over explain themes, for one.

“Narrators explicitly explain the story’s theme 77% of the time, versus 52% for humans: a grieving character’s arc will typically end with the narrator stating the lesson learned. AI dialogue serves philosophical debate more often (59% vs. 34%), and references to other works tend to be vague allusions (72% vs. 50%) rather than specific, named references. The pattern is one of over-determination: AI spells out meaning rather than trusting the reader to infer,” the study said.

AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. “Where a human author might write that a character ‘felt afraid,’ AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,” the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.

A disclosure caught my eye at the bottom of the StoryScope study. “Large language models and coding agents (Claude Code and Codex) are used to aid with and polish writing and generate some tables and plots,” it said.

“I believe it's important to disclose AI use (and ideally think it should be more in-depth than I wrote in the paper),” Russell told me. “Most researchers are using AI, a lot of it seemingly 'slop' [...] but a lot of it is high-effort, good research. Also, technically you are supposed to disclose AI use for conference submissions, but most people don't. I want to help change that norm!”

She also explained a bit more about how AI agents helped shape the project. “I use AI agents to help implement the code (using the claude code / codex interfaces). I also use them as an editor during the writing process! They have access to the project codebase and the paper latex, so the agents can implement graphics for me much more quickly than I could,” she said. “They write comments and add to the paper draft, but I keep it all in different colors so I can manually review and accept/reject/edit any suggestions from AI. I am a big believer that AI can help or hurt writing, but usually helps when not used to create more internet 'slop'.”

I kept thinking about Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s story “Ship-Shape Pay-Off” being turned into an AI prompt and then spit back out by an LLM. Ellison died in 2018 and was notoriously protective of his work to the point of violence. He successfully sued James Cameron for plagiarism over The Terminator. I have a hard time imagining he’d be happy to see his story pumped into a machine, no matter the results.

“A lot of people, like teachers or readers, don't really care if AI was used in the writing process, but do care if the human is the one behind the heart of it,” Russell said. “A teacher wants to know if their student understood the lesson, and a reader wants to know that the creativity behind a touching story was truly the work of the human author.”

These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines.

^{Alex Reisner (The Atlantic)}

404 Media

2026-07-10 17:20:01

Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

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 mobile podcasting, participating in the meme, and vertigo.

JASON: My last few articles have basically been first person behind the blog vibes about things I’m doing (Cannes, influencer LARPing), or things that annoy me (ChatGPT flyers), so I’m trying to think how much more people want to know about my Process or what’s going on in my brain. As mentioned in those posts, I flew to France for Cannes a few weeks ago, and, because I was in Europe already, have been here for a few weeks now (also as discussed in the LARPing post, having our own company has given me the ability to do some pretty cool things, and to work weird hours from faraway places without it ruining everything). I’m headed back home to the US today, writing this from Heathrow on a layover. When I’m at home, I either work on my patio or at my desktop computer battle station that you probably know from my podcast. A few gear and time-zone related observations from my last few weeks:

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Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 21:54:58

Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training

Patreon announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models.

“I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, wrote in a post on Instagram with the superimposed text, “POV: you're CEO of one of these fucking tech companies, so you do what you want.”

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.”

"As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies. On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience," Drew Rowny, SVP of Product at Patreon, said in a press release published by Cloudflare last week. "Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used. That's why we're building on our existing work with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level across Patreon, while still allowing the crawlers that help creators get discovered and grow their businesses through search."

Last year, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which provides cybersecurity protection and content delivery services to websites, announced that it would start blocking AI crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default. And earlier this month, Cloudflare announced new options for website owners to control AI traffic based on whether bots are search, agent, or training crawlers. In September, according to the company’s blog, all new domains onboarding to Cloudflare will have training and agent bots blocked by default on pages that display ads, while search crawlers will remain allowed by default.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare pointed 404 Media to the company's Crawl Control technology and its recent data about AI crawling. "Patreon recently enabled Cloudflare’s Crawl Control technology for its users at the network level. Others, like beehiive, have also recently enabled Crawl Control to allow its users to allow or block specific AI models based on their preference," they said.

“Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent. If that's not on the table, the crawlers can stay the fuck off Patreon. The free internet is alive and happening. The rebellion has already started,” Conte wrote in his post.

