404 Media

2026-01-22 19:00:38

Scientists Got Men to Rate Penises by How Intimidating They Are. This Is What They Found.

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When it comes to the evolution of the human penis, size matters.

Scientists have discovered that men with larger penises are not only more attractive to women, they are also deemed more threatening to men, which is “the first experimental evidence that males assess rivals’ fighting ability and attractiveness to females based partly on a rival’s penis size,” according to a study published in PLOS Biology on Thursday.

“In humans, height and body shape are well known to influence attractiveness, but penis size has rarely been tested alongside these traits in a controlled, experimental setup,” said Upama Aich, a behavioral and evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who led the study, in an email to 404 Media.

“What motivated us was the evolutionary puzzle that the human penis is unusually large relative to other primates, which raises the question of whether it signals information beyond its primary reproductive role of sperm transfer,” she added.

Sexual selection, a form of natural selection, is a process in which certain traits that enhance reproductive success—from big antlers to colorful feathers—become amplified in a lineage over time. Male traits may persist both because they are selected by females, which is known as intersexual selection, or because those traits are associated with better success against male rivals, which is called intrasexual selection.

Previous research has presented evidence that bigger penises are more attractive to women, in tandem with characteristics like height and body shape, suggesting that intersexual selection may have played a role in the anomalously large human penis. Aich and her colleagues set out to confirm that result, while also testing out the role of intrasexual selection for the first time.

The researchers recruited more than 600 male and 200 female participants to rate computer-generated male figures with different heights, body shapes, and penis sizes (all shown in a flaccid state). Some participants attended an in-person display of life-size images while others rated the figures on an online platform. Men were asked to assess the figures as potential rivals, while women were asked to rate them as potential mates.

Participants also filled out a questionnaire about their physical characteristics (including height and weight) and sexuality. Given the focus on mates and rivals, the researchers only used responses from self-identified heterosexual males and females in the study.

The team designed the approach with nondescript figures devoid of any personality or identifiable background in part to sidestep the immense cultural weight of the human penis, an anatomical feature endowed with major significance across eras and societies.

“We were very conscious that penis size is culturally loaded and surrounded by myths, humour, and anxiety,” said Aich. “That’s one reason we used anatomically accurate, computer-generated figures: it allowed us to manipulate specific traits independently while controlling for personal identity, social narratives and contextual cues.”

“I do think this cultural baggage has discouraged careful scientific study in sensitive topics in the past, but from an evolutionary perspective, that makes it even more important to examine the question empirically rather than relying on assumptions,” she added.

To that end, the new study confirmed that women generally preferred figures with larger penises in addition to taller figures with more V-shaped bodies. It also revealed for the first time that men factored penis size into their assessment of male rivals, as they rated the figures with larger penises as more threatening rivals. Even more importantly, the men overwhelmingly guessed that the figures with larger penises would be more attractive to women.

According to the researchers, this hints that in our evolutionary past, males may have avoided confrontations with rivals based in part on their penis size in addition to height and body shape. As a consequence, males with larger penises may have secured more access to mates not only due to female preference, but also because they were not challenged by rivals as often. This aspect of male-male competition may have helped to enlarge the human penis over time through selection.

“Previous research had often focused on the effect of penis size on female preferences, so our results that men also use penis size when assessing rivals adds a new dimension to the story,” Aich said. “It suggests penis size is interpreted not only in a sexual context, but also in competitive rival cues.”

“However, the effect of penis size on attractiveness was four to seven times higher than its effect as a signal of fighting ability,” she continued. “This suggests that the enlarged penis in humans may have evolved more in response to its effect as a sexual ornament to attract females than as a badge of status for males, although it does both.”

Aich said her team was most surprised by the consistency of the participants’ responses across many manipulated variables. Similar patterns in the responses showed up regardless of whether the participants were viewing life-sized projections or scaled images online, whether they received payment for the experiment, and across both male and female participants.

“One obvious next step is to study how these visual cues interact with others that matter in real-world interactions, such as facial features, voice, or movement,” she said. “Another open question is how culturally variable these perceptions are, since standards of masculinity and attractiveness differ across societies. A cross-cultural study would be interesting.”

The new study adds to the evidence that both forms of sex selection influenced the size of the human penis, but many other factors also played a role in the development of the organ. For example, penis shape and size may have evolved to scoop the sperm of rival males out of the vaginal canal, or to raise the odds of female orgasm, both of which can contribute to reproductive success.

In other words, both the size of the ship and the motion of the ocean are a part of the complex story of human sexual evolution.

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Experimental evidence that penis size, height, and body shape influence assessment of male sexual attractiveness and fighting ability in humans

Why the human penis is unusually large compared to other primates is a long-standing evolutionary question.

^plos.io

404 Media

2026-01-22 16:20:38

Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’

In posts on ManyVids, the porn platform’s official account holds imaginary conversations with aliens, alongside AI-generated videos of UFOs, fractal images, “angel numbers,” and a video of its founder and CEO Bella French in a space suit shooting lasers from her eyes.

French launched the site in 2014 as a former cam model herself, and the platform has millions of members and tens of thousands of creators. Adult content creators use it to sell custom videos and subscriptions, and perform live on camera. French recently changed her personal website to state her new goal is to “transition one million people out of the adult industry and do everything we can to ensure no one new enters it.” The statement follows posts on X’s ManyVids account about new strategies to pivot the site toward safe-for-work, non-sexual content.

This sudden shift away from years of messaging about being a compatriot with sex workers, combined with bizarre AI-generated text and images about talking to aliens and numerology on social media, has made some creators worry for their livelihoods, and caused others to leave the site completely.

For years, the official ManyVids social media accounts made mostly normal posts that promoted the site and its creators. But in mid-2025, the posts from the ManyVids X account changed. Instead of promotions of top creators, announcements of contests, and tips for using the platform, the account shifted its focus to existential and metaphysical musings. Around August, it started posting cryptic quotes, phrases, and images, many seemingly generated by or about AI.

The account also started replying to engagement-farming posts from influencers, writing things like “Our purpose: to protect the feminine energy — so that balance may return,” and posting borderline-nonsensical bullet-point lists about “the boldness scale” and how ManyVids leadership is “all connected.”

“The impact strength of a positive leader ⚡ Effectiveness ⚡ Execution ⚡ Discipline ⚡ Accountability,” one post in August said. On August 20, @ManyVids posted an image on X of a flow chart alongside a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation, seemingly illustrating how the platform would bring in users through a “safe-for-work” zone, then allow them to access NSFW content after verifying their identifications. “Our vision: Adult Industry 2.0 isn’t about more revenue. It’s about evolution,” the post said.

The replies to these posts show ManyVids creators expressing anger, concern, and bafflement. The account stopped posting on X in September. But on the ManyVids platform itself, which has a “news” feed that functions similarly to a microblogging platform but is just for official platform posts, the odd entries continue.

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Do you know anything else about what's happening at ManyVids, or do you have a tip about porn platforms and online sex work generally? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

“Social API for the AI Age. Phase 1 — Pride Engine,” one post from January 16 says:

“The High Universal Income (HUI) Engine is the distribution hub of the new economy, built for a world where AI does the work humans never wanted to do. AI generates surplus wealth, but humans need surplus purpose. Human meaning becomes the rarest and most valuable resource on Earth. Instead of opaque taxes, AI companies fund a Social License through platforms like ManyVids, converting AI efficiency into merit-based bonuses for human contribution. For every dollar earned through passion, creation, care, or learning, HUI adds 10%. This is not charity. It is a Pride Engine. We shift the foundation of human value.”

The post ends with a six-second AI generated video that includes the phrase “the ultimate guide to rebuilding civilization.” Most posts in recent weeks are like this: clearly AI generated text alongside six-second AI generated clips showing angels, chakras, or spiritual phrases. “The Simulation of Integrity. If we don’t fully understand the ultimate nature of reality, what should guide how we live inside it?” one recent post says. “If the nature of the ‘game’ is unknown, then how you treat others — and yourself — becomes the most meaningful data point.”

And in a post right after the new year: “Hey everyone! Back-to-the-office Monday vibe. How were your holidays? Did you travel anywhere? I did... 🕳️Next time, I’ll bring sunglasses. I came back with a few new ideas and fresh thoughts ✨Let’s get to work. Let’s go, 2026! 🚀” Below the text: a video of French in a space suit, black hole in the background, shooting laser-lightning out of her eyes.

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Screengrab via ManyVids

A lot of people who rely on ManyVids for income have noticed this odd behavior and are disturbed by it.