In May, Conte posted a 43-minute video addressing how the AI industry fails to compensate creators. “Creators deserve consent, credit and compensation,” Conte said in the video. “Consent meaning, ‘Do I get to opt out of my work being used by these models as training data?’ Credit meaning, ‘If my work is used and you just replicate my whole vibe as an artist… do I get credit for that?’ And then compensation, meaning, ‘Do I get paid when that happens?’ Unfortunately, the answer to all three of these questions right now is a big fat ‘No.’”

AI-generated works are permitted on Patreon, as long as they comply with the platform's terms of use. In 2024, 404 Media reported that many creators of nonconsensual sexual images and videos monetized their content on Patreon. Last year, Patreon updated its content guidelines for AI content to state: “AI-generated depictions of people that are illustrated/animated are permitted; AI-generated hyperrealistic depictions of people are permitted only if the people are real and have documented their explicit consent.”

Updated 7/9 at 7:59 p.m. EDT to include Drew Rowny's statement.

Updated 7/10 at 11:32 EDT to include comment from Cloudflare.

How Makers of Nonconsensual AI Porn Make a Living on Patreon

Accounts that present as benign on Patreon are advertising thousands of nonconsensual AI porn images on Telegram.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 14:09:23

Farmers Finally Get a John Deere Right to Repair Agreement That Doesn’t Screw Them Over

Wednesday, John Deere agreed to give farmers broader access to repair their tractors and farm equipment under an antitrust settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, one of the biggest wins in the long right to repair battle. The settlement is the latest and by far the most important development in several recent lawsuits against John Deere, and is finally an agreement that isn’t full of half measures and doesn’t have massive, obvious loopholes.

The FTC settlement is far better than a recent, highly controversial settlement in a separate class action lawsuit against Deere brought by farmers in Illinois, and it’s worth breaking down the differences. Two years ago, I wrote an article called “The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly,” which followed that Illinois case, in which several farmers brought a complex, class action antitrust lawsuit against Deere. The judge in that case, Iain Johnson, wrote several scathing opinions about Deere’s anti-repair practices that indicated that he was seemingly inclined to hit Deere with stiff penalties.

But after years of litigation, the plaintiffs in that case decided to settle with Deere in April, earning a $99 million payout for farmers who paid for repairs over the last decade, and several right-to-repair protections that did not have much in the way of legal teeth.

This $99 million payout was roughly $79 million after legal fees and to be divided among more than 200,000 farmers; this means each farmer will receive roughly $395, or “less than the cost of a single authorized dealer service call for a typical 500-acre farm,” according to an analysis by Willie Cade, a longtime farm right to repair advocate.

“Bottom line is that farmers are getting $0.79 per acre for the eight years of Deere abuse,” Cade told me. “Bad settlement. The settlement is insufficient … the money is a small fraction of what the class could recover at trial, the claims process depends on labor-hour data only Deere holds, and the repair "fixes" are riddled with loopholes that leave Deere's monopoly intact.”

Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor
“There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks.”
404 MediaJason Koebler

The Illinois settlement would prohibit farmers covered by it from filing any future repair-related litigation against Deere, and only required Deere to provide parts and repair guides to farmers under poorly defined “fair and reasonable” terms, a loophole that other manufacturers have used to claim that their parts and tools are constantly out of stock or cost astronomic prices.

“The ‘fair and reasonable terms’ standard is not price equality with dealers, nor is it a guaranteed price ceiling,” Cade wrote in his analysis. “Disputes about whether Deere’s pricing meets this standard are subject to Court oversight, but individual farmers may have limited practical ability to challenge pricing that does not obviously cross the line.”

The settlement in the Illinois case was so bad that one of the plaintiffs in the case, Wilson Farms, filed a 53 page formal objection to it two weeks ago, in part because it claims that there are many “unlitigated and uncompensated” cases in which farmers suffered under Deere’s monopoly. Under the settlement, farmers would no longer be able to sue Deere by “terminat[ing] Class members’ ability to collectively challenge Deere’s repair aftermarket monopolization for a generation.”