“Ethical dilemmas about AI aside, the posts are completely disconnected with ManyVids as a site,” one ManyVids content creator told 404 Media, on the condition of anonymity. “Their customers and their creators are not served in any way by these. When faced with backlash, MV removed the ability to comment on posts. To anyone looking at them they appear to be ramblings and images generated by a person in active psychosis.”

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Screengrab via ManyVids

Almost every ManyVids creator 404 Media spoke to for this story brought up “AI psychosis” unprompted, when asked if they’d seen the ManyVids posts.

“I have seen them and I find them really insulting,” Sydney Screams said. “The way I perceive the posts is that Bella and the MV team doesn't respect their creators enough to spend time making their own content, instead taking the easy way out and using bizarre AI that doesn't even relate. Why do we need Bella shooting laser beams out of her eyes to make an announcement? It's infuriating because it's like she doesn't take us seriously, doesn't take her own platform seriously, and we're supposed to just be grateful for the crumbs she's giving us. We deserve better,” she said. “We deserve to be treated with respect, talked to like we're adults, and listened to like our voices matter. Instead we get AI slop and posts that promise big things without any sort of follow through.”

Harlan Paramore, a ManyVids creator who also helps other creators onboard and manage their selling sites, said he’s noticed “bizarre posts about AI, angel numbers, christopaganism, cyberpaganism.”

“I don't have anything against any of those beliefs, but they seem wildly out of place for an official site blog. They are also heavily loaded with AI-like language and structure, and decorated with AI images,” Paramore said. “I'm also a professional artist, and as both an artist and sex worker I'm frustrated and confused. Some of it kind of sounds like AI psychosis, too, which has me concerned for whoever is running that blog.”

“I'm not a mental health professional, but whatever Bella is going through doesn't seem normal. It doesn't seem healthy,” Screams said. “From where I'm sitting, if I were close to Bella, I'd be reaching out to her other friends and family members to stage an intervention and try to get her serious mental health care.”

All of this is coinciding with an apparent massive change in French’s ideology toward sex work. On her personal website, French says the goal of ManyVids is changing to “transition one million people out of the adult industry.” She calls sex work “exploitative.” Her bio quotes her as saying: “I had two choices: surrender to an exploitative industry or dismantle it. I chose to build its replacement... ManyVids was the result—the most efficient revenue-distribution engine for the AI-displaced workforce. Guided by first principles and core value thinking, Bella is leading MV’s next evolution: a Fintech/Social-Impact hybrid that turns digital presence into economic creation. By utilizing AI-integrated workflows and layered access, ManyVids is migrating creators from adult content into a diversified creative economy,” her bio says. “Our goal is to transition one million people out of the adult industry and do everything we can to ensure no one new enters it. We are working to transform an industry we don’t believe should exist—but we recognize that simple elimination creates deeper shadows. The solution is elevation through meaningful alternatives.”

This is a recent addition to her website. According to archived versions of the site, the section about transitioning people out of the sex industry wasn’t there in November 2025.

“ManyVids is now becoming a regulated e-social ecosystem — a digital space that sensitizes, elevates, and restricts adult content through layered brackets of access,” French’s bio says now. “This ensures that sacred sexual expression is never free, never exploited, and never divorced from its core human depth.” The “layered brackets” seem to be a reference to the ChatGPT screenshots from August 20.

This is an extreme departure in tone from what French has said was her mission with ManyVids in the past. In 2019, I met French for an on-background hotel room meeting during the porn industry’s biggest award show and conference, AVN, where she told me she created ManyVids out of a passion to create a platform where other sex workers—having been an adult content creator herself—would be treated fairly and would be listened to by the platform’s owners. French is a former cam model herself, and has always been open publicly about wanting to create better platforms for other sex workers.

“Their customers and their creators are not served in any way by these."

“We try to offer sex workers the tools to be more successful as independent entrepreneurs without being judged,” French told the Daily Beast in 2019. “What was really important for me was to educate the world and make them realize that porn stars are not stupid.”

Shortly after she and I met in 2019, French agreed to a written interview as part of a VICE story about authenticity in cam work. In that email, she called camming the “biggest gift” she’d ever received. “Being a camgirl not only has a huge influence on my approach to taking business decisions but has changed the way I view people and life in general,” French wrote at the time. “Every single decision we take at ManyVids must answer 1 simple question, ‘Will this help the content creators, our MV Stars?’ That’s it,” French wrote in 2019. “If the answer is yes then we proceed, regardless if there is any financial advantage or potential for profit, that is irrelevant.”

Platforms have long profited off of sex workers and pornography to establish popularity and rake in revenue before eventually doing a heel-turn on the creators who made them successful. We’ve seen it happen with mainstream social media platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, and also on sites ostensibly made for sex workers, like OnlyFans, which nearly changed its policies to ban explicit material after making billions of dollars off their content.

I asked ManyVids and French if the platform is changing to reflect these social media posts and her statements on her bio, who is making the AI-generated posts mentioned above, how French plans to “transition one million people” out of sex work, and if any of this will affect creators and fans who use ManyVids. The ManyVids support team did not answer these questions specifically, but sent the following response (emphasis theirs):

"Hello, thanks for reaching out. Respect for Online Sex Workers. Sex work is real work. No more living in the shadows, no more being misunderstood.
No more being afraid, shadowbanned, or persecuted by systems and institutions. Not on our watch. We are not victims — and we are taking action now.This generation of online sex workers is about to change the game forever —and transform the oldest profession in the world in the right direction, for good. Respect the creators. Respect the work. Respect what you watch. We stand for safety, dignity, and opportunity for all creators."
Screenshot of the emailed response from ManyVids support
I asked ManyVids to explain in specific terms what "we are taking action now" means. They replied: "A post will be published to our ManyVids News feed this Saturday, January 24th. It will provide additional clarification and go into a bit more detail on this," with a link to the feed.

“It concerns me that access to my earnings, and more importantly my personal information, is in the hands of someone seemingly out of touch with reality.”

In the meantime, creators have been confused and worried for weeks. Nothing has changed about the way the site operates publicly or creators’ payouts as of writing, but this is a series of events that many adult content creators are concerned represents a potential threat to their livelihood.

“If something were to happen to MV (or to my account there) due to what can only be described as AI psychosis, I would lose upwards of 14k per year—a not insignificant amount of income,” another adult creator on ManyVids told 404 Media. “It concerns me that access to my earnings, and more importantly my personal information, is in the hands of someone seemingly out of touch with reality.”

ManyVids takes a larger-than-most cut from creators' profits, depending on the type of content: For videos and contest earnings (which are similar to tips), the platform takes 40 percent. On tips and custom video sales, it takes 20 percent, which is more in line with other adult platforms. This has been a source of complaint from creators for a long time, combined with unpredictable algorithms that creators say change how they’re discovered on the platform and what content performs best, impacting their earnings. Users have expressed dissatisfaction with these aspects of the platform, and how French runs it, for years. But the recent turn to AI and French’s statements about the industry are making some wonder if it’s time to leave.

“I will still be using ManyVids for NSFW content for as long as they allow it,” adult content creator August told 404 Media. “But part of me thinks that they will try to do what OnlyFans did years ago and try to ban NSFW content which would be an absolute disaster for sex workers whose income depends on platforms like ManyVids.”

Luna Sapphire, a creator who has been using the platform since 2015, said she finds French’s statements on her website “harmful and insulting” to those who’ve helped popularize the site from the start. “Most of us are not looking for a path out of the adult industry; we simply want to do our jobs with as little interference and censorship as possible,” Sapphire said. “Bella used to be very pro-sex worker and it is disappointing to see her change her tune.”

Several adult platforms have embraced, or at least allowed, AI-generated content and “models” on their sites alongside human creators in the last few years. On OnlyFans, AI-generated is allowed, but must comply with the site’s terms of service and and “must be clearly and conspicuously captioned as AI Generated Content with a signifier such as #ai, or #AIGenerated,” Onlyfans says in its terms. Fansly, another adult platform for independent creators, forbids “photorealistic AI-generated content” but allows non-photorealistic “virtual entities” (like V-tubers) if they’re registered using the uploader’s real legal information for verification purposes. JustForFans requires that “consent, identity, and proof of age must be established if the AI images are based on a real person's likeness,” and allows deepfakes if consent has been established. “For example, you can use your own face to create images of yourself or a model who has granted consent to use their face,” the platform’s terms say. IWantClips, another site for selling custom content, also requires users making AI-generated models to verify their identities, but explicitly doesn’t allow deepfakes.

In 2024, IWantClips awarded an AI-generated model $1,000 as the winner of a Valentine’s Day-themed contest. “Adora” competed in the contest alongside human sex workers. On most of these sites, engagement and attention are currency, and on ManyVids, AI generated models sell content alongside humans. The platform prohibits “AI-generated or deepfake content that misrepresents real individuals without consent,” as part of its terms that forbid “content that violates any third party's intellectual property rights or another individual's privacy.”

“The AI/intense spirituality path has been so strange to witness, and I can’t imagine what it’s leaving the fans to think,” Elizabeth Fields, an adult content creator who’s used ManyVids for six years, told 404 Media. “I don’t understand what they are trying to do by taking this direction, nor do I understand how it’s fair of a sexwork built site to assume all of us don’t want to do NSFW content–and to try and funnel us into this box of ‘not enjoying the work we do. To an extent it feels degrading honestly—just because Bella’s experience in sex work was survival based and to make ends meet—a lot of us thoroughly enjoy our jobs, the path we took, and want to continue doing this.”

Many sex workers are disabled, neurodivergent, mentally ill, chronically ill, or “all of the above,” Fields noted, and rely on online sex work to pay the bills. “It feels absolutely unfair to feel like we could be pushed off of a site that became popular off OUR NSFW content—because they want to make it more SFW, and implement all these new AI features that will quite frankly just turn clients off.”

Despite all of this, Fields said she won’t be leaving the site. “To the point that as much as I'm extremely disappointed with many of the recent changes occurring, I won’t be deleting my account as to not lose that income and disappoint my ManyVids fans.”

Others are done. Sydney Screams said she’s no longer uploading to ManyVids and made the decision to slowly start removing content from her stores there. “Platforms that allow for online sex work should be working FOR us, not against us. Sex workers use platforms like MV to earn our own living, to enable ourselves to have better lives, to keep ourselves housed and fed, to pay for medical bills, etc. Many of us choose this life and choose to make this our career, though there are far too many who are survival sex workers,” Screams said. “We aren't looking for a pathway out of the adult industry, especially on a platform that is a porn platform!!! Unless MV is going to start funding the educations & trainings of those trying to leave the industry for work elsewhere, I do not see how a porn platform is going to create a path out of the industry.”

Emanuel Maiberg contributed reporting to this story.

AI-Generated Grandma Porn Is Flooding the Internet

Hundreds of AI GILF erotica are flooding Xvideos and Manyvids.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-21 17:39:08

Podcast: Here’s What Palantir Is Really Building

We start this week with Joseph’s article about ELITE, a tool Palantir is working on for ICE. After the break, Emanuel tells us how AI influencers are making fake sex tape-style photos with celebrities, who can’t be best pleased about it. In the subscribers-only section, Matthew breaks down Comic-Con’s ban of AI art.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/b-QHWpqjD-E?…

• ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid
• Instagram AI Influencers Are Defaming Celebrities With Sex Scandals
• Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2026-01-21 14:52:05

Amateur Radio Operators in Belarus Arrested, Face the Death Penalty

The Belarusian government is threatening three ham radio operators with the death penalty, detained at least seven people, and has accused them of “intercepting state secrets,” according to Belarusian state media, independent media outside of Belarus, and the Belarusian human rights organization Viasna. The arrests are an extreme attack on what is most often a wholesome hobby that has a history of being vilified by authoritarian governments in part because the technology is quite censorship resistant.

The detentions were announced last week on Belarusian state TV, which claimed the men were part of a network of more than 50 people participating in the amateur radio hobby and have been accused of both “espionage” and “treason.” Authorities there said they seized more than 500 pieces of radio equipment. The men were accused on state TV of using radio to spy on the movement of government planes, though no actual evidence of this has been produced.

State TV claimed they were associated with the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR), a long-running amateur radio club and nonprofit that holds amateur radio competitions, meetups, trainings, and forums. WhatsApp and email requests to the BFRR from 404 Media were not returned.

On Reddit, Siarhei Besarab, a Belarusian amateur radio operator, posted a plea for support from others in the hobby: “MAYDAY from Belarus: Licensed operators facing death penalty.”

“I am writing this because my local community is being systematically liquidated in what I can only describe as a targeted intellectual genocide,” Besarab wrote. “They have detained over 50 licensed people, including callsigns EW1ABT, EW1AEH, and EW1ACE. These men were paraded on state television like war criminals and were coerced to publicly repent for the "crime" of technical curiosity. Propagandists presented the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR) as a front for a ‘massive spy network.’”

“State propaganda unironically claims these men were ‘pumping state secrets out of the air’ using nothing more than basic $25 Baofeng handhelds and consumer-grade SDR dongles,” he added. “Any operator knows that hardware like this is physically incapable of cracking the modern AES-256 digital encryption used by government security forces. It is a technical fraud, yet they are being charged with High Treason and Espionage. The punishment in Belarus for these charges is life in prison or the death penalty.”

The Belarusian human rights group Viasna and its associated Telegram channel confirmed the detention and said that it spoke to a cellmate of Andrei Repetsi, who said that Repetsi was unable to talk about his case in jail: “The case is secret, so Andrei never told the essence of the case in the cell. He joked that his personal file was marked ‘Top secret. Burn before reading,’” Viasna wrote.

Most hams operate amateur radios for fun, as part of competitions, or to keep in touch with other hams around the world. But the hobby has a long history of being attacked by governments in part because it is resistant to censorship. Amateur radio often works even if a natural disaster or political action takes down internet, cell, and phone services, so it is popular among people interested in search and rescue and doomsday prepping. Amateur radio has been used to share information out of Cuba, for example, and in 2021 the Cuban government jammed ham radio frequencies during anti-government protests there.

Cuba Is Jamming HAM Radio Frequencies, Operators Say

Amateur radio operators regularly communicate between Florida and Cuba. Last week, mysterious signals originating from Havana jammed the most popular frequencies.

^{Jason Koebler (VICE)}

404 Media

2026-01-21 14:00:25

Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback

San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money.

Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, the world’s premier comic book convention that over the years has also become a major pan-media event where every major media company announces new movies, TV shows, and video games. For the past few years, Comic-Con has allowed some forms of AI-generated art at this art show at the convention. According to archived rules for the show, artists could display AI-generated material so long as it wasn’t for sale, was marked as AI-produced, and credited the original artist whose style was used.

“Material produced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be placed in the show, but only as Not-for-Sale (NFS). It must be clearly marked as AI-produced, not simply listed as a print. If one of the parameters in its creation was something similar to ‘Done in the style of,’ that information must be added to the description. If there are questions, the Art Show Coordinator will be the sole judge of acceptability,” Comic-Con’s art show rules said until recently.

These rules have been in place since at least 2024, but anti-AI sentiment is growing in the artistic community and an artist-led backlash against Comic-Con’s AI-friendly language led to the convention quietly changing the rules. Twenty-four hours after artists called foul the AI-friendly policy, Comic-Con updated the language on its site. “Material created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) either partially or wholly, is not allowed in the art show,” it now says. AI is now banned at the art show.

Comic and concept artist Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media Comic-Con’s friendly attitude towards AI was a slippery slope towards normalization. “I think we should be standing firm especially with institutions like Comic-Con which are quite literally built off the backs of artists and the creative community,” she said. Oreglia was one of the first artists to notice the AI-friendly policy. In addition to alerting her circle of friends, she also wrote a letter to Comic-Con itself.

Artist Karla Ortiz told 404 Media she learned about the AI-friendly policy after some fellow artists shared it with her. Ortiz is a major artist who has worked with some of the major studios who exhibit work at Comic-Con. She’s also got a large following on social media, a following she used to call out Comic-Con’s organizers.

“Comic-con deciding to allow GenAi imagery in the art show—giving valuable space to GenAi users to show slop right NEXT to actual artists who worked their asses off to be there—is a disgrace!” Ortiz said in a post on Bluesky. “A tone deaf decision that rewards and normalizes exploitative GenAi against artists in their own spaces!”

According to Ortiz, the convention is a sacred place she didn’t want to see desecrated by AI. “Comic-Con is the big mecca for comic artists, illustrators, and writers,” she said. “I organize and speak with a lot of different artists on the generative AI issue. It’s something that impacts us and impacts our lives. A lot of us have decided: ‘No, we’re not going to sit by the sidelines.’”

Oritz explained that generative AI was already impacting the livelihood of working artists. She said that, in the past, artists could sustain themselves on long projects for companies that included storyboarding and design. “Suddenly the duration of projects are cut,” she said. “They got generative AI to generate a bunch of references, a bunch of boards. ‘We already did the initial ideation, so just paint this. Paint what generative AI has generated for us.’”

Ortiz pointed to two high profile examples: Marvel using AI to make the title sequence for Secret Invasion and Coca-Cola using AI to make Christmas commercials. “You have this encroaching exploitative technology impacting almost every single level of the entertainment industry, whether you’re a writer, or a voice actor, or a musician, a painter, a concept artist, an illustrator. It doesn’t matter…and then to have Comic-Con, that place that’s supposed to be a gathering and a celebration of said creatives and their work, suddenly put on a pedestal the exploitative technology that only functions because of its training on our works? It’s upsetting beyond belief.”