“Rather than provide any meaningful benefit to the Class, it appears that the proposed Settlement’s most important effect will be to give Deere its most powerful tool yet in its decades-long effort to block farmers from repairing their own equipment,” the objection says. “Extinguishment of farmers’ rights under the law.”

Other farmers called the Illinois settlement “disingenuous” and “unfair.”

The good news is that the wildly disappointing and seemingly unnecessary selling out of farmers’ rights in the Illinois case that Deere appeared to be losing very badly is greatly mitigated by the FTC’s settlement from this week. The FTC case was brought by Lina Khan under the Biden administration; to its credit, the Trump administration decided to continue litigating.
youtube.com/embed/lqwdvFz1Xeo?…
The FTC settlement does not have monetary damages for farmers, but it has far better right to repair protections for John Deere customers moving forward. In the FTC deal, the “fair and reasonable terms” are better defined and are based on the price that John Deere dealers actually pay for repair parts and tools. Deere and its dealers are not allowed to “discriminate or retaliate” against farmers who repair their own equipment (manufacturers have been known to brick devices that consumers fix themselves). The FTC settlement also includes access to farmers for “future repair resources,” meaning repair tools, guides, software, and parts that Deere creates in the future.

Deere must also file “compliance reports” with the FTC, and the FTC will have oversight of the compliance. Crucially, the FTC settlement also does not affect farmers’ private grievances against Deere, meaning it is possible for farmers to sue Deere if the company’s repair practices have affected them.

The FTC settlement is one that has actual legal teeth and enforcement mechanisms that Deere should at least theoretically have to comply with. Earlier agreements and right to repair “wins” for farmers were often half measures (though it’s worth mentioning that Colorado passed a good agriculture right to repair law in 2023 after years of struggle from farmers and advocates). Deere and various farmers’ public interest groups had previously agreed to right to repair “memorandums of understanding” in which Deere promised to make repair parts and tools available to farmers. In practice, however, these tools and parts were often not available, were not as good as what dealers and authorized service providers had access to, or were unreasonably expensive. These memorandums of understanding also had few or no enforcement mechanisms.

Cade told 404 Media in an email that this settlement order “gives farmers real hope.”

Nathan Proctor, senior right to repair campaign director for consumer rights group U.S. PIRG, said in a statement that the FTC settlement “is much better than the deal secured in [the Illinois] class action lawsuit.”

“Deere has now agreed to make available all materials needed to conduct repairs, including some which it has previously withheld,” Proctor said. “I want to thank the FTC for its work on this case. Our goal from the start of our campaign was to ensure that farmers and independent mechanics get everything they need to fix equipment. We will continue to monitor the situation and advocate to ensure that goal is a reality.”

In other words, farmers finally have an actual, major win in the right to repair fight that goes far beyond earlier piecemeal and moral victories.

The Tech Industry Has a New Plan to Stop Right to Repair Laws

Faced with new laws in California and other states, big tech lobbyists want to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" to prevent "a compliance market where lawyers drive the decisions."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 13:22:11

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.

The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see. This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites.

“This isn’t something that had really been studied before—how much AI content people are actually seeing,” Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, told me in a phone interview. “AI content is a tax on readers’ time.”

(Pangram formerly advertised on 404 Media. I am covering this data because I have written many articles about how AI-generated content is taking over social media and is brute forcing social media algorithms, and I have not seen other data that attempts to measure the actual popularity of slop.)

For this research, Pangram specifically asked users of its Chrome extension to opt-in to share Pangram browsing results with the company. The company analyzed roughly a million posts that its users organically scroll through across LinkedIn, Medium, X, Reddit, and Substack over a two-month period. Pangram found that, universally, longer posts on all platforms are more likely to be AI-generated than shorter posts. The company split the content it analyzed into “shortform” (between 50 and 250 words) and “longform” (longer than 250 words).

The data suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a huge portion of longform posts on LinkedIn and X’s new article format are fully AI-generated or AI-assisted (meaning drafted, edited, or rewritten by AI with some human elements). Forty percent of longform LinkedIn posts analyzed in the data were fully AI-written; a quarter of X articles were fully AI written, but another 23 percent of X articles were AI-assisted, the company said. It intuitively makes sense that longer form content is more likely to be AI-generated, because people usually won’t bother to AI-generate a few word response or a pithy comment on a quote tweet, for example. AI is also famously verbose, meaning AI-generated content is more likely to show up in longer posts.