“What is Comic-Con trying to tell the industry?” She said, “It’s telling artists: ‘Hey you, you’re exploitable and you’re replaceable.’”

Ortiz was heartened that Comic-Con changed its policy. “It was such a relief,” she said. “Generative AI is still going to creep its nasty way in some way or another, but at least it’s not something we have to take lying down. It’s something we can actively speak out against.”

Comic-Con did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, but Oreglia said she did hear back from art show organizer Glen Wooten. “He basically told me that they put those AI stipulations in when AI was just starting to come around and that the inability to sell AI-generated works was meant to curtail people from submitting genAI works,” she said. “He seems to be very against genAI but wasn't really able to change the current policy until artists voiced their opinions loudly which pressured the office into banning AI completely.”

Despite changing policies and broad anti-AI sentiment among the artistic community, Oreglia has still seen an uptick of AI art at conventions. “Although there are many cons that ban it outright and if you get caught selling it you basically will get banned.” This happened to a vendor at Dragon Con last September. Organizers called police to escort the vendor off the premises.

“And I was tabling at Fanexpo SF and definitely saw genAI in the dealers hall, none in the artists alley as far as I could see though but I mostly stuck to my table,” she said. “I was also at Emerald City Comic Con last year and they also have a no-ai policy but fanexpo doesn't seem to have those same policies as far as I know.”

AI image generators are trained on original artwork so whatever output a tool like Midjourney creates is based on an artist’s work, often without compensation or credit. Oreglia also said she feels that AI is an artistic dead end. “Everything interesting, uplifting, and empowering I find about art gets stripped away and turned into vapid facsimiles based on vibes and trendy aesthetics,” she said.

'Secret Invasion' AI Opening Cost No Artists Their Jobs

Method Studios clarifies reports that sparked a social media backlash, stating AI tools "complemented and assisted our creative teams."

^{Carolyn Giardina (The Hollywood Reporter)}

404 Media

2026-01-20 17:47:24

How Wikipedia Will Survive in the Age of AI (With Wikipedia’s CTO Selena Deckelmann)

Wikipedia is turning 25 this month, and it’s never been more important.

The online, collectively created encyclopedia has been a cornerstone of the internet decades, but as generative AI started flooding every platform with AI-generated slop over the last couple of years, Wikipedia’s governance model, editing process, and dedication to citing reliable sources has emerged as one of the most reliable and resilient models we have.

And yet, as successful as the model is, it’s almost never replicated.
open.spotify.com/embed/episode…
This week on the podcast we’re joined by Selena Deckelmann, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia. That means Selena oversees the technical infrastructure and product strategy for one of the most visited sites in the world, and one the most comprehensive repositories of human knowledge ever assembled. Wikipedia is turning 25 this month, so I wanted to talk to Selena about how Wikipedia works and how it plans to continue to work in the age of generative AI.

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.

• Wikipedia’s value in the age of generative AI
• The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
• Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
• Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
• Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'

youtube.com/embed/39LR9ouJR3c?…

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors

“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-20 15:09:04

Alleged Mail Thief Arrested After Bragging About Crimes On Instagram Stories

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

A serial mail thief’s alleged robbery spree ended after he posted photos of stolen credit cards and bins of mail to his Instagram Stories on the same day he robbed a carrier at knifepoint.

Jordan McCorvey, a 32-year-old man in Ohio, allegedly robbed a USPS letter carrier’s truck while they were on their delivery route on November 28. The carrier told investigators two men approached their truck with a knife and demanded access to the truck, according to the affidavit, and when the carrier unlocked the truck and gave them access, they took a tray of mail.

The description of one of the suspects matched a man who investigators already knew as “a known mail thief with criminal history related to possession of stolen mail and bank fraud,” the complaint says. The same day as the theft, McCorvey’s Instagram accounts—with the usernames "2corkmoney," "Icorkmoneybaby," and "cork2saucy”—posted photos of him flipping through stacks of mail still in the USPS tray, showing the same zip code on the letters as the carrier’s stolen deliveries.

For the next few days, more evidence appeared on McCorvey’s Instagram Stories, where he uploaded photos and videos “involving banking transactions and other various posts connected to financial institutions,” according to the complaint. “These posts included solicitations for individuals with bank accounts or other related financial information.”

In one photo, a man—it’s not clear from the complaint whether it’s McCorvey— celebrates in front of a Wells Fargo ATM, holding a card in the air, with a Wells Fargo branch tagged as a location sticker on the photo.

This isn’t the first time an alleged criminal outed himself by bragging on social media and in public. Idriss Qibaa, the man who ran an extortion scheme called Unlocked4Life.com that promised to unlock clients’ social media accounts, admitted on the popular No Jumper podcast that he was the one locking people’s accounts to extort them out of thousands of dollars, which helped the FBI charge him.

McCorvey was arrested on January 9 in Columbus. Mail theft is a federal crime and McCorvey could face fines and up to five years in prison.

Scammer Allegedly Makes $600,000 a Month Holding Instagram Accounts Hostage

The case of Unlocked4Life, who outed himself on Adam-22's No Jumper podcast, shows how Instagram account scammers have escalated to violence and intimidation too.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-20 14:53:30

Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming ICE

The Federal Aviation Administration put a drone no fly zone within 3,000 feet of “Department of Homeland Security facilities and mobile assets,” according to a notice to airmen posted by the government. The no fly zone is the same type that the U.S. uses to restrict consumer drones over military bases and Department of Energy (DOE) research centers and facilities. The order appears to attempt to criminalize the use of drones to film Immigration and Customs Enforcement and DHS employees who are detaining people all over the country.

The order is particularly notable because it does not apply just to static locations like DHS offices, but also to “vessels and ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts.” The notice classifies areas within 3,000 feet horizontally and up to 1,000 feet of altitude as no fly zones and as “national defense airspace,” meaning the skies up to a half mile from ICE vehicles in Minneapolis, for example, could fall under this new jurisdiction. The notice states that people who violate the restrictions can be charged criminally, could face civil penalties, and may lose their authority to fly drones in the future.

“In addition, [drone] operators who are deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to protected personnel, fac [facilities], or assets may be mitigated,” it adds, noting that “mitigation may result in the interference interception, seizure, damaging, or destruction of unmanned aircraft deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to protected personnel, facilities, or assets.”

The order replaces a previous no fly zone that applied only to military bases and DOE sites. Military bases and DOE sites are static locations that don’t move. The new no fly zone, called a temporary flight restriction (TFR), applies to DHS employees and vehicles wherever they may be. ICE is notoriously performing raids all over the country with no notice.

With the rise of cheap consumer drones, some activists and protesters have used them to film law enforcement and to document police abuse. This no fly zone criminalizes that activity, further cracking down on the tactics protesters can use to keep people safe or film ICE brutality. It is unclear whether any specific incident led DHS to push for the no fly zone. DHS and the FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DHS itself has used its own drones to surveil protesters, including in Minneapolis. In 2020, a Customs and Border Patrol Predator drone surveilled people protesting the police killing of George Floyd, and last year DHS flew Predator drones over anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Those aircraft were detected using open source flight records and air traffic control audio. On Monday, videos of aircraft circling over Minneapolis were widely shared on social media, with many people saying the aircraft appeared to be drones. 404 Media has not yet been able to confirm what the aircraft are.

DHS Flew Predator Drones Over LA Protests, Audio Shows

Air traffic control (ATC) audio unearthed by an aviation tracking enthusiast then reviewed by 404 Media shows two Predator drones leaving, and heading towards, Los Angeles.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-19 14:28:36

ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice

When authorities used Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app on a detained woman in an attempt to learn her identity and immigration status, it returned two different and incorrect names, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the app ICE is using to determine who should be removed from the United States, according to testimony from a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official obtained by 404 Media.

ICE has told lawmakers the app, called Mobile Fortify, provides a “definitive” determination of someone’s immigration status, and should be trusted over a birth certificate. The incident, which happened last year in Oregon, casts doubt on that claim.

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

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ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice

In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, the official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-17 14:00:31

Scientists Make Stunning Find Inside Prehistoric Wolf’s Stomach

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that entered the belly of the beast, craved human blood, exposed primate bonds, and pranked birds

First, a prehistoric chew toy for a puppy opens a window into a doomed lineage. Then: why saving species could save your own skin, the dazzling diversity of same-sex behavior in primates, and the exploits of asexual yams.

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.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a woolly rhinoceros

Guðjónsdóttir, Sólveig et al. “Genome Shows no Recent Inbreeding in Near-Extinction Woolly Rhinoceros Sample Found in Ancient Wolf's Stomach.” Genome Biology and Evolution.

Record scratch, freeze frame: Yep, that's me, an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros in a mummified wolf stomach. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation. Well, the good news is that it was not because I am inbred, according to a new study.

That’s my pitch for a movie based on the true story of some half-digested woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) remains that were wolfed down by a permafrost-preserved pupsicle from 14,400 years ago.

Incredibly, scientists were able to sequence the genome of the rhino, which revealed that this individual still had a high level of genetic diversity in its lineage, and no signs of inbreeding. Considering that woolly rhinos vanished from the fossil record around 14,000 years ago, this study suggests that they may have experienced a very sudden population collapse, rather than a gradual demise.
The piece of woolly rhino tissue found inside the stomach of the Tumat-1 puppy. Image: Love Dalén/Stockholm University.
“While Late Pleistocene remains of woolly rhinoceros are numerous, very few remains exist from around the estimated time of extinction,” said researchers led by Sólveig M. Guðjónsdóttir of Stockholm University. At 14,400 years old, the mummified tissue found in the wolf is “one of the youngest known woolly rhinoceros remains.”

“Given our results, we suggest that any change at the genomic level associated with the species extinction must have taken place during the last few hundred years of the species' existence,” the team added. “We conclude that their decline toward extinction likely occurred rapidly after ∼14,400 years ago, most likely driven by rapid changes in environmental conditions.”

In other words, the last supper of a wolf that died when giant ice sheets still covered much of the Northern Hemisphere has opened a window into the rich heritage of this rhinoceros—and the sudden downfall that awaited its relatives.

And for anyone interested in cryptids, the authors note that the “last appearance dates in the fossil record do not exclude the possibility that the species persisted for longer.” Does this mean that woolly rhinos live on in some untrammeled wilderness to this day? Definitely not, they are dunzo. But it does raise the tantalizing question of when and where the last woolly rhino took its final steps, ending a long and storied line.

In other news…

Save wildlife, stay off the menu

Alves, Dálete Cássia Vieira et al. Aspects of the blood meal of mosquitoes (Diptera: culicidae) during the crepuscular period in Atlantic Forest remnants of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Here’s one way to get people to care about biodiversity loss: tell them that the mosquitos are out for their blood.

In a new study, scientists captured and studied 145 engorged mosquitoes from a deforested area in Brazil, which revealed a growing reliance on human blood. The results suggest that mosquitoes are more likely to seek out human blood in areas experiencing biodiversity loss.

“In the present study, human blood meals were detected in nine species” including mosquitoes that “spread dengue, yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya,” said researchers led by Dálete Cássia Vieira Alves of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. “The results revealed a clear tendency for the captured mosquito species to feed predominantly on humans.”

“Deforestation reduces local biodiversity, causing mosquitoes, including vectors of pathogenic agents, to disperse and seek alternative food sources…such as humans,” the team said.

In other words, a future of biodiversity collapse is going to be buzzy, and itchy, and deadly, given that mosquitoes are notoriously the most dangerous animals to humans—killing roughly a million people per year—due to their capacity to spread pathogens. It would be great if we could all conserve wildlife for solely altruistic reasons, but a little nightmare fuel is useful in small doses.

Same-sex sexual behavior plays many roles in primates

Coxshall, Chloë et al. “Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is common in nature—documented in more than 1,500 animals—especially among socially complex species like primates. Now, scientists have presented a comprehensive review of these sexual bonds in dozens of non-human primates, which revealed that the interactions are context-dependent and may serve a variety of evolutionary functions.

“In baboons, for example, females form affiliative networks, through grooming and possibly SSB, to manage group tension, especially during unstable periods such as hierarchical shifts,” said researchers led by Chloë Coxshall of Imperial College London. “Male rhesus macaques use SSB to navigate aggression and shifting dominance by forming coalitions. Those engaging in SSB are more likely to ally and support each other in competition.”

While the study focused on non-human primates, the team also speculated about the possible evolutionary links between SSB in humans and non-human primates, but warned that the study “does not address human sexual orientation, identity or lived experience.”

“While acknowledging that cultural biases have historically shaped how SSB is reported in animals, we hope this study encourages further research into its evolutionary and social roles in primates at large,” the team concluded.

Don’t be deceived by the asexual yams

Chen, Zhi and Chomicki, Guillaume et al. “Berry Batesian mimicry enables bird dispersal of asexual bulbils in a yam.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Even in all of its diverse configurations, sex is simply not everyone’s bag. Lots of species have opted to eschew it entirely in favor of asexually cloning themselves, such as the Asian yam Dioscorea melanophyma.

This yam has evolved a clever technique to disperse its version of “bulbils,” the asexual version of seeds, by dressing them up like berries so that birds will eat them, reports a new study. This helps the plant spread its clones far and wide without the need for sexual reproduction.

“We show that the yam Dioscorea melanophyma—which has lost sexual reproduction—evolved black, glossy bulbils that mimic co-occurring black berries and entice frugivorous birds to ingest and disperse them,” said researchers co-led by Zhi Chen of the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Science and Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University.
The false berry “bulbils” of the yam. Image: Gao Chen
The team found that birds preferred real berries “yet they significantly consumed bulbils too” and “could not visually discriminate bulbils from berries.” In this way, the yams use “mimicry to deceive birds and achieve longer dispersal distance,” the study concludes.

It’s amazing how many adaptive strategies boil down to pranking one’s fellow Earthlings. So if you’re a bird, beware the sham yam yums. And if you are looking to name a band, the Asexual Yams is officially out there as an option.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Aspects of the blood meal of mosquitoes (Diptera: culicidae) during the crepuscular period in Atlantic Forest remnants of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Identifying their food sources provides insights into mosquito foraging behaviors and directly impacts the epidemiology of mosquito-borne pathogens such as d...

^{Dálete Cássia Vieira Alves (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2026-01-16 17:17:14

Behind the Blog: Putting the Puzzle Together

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 the staying power of surveillance coverage, the jigsaw of reporting, and eyestrain.

JASON: I’ve started this year in the same way I spent a lot of last year: Writing about the automated license plate reader company Flock. In my career it’s been sort of weird for me to focus on one company or one thing so much for so long. I tend to get a little restless about the topics I cover, and there can sometimes be a very real fatigue with specific types of stories. After a while, people “get it,” and so the bar for a new story on a topic keeps going up. I wish this weren’t the case, and we try to cover things we feel are important, but if you’re writing about a topic and no one is reading it, then the audience might be telling you they don’t find that thing interesting anymore.

This has not yet been the case with Flock, somewhat to my surprise. I’ve been writing about surveillance technologies for a long time, and it’s rare for a specific company or specific type of technology to hold people’s interest and attention for too long.

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Behind the Blog: Putting the Puzzle Together

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-15 19:10:37

There’s a Lootbox With Rare Pokémon Cards Sitting in the Pentagon Food Court

It’s possible to win a gem mint Surging Sparks Pikachu EX Pokémon card worth as much as $840 from a vending machine in the Pentagon food court. Thanks to a company called Lucky Box Vending, anyone passing through the center of American military power can pay to win a piece of randomized memorabilia from a machine dispensing collectibles.

On Christmas Eve, a company called Lucky Box announced it had installed one of its vending machines at the Pentagon in a now-deleted post on Threads. “A place built on legacy, leadership, and history—now experiencing the thrill of Lucky Box firsthand,” the post said. “This is a milestone moment for Lucky Box and we’re excited for this opportunity. Nostalgia. Pure Excitement.”
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A Lucky Box is a kind of gacha machine or lootbox, a vending machine that dispenses random prizes for cash. A person puts in money and the machine spits out a random collectible. Customers pick a “type” of collectible they want—typically either a rare Pokémon card, sports card, or sports jersey—insert money and get a random item. The cost of a spin on the Lucky Box varies from location to location, but it’s typically somewhere around $100 to $200. Pictures and advertisements of the Pentagon Lucky Box don’t tell us how much a box cost in the nation’s capitol and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Most of the cards and jerseys inside a Lucky Box vending machine are only worth a few dollars, but the company promises that every machine has a few of what it calls “holy grail” items. The Pentagon Lucky Box had a picture of a gem mint 1st edition Charizard Pokémon card on the side of it, a card worth more than $100,000. The company’s social media feed is full of people opening items like a CGC graded perfect 10 1st edition Venusaur shadowless holo Pokémon card (worth around $14,000) or a 2023 Mookie Betts rookie card. Most people, however, don’t win the big prizes.