“Our data shows that AI-generated content is a problem across all platforms, and it is hitting longform content especially hard,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Contrary to what one might expect, people are overwhelmingly willing to use AI to speak on their behalf in professional settings that are associated with their real identity, and less likely to use it on casual and anonymous platforms.”

The study also found that top-level posts on LinkedIn and Reddit are far more likely to be AI-generated than the comments underneath an original post.

I have been using the Pangram Chrome extension for several months now, after interviewing Spero for an article I wrote called “Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain.” In that article, I wrote about the cognitive weight of the constant assessments I am doing when I’m browsing the internet, trying to determine whether a piece of writing is AI-generated or not. After writing that article, I decided to try the Pangram Chrome extension to see whether its assessments of likely AI-generated writing aligned with my own brain’s assessments. After using the extension for nearly two months, my experience has largely aligned with what Pangram’s data suggests: Many of the longform articles I see on X are obviously AI generated, and are detected by Pangram as such. A huge amount of the LinkedIn posts I see are obviously AI-generated.

Because of the way the study worked, by passively detecting AI generated content that people see in their normal browsing, the data is potentially more useful than other studies that have sought to estimate the raw percentage of AI-generated content on the internet, but not whether anyone was actually seeing that content. These prior studies, which found that as many as a third of new sites are AI, allowed for the possibility that AI-generated content was flooding the internet but that it was of such a low quality that actual people may not have been seeing it.

The Pangram data raises questions about what platforms are doing to promote or disincentivize AI slop. LinkedIn, for example, had for years built AI writing tools into its platform meaning that it has been incredibly easy to post AI-generated content on the platform and that AI-generated content became incredibly common on the platform. In May, the company announced that it is trying to disincentivize AI content in the name of “keeping conversations real,” and the AI writing assistant is no longer built into the post button. Reddit, meanwhile, has become a vector for companies trying to game LLM tools by promoting their products on the site because AI search tools often scrape Reddit. But Reddit’s moderators are also overwhelmingly anti AI, and the company has worked to delete AI-generated posts and ban accounts that spam. On Monday, Reddit published a blog post saying that “in the age of AI, spam, bot activity, and inauthentic content are top of mind for people who love Reddit (and humans).” In the last few weeks, Reddit launched an ad campaign called “people are best” specifically highlighting that its users are human. A Reddit spokesperson referred us to the blog post when asked for comment.

As we have reported before, no AI detector is 100 percent foolproof, and Pangram certainly has both false positives (human content detected as AI) and false negatives (AI content detected as human). Spero said that the company is constantly working on minimizing both, and that it estimates its false positive rate at roughly one in 10,000. He said he believes the Pangram data is likely a “lower bound” and that the actual problem is likely worse, because people who are willing to install AI detectors on their browsers are likely trying to avoid AI-generated content.

“I think the data generalizes out [to non Pangram users], but that it’s a lower bound on AI content because someone with the Pangram extension probably cares more about seeing AI content than the average person and would be more likely to block or mute AI posters,” he said.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement that “Professionals come to LinkedIn to hear from real people and their unique insights and perspectives. We actively work to reduce low quality, automated or generic content, and while AI can be used to beat the blank page problem, our focus is on surfacing professional conversations that help people advance their careers.”

Substack and X did not respond to a request for comment.

AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War

Online AI image detecting tools that may or may not work are labeling real photographs from the war in Israel and Palestine as fake, creating what a world leading expert called a “second level of disinformation.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 17:26:42

Meta Patents AI Device That Tracks Your Emotions, Watches You Take Your Meds

Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent’s stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they’re happy or sad.

Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an “apparatus” that surveilled a user and their surroundings constantly to craft a better workout. “The audible communications may be associated with contextual factors such as time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction,” the patent said. “The audible communications may be transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators.”
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According to the filing, Meta needs to know when a user laughs or sighs, where they are physically, and what objects they’re surrounded by. It would even like to know when you’ve taken your meds. “The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s),” the patent said. “The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user's emotional state or generate other insights about the user [...] in another example, the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user's voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.).”