Lucky Box vending machines are scattered across the country and mostly installed in malls. According to the store locator on its website, more than 20 of the machines are in Las Vegas. Which makes sense, because Lucky Boxes are a kind of gambling. These types of gacha machines are wildly popular in Japan and other countries in Southeast Asia. They’ve seen an uptick in popularity in the US in the past few years, driven by loosening restrictions on gambling and pop culture crazes such as Labubu.

Task & Purpose first reported that the Lucky Box had been in place since December 23, 2025. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told 404 Media that, as of this writing, the Lucky Box vending machine was still installed in the Pentagon’s main food court.

Someone took pictures of the thing and posted them to the r/army on Monday. From there, the pictures made it onto most of the major military subreddits and various Instagram accounts like USArmyWTF. After Task & Purpose reported on the presence of the Lucky Box at the Pentagon, Lucky Box deleted any mention of the location from its social media and the Pentagon location is not currently listed on the company’s store locator. But it is, according to Gough, still there.

In gaming, the virtual versions of these loot boxes are frowned upon. Seven years ago, games like Star Wars: Battlefront II were at the center of a controversy around similar mechanics. At the time, it was common for video games to sell loot boxes to users for a few bucks. This culminated in an FTC investigation. A year ago, the developers of Genshin Impact agreed to pay a $20 million fine for selling loot boxes to teens under 16 without parental consent.The practice never went away in video games, but most major publishers backed off the practice in non-sports titles.

Now, almost a decade later, the lootboxes have spread into real life and one of them is in the Pentagon.

What is a Lucky Box and why is there one at the Pentagon?

The company that makes the machines announced on Christmas Eve that a Lucky Box is now inside the Pentagon

^{Jeff Schogol (Task & Purpose)}

404 Media

2026-01-15 14:03:04

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid

Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.

The findings, based on internal ICE material obtained by 404 Media, public procurement records, and recent sworn testimony from an ICE official, show the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground. The tool receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) among a range of other sources, according to the material.

The news comes after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kristi Noem said the agency is sending hundreds more federal agents to Minneapolis amid widespread protests against the agency. Last week ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37 year old U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good. During Operation Metro Surge, which DHS calls the “largest immigration operation ever,” immigration agents have surrounded rideshare drivers and used pepper spray on high school students.

“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” a user guide for ELITE obtained by 404 Media says. The tool aims to be nearly all encompassing when it comes to finding ICE targets, from identifying subjects in the first place, to building a list of people, to supervisors approving selections for officers to ultimately go into the field and apprehend.

💡
Do you know anything else about this tool? Do you work at ICE, CBP, or Palantir? 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.

One feature of ELITE is the “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab,” according to the user guide. This lets ICE see people it may potentially want to detain on a map interface, based on various criteria such as “Bios & IDs,” “Location,” “Operations,” and “Criminality.” An ICE officer can then select people one by one, or draw a shape on the map to see people in that selected area.

ELITE has already been used by ICE to target specific areas, according to sworn testimony from an ICE official in Oregon. In October, immigration officers waited in three unmarked SUVs outside an apartment complex in Woodburn. They went on to bust a driver’s window and pull a 45-year-old woman from a van, used ICE’s facial recognition app Mobile Fortify on her, and agents had the goal of making eight arrests per team per day, Oregon Live reported. Lawyers representing the woman say authorities arrested her and more than 30 other people in a “dragnet.”

“One of our apps, it’s called ELITE. And so it tells you how many people are living in this area and what’s the likelihood of them actually being there,” a deportation officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit, identified in court records as JB, testified about the raid in early December. 404 Media purchased a transcript of JB’s testimony from the court. “It’s basically a map of the United States. It’s kind of like Google Maps.”

“It pulls from all kinds of sources,” JB continued. “It’s a newer app that was actually given to us in ICE.” JB said ELITE is what ICE sometimes uses to track the apparent density of people at a particular location to target. “You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than [...] like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent [...] you’re not going to go there.” For that raid in Woodburn, JB suggested the immigration officers used ELITE to generate leads. Additionally, in a text thread of immigration officers, someone described the area as “target rich,” which JB explained meant the officials had run multiple license plates in that area and found vehicles registered to people “who had either a criminal or immigration nexus.”

Screenshots of the ICE official's testimony. Image: 404 Media.

JB and other officials were testifying in the case of MJMA, the woman pulled from the van during the Woodburn raid. She is being represented by attorneys from Innovation Law Lab.

Once a person is selected on the map interface, ELITE then shows a dossier on that particular person, according to the user guide. That includes their name, a photo, their Alien Number (the unique code given by the U.S. government to each immigrant), their date of birth, and their full address. ELITE notes the source of the address (such as the government agency that supplied it), and gives an “address confidence score.” One address confidence score example in the guide is 98.95 out of 100; another is 77.25 out of 100. This score is based on both the source of the address and how recent the data is, the user guide says. (ICE is paying skip tracers, private investigators, and bounty hunters to help verify peoples’ addresses.)

Those sources can include HHS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and “CLEAR.” The guide does not provide any more specifics on what CLEAR might be, but ICE has repeatedly contracted with Thomson Reuters which sells a data product called CLEAR. Thomson Reuters did not respond to a request for comment. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents don’t say if those are the only entities providing data for ELITE. The user guide says ELITE is “integrating new data sources” to reduce officer workload.

ICE can also use ELITE to look up people based on an unique identifier, such as their Alien Number, name, or date of birth. ELITE also lets ICE do this in bulk, selecting up to 50 people at once, according to the guide.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
ICE can filter the map by what the guide calls Special Operations. These are “groups of pre-defined aliens specifically targeted by Leadership for action.” ICE officers are told to consult ICE leadership or “broadcasts” on when to use these operation filters. DHS’s surge in Minneapolis is focused at least in part on the city’s Somali community after renewed focus on a COVID-19 fraud case. The overwhelming majority of Somalis who live in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area are U.S. citizens, PBS reported.

“These records give us behind-the-scenes insight into the kind of mass surveillance machine ICE is building with help from powerful tech companies like Palantir,” Laura Rivera, senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media. “When combined with what we know from ICE testimony and other public information, it gives us a blueprint into how ICE is going into communities and identifying people for arrest in real-time.”

Senator Ron Wyden, who represents Oregon where ELITE was discussed, told 404 Media in a statement, “The fact ICE is using this app proves the completely indiscriminate nature of the agency's aggressive and violent incursions into our communities. This app allows ICE to find the closest person to arrest and disappear, using government and commercial data, with the help of Palantir and Trump's Big Brother databases. It makes a mockery of the idea that ICE is trying to make our country safer. Rather, agents are reportedly picking people to deport from our country the same way you'd choose a nearby coffee shop.”
Screenshot of the Palantir contract, via highergov.com.
The ELITE user guide does not say who developed the system. But the tool’s distinctive title—Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement—exactly matches one included in an addendum to a Palantir contract from last year. It says Palantir should “continue configuration and engineering services” for ELITE and some other ICE tools. That supplemental agreement for $29.9 million started in September and is planned to go on for at least a year.

Palantir has worked with ICE for years and was focused on criminal investigations, supporting Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. That changed in the second Trump administration, with Palantir now working on ICE’s deportation efforts.

After participating in a three-week coding sprint, ICE updated an ongoing Palantir contract related to “Enforcement Prioritization and Targeting,” to “support the development of an accurate picture of actionable leads based on existing law enforcement datasets to allow law enforcement to prioritize enforcement actions,” according to an internal Palantir wiki previously obtained by 404 Media. The goal was to find the physical location of people marked for deportation, and Palantir said it believes its work with ICE is “intended to promote government efficiency, transparency, and accountability.”

The leaked material described Palantir’s deportation-focused work as “concentrated on delivering prototype capabilities” and lasting around six months. It left open the room for more work with ICE, and said “Palantir has developed into a more mature partner for ICE.” Documents ICE published described Palantir’s work as building a tool called ImmigrationOS.

More than eight months have passed since Palantir discussed the issue internally. Neither Palantir nor DHS responded to multiple requests for comment.

In their testimony, JB said, “it’s a tool that we use that gives you a probability. But there’s never [...] there’s no such thing as 100 percent.” The user guide adds, “As always, make sure you do your due diligence on each target to confirm removability prior to action.”

How ICE raids in Minnesota connect to a years-old fraud scandal

The Trump administration is using a years-old scandal first prosecuted under the Biden administration to justify its immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

^{David Ingram (NBC News)}

404 Media

2026-01-15 14:00:41

New Legislation Would Rein In ICE’s Facial Recognition App

A group of six Democratic lawmakers is proposing legislation that would dramatically rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app, according to a copy of the draft bill shared with 404 Media. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been scanning peoples’ faces with the app, called Mobile Fortify, across the country, using it to verify their citizenship and claiming that a result in the app should be trusted over a birth certificate.