The more data it has, the patent explains, the better it could understand a user’s moods. “The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis,” it said. “These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices.”
Image via the US Patent Office.
The emotional-analyzing AI would need far more than just a user’s words to determine moods over time. A longer description of the hypothetical training data for the AI included “attributes of thousands of objects” such as a user’s books, personal messages, and newspapers. “In some examples, audible communications may include speech (e.g., voice data), sighs, laughter, or other nonverbal sounds associated with an expression(s), an emotion(s), or ideas. In some examples, the audible communications may include the tone(s) of a voice of a user while making the communication(s),” it said.

All this data, Meta says, would be in service of tailoring better workouts. Humans, the patent explained, are simply not as good as a machine for this. “Personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement,” it said. “These challenges create a need for a practical approach that uses a single device to observe movement, recommend routines, and provide corrective guidance.”

AI lives and dies by its training data. Many of the leading LLMs have already scanned the entire internet and are still hungry for more. Meta’s patented system would give it unprecedented access to the movements, moods, and interactions of its users. Giving the user workout suggestions in return seems a paltry compensation.

A wearable device that records every sound you make and transcribes it for an LLM while monitoring your exact location is a privacy nightmare. It’s also a fear that underpins many people’s concerns about big tech.
Image via US Patent Office
A wearable that records your every word and divines your emotions would also, necessarily, record your interactions with other people. Meta has pioneered non-consensual public recording with its smartglasses so it’s not shocking to see it file a patent that suggests it’ll move further into that space.

The last time Meta explicitly pursued user’s emotional data, it horrified people. In 2012, the company then called Facebook conducted a study into “emotional contagion” using Facebook’s newsfeed. Meta altered the feeds of 700,000 users to see if it could make them happy or sad just by tweaking what they saw online. Meta found that it could, in fact, alter people’s moods if it wanted. It did this without informing users they’d been part of an experiment.

Now it’s patented a device that will record your laughter and play it back to you. All in service of crafting the perfect workout routine. “An implementation may show that the user laughs more often on certain days, shows improved mood after life events, or expresses more positive emotion during morning routines. The device may also provide citations to specific audio moments that support the emotional interpretation,” it said.

Meta wants to tell you how you feel and it’ll use your own voice to do it.

"Like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described," Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told 404 Media.

Update 7/8/26: This story has been updated with a comment from Meta.

A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 15:51:42

Porn Platform Gives Sex Workers Stake in the Company's Profits

The co-founder of adult creator subscription platform MintStars announced she’s leaving the platform and donating her ownership shares in the company to its creators and sex workers.

In an email to creators using the platform in late June, Jessica Van Meir wrote: "I am donating my shares in the company to create a 20 percent co-ownership pool for our creators." She wrote that her remaining three percent of the shares will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars, a non-profit that supports incarcerated sex workers and sex trafficking survivors in the U.S.

“With this step, which completes my personal mission to launch a company for and by adult content creators, I will also be officially moving on from my position as a Director at MintStars,” Van Meir wrote in the email. Van Meir is a Harvard PhD candidate studying the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, and also co-founded the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective three years ago. Van Meir and Daniel Sargent co-founded MintStars in 2021; Sargent will remain at the company as CEO.

Setting up a share pool sets a precedent rarely seen on subscription sites, where creators are directly rewarded for the success of the platform, not just their own individual work.

Van Meir said attacks on her academic work outside of MintStars contributed to her decision to step away. “In the past year, my PhD research has faced attacks from anti-sex work organizations that have attempted to use my affiliation with MintStars to undermine the credibility of my research,” Van Meir wrote in the letter to creators. “I would never want my work with the company to prevent my research and activism from benefiting sex worker communities, so it is time for me to pass the baton.”

The pool of shares for creators will be allocated “in proportion to their contributions to the platform,” Van Meir wrote, adding that the platform plans to launch a points system to earn ownership. If the company is ever sold or pays out dividends to shareholders, creators will be paid in proportion to those points via phantom shares. Phantom shares or stock are a cash incentive tied to company performance that doesn’t dilute the company’s ownership stock or give holders voting rights, but do reward holders — typically executives or employees, but in this case, creators — for their contributions to the company’s success.

According to Van Meir, MintStars creators will be able to earn points in accordance to their earned revenue, how many referrals they’ve made, and number of months they’ve actively used the platform. “This means that you will share in the profits of the company’s success, in a fair proportion to how much you’ve contributed,” she wrote.

Podcast: Why AI Porn Sucks (with Noelle Perdue)
Noelle and Sam discuss everything from sexbots and AI porn to censorship, age verification legislation, and their favorite parody porn flicks.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Many social media and user-generated content platforms have grown massive on the strength and support of sex workers who popularized it. Some of the biggest, like X and Instagram, grew thanks to sexual content; others, like OnlyFans, have been criticized for considering banning adult content due to payment processing problems and banking discrimination in the past.

Demonia, a financial dominatrix who’s used MintStars since 2023, told 404 Media she’s felt frustrated by unstable creator platforms and online censorship in the past, and hopes to put more effort into her MintStars presence following this announcement. “I will be honest, I didn't think I'd live to see such a revolutionary choice in a strictly capitalistic society and environment that promotes individualism to embarrassing levels, and I am elated to have chosen to be part of this project from its early steps,” Demonia told me in an email. “Not only cooperative enterprises are healthier environments to work in on a general level, but there is now a further level of security for the creators who decide to invest in the platform as a source of income, and a great deal of motivation to see it succeed.”

AVN reported that the program for earning points will launch this month and take retroactive activity into account, and that MintStars will also introduce new governance measures including a Creator Advisory Board.

“This co-ownership means to me that MintStars aims to empower sex workers on a practical level, recognizing their importance and their rights, without limiting our creativity and safety in the name of profit, and it will definitely impact my effort into making sure such an example lives to make the adult industry's history, not only because it's a better choice for myself only, but because it also shows to everyone that there is a better way to enjoy our kinky spaces without being afraid of being deplatformed, of our content being rejected or deleted, of our entire existence being put into discussion,” Demonia said.
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“This partnership is another important step forward in creating a complete ecosystem of care that is both for and by adult industry workers,” a spokesperson for SWOP Behind Bars told 404 Media. “We're excited to deepen our ties in the MintStars community and anticipate that Ms. Van Meir's shares donation will enable us to better understand and meet those workers' needs.”

MintStars uses the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC to process payments. Fans and customers can pay as they would on any other website, with a credit card. Creators can receive payouts in fiat as well. Last month, MintStars announced a new partnership with Payy Network. "Creators face financial discrimination every day, bank accounts shut down, payment processors blocking transactions, and earnings delayed for weeks," Sargent said in an announcement of that partnership. "Crypto solved access, but it didn't solve privacy or safety. Nobody's financial activity should be publicly exposed on a blockchain." Settlements on the blockchain also prevent some of the most risky aspects of accepting payments as an adult site, including chargebacks, censorship, and banking discrimination.

“The fact of the matter in the adult industry is that without the working women who make platforms all of their revenue, the latter would never succeed and we can now choose for what we believe in and choose who believes in us, MintStars has given us the opportunity to have our voices heard,” Demonia said. “I do hope more sex workers will put their safety and rights first and focus their energies where they will be undoubtedly rewarded, as it's been proven over and over again since the beginning of this project.

Podcast: Why AI Porn Sucks (with Noelle Perdue)

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 14:05:42

We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’

I am not sure, exactly, how many ChatGPT signs, flyers, or advertisements I had seen without noticing. But I do remember that once I began noticing them, I saw them everywhere. A few blocks from my house, on a display easel: “Break Free Surfing California: SURF LESSONS VENICE BEACH.” On Instagram, a going out of business closeout sale for a skateboard shop. On invites to parties from friends, Fourth of July barbecues being thrown by bars, concert posters. I saw ChatGPT-designed advertisements for drug deliveries in Berlin, World Cup parties in France, junk hauling services in South Carolina, and fundraisers in Texas. The scourge of low effort, stylistically indistinguishable AI-generated signs and flyers have flooded both social media and, increasingly, posters, billboards, and signs in real life: “So ain’t nobody gonna address this ChatGPT flyer pandemic we’re in?” one viral post on Threads read last month.