The move signals the first potential legislative move against the app after 404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence in June based on leaked ICE emails. Since then, 404 Media has covered its continued use against U.S. citizens, the 200 million images it uses, and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement.

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

“When ICE claims that an image it snaps and runs through an unproven app can be enough evidence to detain people for possible deportation, no one is safe,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and who authored the legislation, said. “ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify to determine a person’s legal status is an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans’ faces and fingerprints in the field—especially with unproven and biased technology. It is time to put an end to its widespread use. We can secure the Homeland and respect the rights and privacy of Americans at the same time.”

The bill is being cosponsored by by Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Border Security & Enforcement; Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations & Accountability; Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It follows some of the lawmakers demanding answers from DHS about the app in September.

The proposed law, called the Realigning Mobile Phone Biometrics for American Privacy Protection Act, aims to curtail both Mobile Fortify and Mobile Identify, the local law enforcement version, in a few ways. First, it would ban use of the apps except for identification at ports of entry. As 404 Media showed, Mobile Fortify uses CBP systems that are usually reserved for identifying and taking photos of people as they enter the U.S. Mobile Fortify turned that capability inwards to American streets.

The law would also require all photos and fingerprints of U.S. citizens captured before the practices introduced by the bill be deleted, and require that all photographs or fingerprints of U.S. citizens be destroyed within 12 hours of being taken. The law would also prohibit DHS from sharing the apps with non-DHS law enforcement agencies, effectively killing the local law enforcement version. (404 Media reported the app became unavailable on the Google Play Store in early-December.)

When an immigration officer scans someone’s face with Mobile Fortify, the app runs their face against a bank of 200 million images held by DHS, according to the app’s user manual previously obtained by 404 Media. If the app finds what it believes is a matching face, it returns a name, their nationality, age and date of birth, unique identifiers such as their “alien registration,” and a field titled “Immig. Judge Decision,” the manual says. This appears to refer to whether an immigration judge has ruled on this person’s case, and may include a result that says “remove.”

404 Media previously obtained an internal DHS document through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which showed ICE does not let people decline to be scanned by the app. 404 Media has found likely cases of the app being used in Chicago. In a partnership with Reveal, 404 Media reported the app has been used on U.S. citizens.

One video posted to social media this week showed an officer using the app to take a photo of an identification document in what the video said was Minnesota. 404 Media compared the app shown in the video to the user interface in the leaked Mobile Fortify user manual and they matched.

“The Trump Administration has weaponized federal agencies against the American people. This latest effort to use facial recognition to further target immigrant families is reckless and dangerous,” said Rep. Espaillat in a statement. “I’m proud to stand with Ranking Member Thompson to introduce legislation to combat ICE and DHS, prohibiting the use of facial recognition as yet another ruthless tactic to further this administration’s mass deportation agenda.”

“The abuse of this type of technology by DHS agents is not only invasive, it is likely unconstitutional and certainly un-American,” Rep. Meng added. “Immigration enforcement should not be conducted by an app and DHS should not conduct dragnet operations that terrorize communities and violate people's constitutional rights. I am proud to have worked with Ranking Member Thompson and my colleagues to introduce this commonsense legislation.”

A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement, “Claims that Mobile Fortify violates the Fourth Amendment or compromises privacy are false. The application does not access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data. Its use is governed by established legal authorities and formal privacy oversight, which set strict limits on data access, use, and retention.”

“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations. It operates with a deliberately high matching threshold and queries only limited CBP immigration datasets. Mobile Fortify has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts or by legal guidance. It is lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities,” the statement continued.

Update: this piece has been updated to include a statement from DHS.

Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images

404 Media has seen user manuals for Mobile Fortify, ICE’s new facial recognition app which allows officers to instantly look up DHS, State Department, and state law enforcement databases by just pointing a phone at someone’s face.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-14 19:46:53

Strange ‘Little Red Dots’ in Space Have a Mind-Boggling Explanation, Scientists Discover

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Astronomers think they have solved the puzzle of so-called “little red dots” in space, a population of bizarre objects at the very edge of the observable universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

The new research suggests that these dots are likely the youngest black holes we have ever glimpsed, which are “cocooned” in dense gas, a never-before-seen phenomenon that sheds light on the early evolution of the universe.

“LRDs were first spotted in 2023 in the first images made with the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, in an email to 404 Media. “People have very actively studied these objects since then.”

“They are tiny, bright and red objects seen when the universe was only about 5-15 percent of its current age,” he continued. “They have puzzled astronomers: on one hand, they are too compact and massive for normal galaxies, on the other, they do not look like typical supermassive black holes, because we do not detect their usual signals, such as X-rays. And they are not just a few odd apples—almost every tenth galaxy in the early universe is an LRD.”

These baffling properties have sparked spirited debate about the nature of LRDs. Some studies have suggested they might be exotic star-studded galaxies, or weirdly overmassive black holes.

Hoping to resolve the mystery, Rusakov and his colleagues analyzed JWST observations of more than a dozen of the little red dots across longer timescales. The team confirmed that the dots are likely black holes that are enshrouded by a “cocoon” of energetic gas that can explain their novel properties.

“Our simple solution is: we think that they are massive black holes wrapped in a thick cocoon of dense gas, which makes them appear red and hides the black hole,” Rusakov said. “This idea of the cocoon was inspired by another work that predicted the presence of thick gas. We could check this idea by studying the hydrogen emission from LRDs. This showed us that the cocoon is partly ionised—meaning it has lots of free electrons. This was a surprising discovery, because by scattering light, these electrons hid most useful black hole signals from our sight and also made it appear more evolved than it actually is.”

“By looking inside, we found that these are some of the youngest black holes ever seen,” he added. “This makes them unique laboratories for understanding how black holes got started in the early universe.”
An image of little red dots from JADES 1 The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (Eisenstein et al. 2023). Image: The CEERS Survey/The JADES Survey/PRIMER Survey/Dawn JWST Archive
In other words, it’s not that these objects aren’t radiating in X-rays, it’s just that those wavelengths are largely blotted out by the gassy cocoons. Moreover, the cocoons warp light from the black holes, making them seem much more massive than they actually are, like some kind of cosmic funhouse mirror. Rusakov and his colleagues calculated that the black holes are probably a few million times as massive as the Sun, more than a hundred times smaller than expected by their appearance.

The findings are part of a wave of discoveries about the early universe primarily fueled by the unparalleled precision and sensitivity of JWST’s infrared vision.

“The first JWST observations caused several debates about how galaxies formed in the early universe, such as whether galaxies grow quicker than we thought,” Rusakov explained. “In fact, some of those initially problematic galaxies turned out to be Little Red Dots. As our study shows, they were misinterpreted as purely stellar galaxies and they are supermassive black holes instead.”

As JWST continues to expose strange new frontiers of the universe, astronomers can determine which anomalies point to novel entities and which, like the little red dots, turn out to be familiar objects going through an unfamiliar phase.

Either way, each breakthrough raises new questions. Rusakov and his colleagues may have identified the origin of the little red dots, but it remains unclear whether these young black holes grow faster than the galaxies associated with them, and what that might mean for our understanding of galactic evolution.

“LRDs show us what the black holes looked like a long time ago, and if we are lucky, they may show us how these massive black holes got started,” Rusakov said. “Just to be clear, even though they are likely the youngest black holes we ever found, they already have masses of a few million Suns.”

“This opens up the next big questions: can we find even smaller black holes with the James Webb Space Telescope? Do black holes start tiny and grow or are they born already quite big?” he added. “These exciting questions will definitely keep us busy for some time.”

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Little red dots as young supermassive black holes in dense ionized cocoons - Nature

The highest-quality JWST spectra reveal that little red dots are young supermassive black holes shrouded in dense cocoons of ionized gas, where electron scattering, not Doppler motions, broadens their spectral lines.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-14 16:28:09

How One Guy Crowdsourced More Than 500 Dashcams for Minneapolis to Film ICE

When self-employed software engineer Nick Benson put out the call for dashcams online, he thought he’d get maybe 10 people to donate. More than 500 have shown up on his front porch in suburban Minneapolis. “The state apparatus, of course, has cameras everywhere,” Benson told 404 Media. “The citizens will also benefit from having the same cameras around to document what's going on and making sure that everything is on the up and up.”

In early January, the Trump administration sent 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area. DHS has said hundreds more are on the way. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump threatened Minnesota with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” in a Truth Social post.
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On January 7, two days after Benson put out his call for dashcams, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot legal observer Renee Good in the face. In the wake of that killing, multiple people have filmed agents threatening the lives of other observers.