“YOUR FLYER LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE,” a viral ChatGPT-generated parody of the genre posted by Jill Oliver reads. “Hey if this is your flyer, I’m not going, I’m not donating, I’m not sharing. Don’t ask me.” The “ChatGPT flyer pandemic” has become a big topic of conversation among graphic designers, musicians, bars, and small business owners who care about design and showing that they’ve put effort into something.

Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open. The art of the format is basically big, flashy bright text on dark background and an AI-generated or AI-altered image. There is almost universally a little box of generic icons in a bulleted list vaguely tied to whatever event or business it’s advertising, lines coming off of the text to emphasize whatever it’s saying, and either bolded words or underlined text and tons of arrows and checkmarks haphazardly strewn throughout. It is easier to just show you what they look like than describe it, because they all look basically the same:
From a post by Facebook user Zakkai Rayne Morningstar
The argument against ChatGPT-generated flyers is basically the same as the argument against all other types of AI slop: It looks generic, lazy, and like businesses don’t care. The designer Kenzi Green made a video about the backlash to AI flyers that has 870,000 views called “Customers are begging you to stop the AI slop.” Another video of a graphic designer putting his head in his hands and shaking his head while ChatGPT flyers scrolls past called “we are living in an AI flyer pandemic” has nearly 7 million views.

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A post shared by Kenzi ↠ Luxury Brand Identity + Website Designer (@kenzigreendesign)

“Your logo, food truck wrap, social media graphics, menus all look AI generated,” Green said. “People are going to be able to spot that from a mile away and choose the competitor next to you that looks like they actually hired a human being,” she said. “It might feel like you’re ‘saving time and money,’ but you’re actually slowly turning your brand into something generic like all the other brands out there using AI tools.”

The rejection of ChatGPT flyers infesting real life spaces is real, growing, and cuts across languages and borders. The New Jersey-based sticker company Death By Stickers has started selling a “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” sticker for people to slap on ChatGPT flyers: “With your roll of 50 “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” labels you can let everyone around town know when that flyer is AI SLOP,” the company says. The Thomas House Bar in Dublin has said it will stop letting people post AI flyers in its pub: “We’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub,” the bar wrote on Instagram. “We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest art college, lads. It’s not a good look.” A venue in Oakland has banned AI flyers, too. I have seen anti-AI posters in Portuguese (“TUDO IGUAL: FLYER GERADO PELO CHATGT? CLARO QUE SIM!” Same old story: Flyer generated by ChatGPT? You bet!) and German (“BITTE KEINE FLYER MIT CHATGPT” Please don’t create flyers with ChatGPT). I have seen numerous viral posts from people saying that they will not go to businesses or events that use AI posters to promote, lest one get roped into a Fyre Fest or Willy Wonka AI hellscape experience. And I have begun seeing real graphic designers offering low-cost services for companies that promise not to use AI flyers.

Jonathon Yule, executive creative director for design at the creative studio Concrete in Toronto told 404 Media that these types of posters continue a long tradition of terrible graphic design that we see in the world, but with “none of the charm” that may accidentally come from a business owner making something low quality.

“Terrible posters are nothing new,” Yule said. “The only difference today is generative AI makes it easier than ever to get the veneer of "polish" with none of the charm that these types of posters might have had when the designer was faced with constraints (usually time, resources or experience). These types of posters would have typically been done by designers either working at a small agency or print shop and these mid-level design jobs are disappearing. Stepping back to think about where this style (and its acceptance in the world) might have come from I'm going to have to pin the blame on YouTube and AB-tested-whatever-gets-more-clicks approach to thumbnail design with the exaggerated facial expressions and shoddy yet eye catching typography.”

In the last few weeks, since I began noticing ChatGPT flyers, I’ve been taking photos of ones I’ve seen in real life, and have asked my friends to take photos of AI flyers they’ve seen out in the real world. I’ve seen them at Mexican restaurants and for surfing lessons in Los Angeles, on business cards for drug delivery services and on döner shops in Berlin, for pretzel shops in Philadelphia, and so on. I've tried at times to not notice these, but like with other AI, my brain feels like it is constantly trying to calculate whether any given sign or flyer was made using AI, and, if so, whether it actually matters.

These can be generated in ChatGPT easily by asking it to generate you a flyer or advertisement for any sort of event or business you can think of. ChatGPT routinely generated flyers that are essentially identical in format to what I see all the time when I threw random events at it: “Can you make a poster for my bar? It’s called Jason’s bar and we’re having a Fourth of July party. It goes from 4-10 pm and has food, fun, and fireworks,” and it instantly generated this, which is emblematic of the style.

None of the ChatGPT posters have the “Graphic Design Is My Passion” charm of quickly dashed off or handwritten posters, nor even the unhinged excess you might see in, for example, a Softbank Vision Fund slide presentation. For my money, one of the most iconic pieces of graphic design of the last 20 years is “Friendship Ended With Mudasir, Now Salman is my best friend.” With a ChatGPT poster, you get none of the sheer emotion that comes through the page with a mouse-drawn X. Here’s to bringing back an MS Paint aesthetic, handwritten scribbles, or literally anything else.

Friendship Ended With Mudasir | Know Your Meme

Friendship Ended With Mudasir refers to a Facebook post by Pakistani government worker Asif Raza Rana, announcing he was no longer friends with a man named

^{Scarfsman (Know Your Meme)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 12:15:17

'Knockoff' Browser Extension Hides Sketchy Brands on Amazon

A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.

In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by “SUNHZMCKP,” spoons made by “SACATR,” and a lamp made by “ROTTOGOON.” In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote “Sorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX.” The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who don’t use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.

In a video call, Pigford told me that he had been thinking about making Knockoff for a while but that he finally decided to do it last weekend. “I was cutting the grass and about to get my trimmer out to do some weed eating, and it wouldn’t crank. So I decided to get some specific tools, and I searched for them and was like ‘What are these brands? Am I going insane?’ I just wanted something from a common brand or something I was familiar with,” he said. “I was like ‘man, I’ve gotta build something.’”

Pigford said that Knockoff is essentially building a list of brands to allow or not allow, and that it uses several different criteria to do this, including looking at the names of the brands: “Basically number of consonants, number of vowels, how they are grouped together, whether they’re in all caps or not,” he said. This means that brands like “EHEYCIGA” will be automatically added to the filter list. But the list of blocked brands is intended to be determined by its community of users, and any user can ask the extension to allow or block any specific brand for themselves. The project builds on previous similar attempts to highlight sketchy brands on Amazon, including one called AmazonBrandFilter and The Markup’s Amazon Brand Detector. The extension also allows anyone who has downloaded it to report potentially sketchy brands and to report brands that have been accidentally flagged as knockoffs.

The extension runs locally and doesn’t require an account to use, and doesn’t send data back to any server. It is free. “I stand to benefit nothing directly economically, it’s a nice little tool I wanted to make,” Pigford said.

Knockoff is pretty useful whether you use Amazon or not. For those who don’t use Amazon, it highlights a problem repeatedly shown by Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission in an antitrust lawsuit against the company, which is that much of Amazon is pay-to-play, with brands needing to buy ads or placement boosts in order to be featured at the top of search results. The platform has also become an algorithmic and financial race to the bottom, with companies stealing others’ designs, jamming their product pages with keywords that will perform well in search, and creating fly-by-night brands to try to end up at the top of search results.

“There was somebody who sent me a screenshot from using the extension and the first 20 items or something were all grayed out. Like there were all these knockoff brands before they could find a legitimate item,” Pigford said. “It’s like, OK, that about sums it up.”

“I think people want control over what it is that they're seeing on the internet,” he added. “This sort of gives some control back to just getting everything shoved in your face. It’s like fighting back against the algorithm to some extent.”

Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

"Amazon shifted gears so that it now litters its storefront with pay-to-play advertisements. In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 11:11:45

LARPING: How Influencers Fake Being Rich

This week, we talk about Jason's dive into the world of LARPing, where hustlebros and influencers use fake YouTube, OnlyFans, and Stripe dashboards as "proof" that they're rich in order to sell low-quality get-rich-quick courses in pyramid schemes. We show how easy it is to pretend like you're rich, and how these strategies are used all over social media.
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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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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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