Benson feels like he has to do something, so he gets dashcams into the hands of people who want them. “We need more documentation showing what these people are doing. Because I don't know—other than a compelling visual documentation of what's going on—I don't know what other tools we have until the legislative branch of our government can stand up and do its job and provide a check to all of this, because our state government can't,” he said. “So all we can do is collect evidence that this is happening and let people know about it.

Benson made it easy to buy the cameras. He set up an Amazon wishlist that has the dashcams and a 256gb memory card to go in them. People buy the equipment on Amazon and it shows up at Benson’s house. From there, he reaches out to local community organizers and gets them into the hands of people who want them. “I think more than 350 of those cameras have gone out and are already deployed in the community now,” he said. “So we got them out fast, because we all understand exactly why we need those cameras, and we appreciate that support very much.”

Benson got the idea for the dashcam wishlist when ICE told local police that one of his friends was ramming their cars. “That was completely fabricated,” Benson told me. But there was no way to prove it. It was the word of the federal government against Benson’s friend. “Dashcams are the only way we can prevent that from happening.”

As ICE spreads across cities in the US and continues to disappear and kill people, citizens have taken to the streets to put themselves between the masked agents and their targets. These community observers use a variety of tactics, including blowing whistles to let people know ICE is in the area and recording everything and posting it online.

Benson runs the website JetTip, a flight alert service for aviation enthusiasts and it was through this work he first noticed how America was changing during Trump’s second term. “I got interested in all of the ICE things by tracking the flights that were coming in to take deportees away,” he said. “In addition to keeping track of those flights that are coming and going from the airport, I've been getting looped in with the community observation part of it.”

Benson lives in Burnsville, a Minneapolis suburb with a population of 60,000. He said that even here, ICE is a constant and terrifying presence. “There's more federal agents here now than there are local police,” he said. “And we know that they're not operating with respect to the rule of law. They're conducting warrantless door to door operations right now.”

The day after Ross shot Good, Benson was dropping his kids off at school when he noticed a man running down the road. At first he thought the man was jogging. “And then half a block down the way, there was the ICE agent who was running after him,” he said. “They were just right there when I'm driving my kids to school. And it was so frustrating and violating.”

Benson put the call for cameras on January 5, but saw an uptick in donations after the Good shooting. “It was immediately clear that ICE was lying about it, and people were looking for a way to reach out and make a difference from wherever they were in their community, and that Amazon wish list was a very low friction, easy way for people to make a constructive and tangible difference,” he said. “It was more than $75,000 worth of Dash cams that have been delivered to my house here now in Burnsville.”

From there, Benson plugged into local community organizations and got the cameras into the hands of his neighbors watching ICE. “We have to teach history or someone else will teach their version of it,” Jean, one of Benson’s dashcam recipients who spoke to 404 Media on the condition of pseudonymity for her safety, said. She said that one big plus of the dashcams is that it keeps observers hands on the wheel when they’re in their car. “This was safer. A lot of people were trying to record [on their phones] while driving.”

Jean started observing and recording ICE, and organizing others to do the same, after she witnessed a raid in December. She said that ICE brought more than two dozen cars, a tactical vehicle, and dozens of armed agents. “We have to make sure people are watching,” she said. “We have to make sure we’re keeping track of our community members.”

Letty, another ICE watcher in the area, learned about the community organizations in her area after the Renee Good shooting. After getting plugged in, they told her a man named Nick was giving out dashcams. “I think they’re a great tool and beneficial to anyone who is out patrolling and observing,” she said. “Hell, I think if you’re a person of color and vulnerable to being kidnapped, I strongly believe you should have one in one in your car even if you’re not in any [observation] groups.”

Letty, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said the camera gives her a small amount of peace of mind. “But deep down I also know agents don’t care about whether you have one or not, “ she said. “I’ll never get rid of my dashcam now though. I feel like it adds another layer of safety.”

Benson isn’t done giving out cameras. “We need all of those cameras we can get to help the people who have the opportunity to stand up for what's right here and make sure that we're protected as best we can be from the federal government right now,” he said.

Benson said that the mood has changed in the neighborhood since ICE killed Renee Good. “My family were all immediately a lot more concerned about what I was doing, of course. It's hard when you see those videos of someone who was just out driving and ICE comes up to them and said, ‘Didn't you learn your lesson from the other day,” he said. "They're weaponizing this killing to prevent people from just existing in their neighborhood. Like, you can't even be near ICE while they're operating, because that means you didn't learn your lesson of them murdering someone who was there.”

Some ICE agents are reportedly using Good’s shooting as a threat: Videos captured by bystanders in the Minneapolis area this week shows agents asking if people have “learned from what just happened” while threatening them.

“It's upsetting, and it's just the next step in getting kicked in the guts by these guys,” Benson said. “I don't want to get in a situation where I've got a bunch of idiots yelling at me from outside of my car, possibly with guns drawn, and possibly giving me conflicting directions where they already have the outcome predetermined and my actions won't make any difference. That's the sort of thing that makes me really nervous: that they've already decided they need to make examples out of people.”

But Benson said he won’t give up. “We can't give up, and we can't stop doing everything we can to protect our neighbors, because we can't let them win.”

And so Benson hands out dashcams. “We’re in a situation right now where the only people that are helping are just good people, normal people, standing up and helping out the best way they can. That’s all they’ve got…what a stupid situation that we allowed this to get this far.”

Hundreds more federal agents being sent to Minneapolis, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem says

Noem said that more agents will arrive in the Twin Cities metro Sunday and Monday to help officers already there continue to do their work "safely."

^{Riley Moser (CBS Minnesota)}

404 Media

2026-01-14 15:29:17

Cop Used Flock to Wrongfully Accuse a Woman Then Refused to Look at Evidence That Exonerated Her, Body Camera Shows

A police officer in Colorado used evidence from Flock cameras to wrongfully accuse an innocent woman for package theft, then yelled at her on the phone when she told him she had evidence that exonerated her, according to body camera footage obtained by 404 Media.

The nightmare situation happened in September in Columbine Valley, Colorado and was first reported by The Colorado Sun, which obtained Ring camera footage from the woman, Chrisanna Elser, that showed an initial interaction with Sergeant Jamie Milliman at her home. 404 Media has obtained body camera footage of that interaction as well as footage from a phone call Milliman made to Elser after he gave her a court summons.

The incident highlights not only the extreme extent to which America’s cities and towns are surveilled, but also the fact that police believe this surveillance evidence, which in this case was used to wrongfully summons Elser to court, is infallible and bulletproof. It also shows that anyone can be caught in America’s surveillance dragnet; there is no safety in the idea that you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide.

“You know we have cameras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing,” Milliman told Elser and her husband at her home, referring to Flock automated license plate reader cameras in the nearby town of Bow Mar. He then told her the town’s Flock cameras had recorded her vehicle entering and leaving the town 20 times in the last month, including on Tuesday, September 22 “from 11:52 until 12:09, exactly,” he said. “Like I said, nothing gets in or out of the town without us knowing about it … I have you on camera walking up, ringing the doorbell, taking the package, and literally running away. I have you on camera doing this … I get that this is a shock to you, but I am telling you, this is a lock, 100 percent no doubt she did this.”

But Elser didn’t do it. Elser was visiting her tailor’s home for a dress fitting, and didn’t steal the package. She had her Ring camera footage from her tailor’s house and footage from her Rivian vehicle to show that she didn’t steal the package, which she told Milliman on a phone call obtained by 404 Media.

“Why don’t you come on down and look at the video?” Elser said. Milliman refused to look at the video, and said “The next person you can tell is the judge or your lawyer. This is how this works. The judge or your lawyer.”

Elser asked to speak to his supervisor.

“I am the supervisor. That is it. There is no one else to talk to,” he said. “It is on camera many times. You’ve been served a summons … I will bring all of my evidence, the many, many, many, many videos, and you can bring yours. And if a judge says you didn’t do it then you didn’t do it.”

“What are going to be the repercussions when this is proven incorrectly and you’re wasting my fucking time?” Elser’s husband told Milliman on the call.
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Elser and her husband also asked Milliman to show them the evidence he had, or to answer basic questions such as what the woman on the Flock cameras was wearing in the department’s video footage. “You’ll have to go to court for this information,” he said. “I can tell you. I am not going to tell you. I can tell you, but I am not going to tell you.”

“I’m going to go to the local police department,” Elser said.

“This is the local police department. I am the jurisdiction,” he responded.

“I want to talk to somebody today,” Elser said.

“Well, that is not going to happen. It’s not going to happen,” Milliman said.

“Yes, it can happen,” Elser said.

“I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. I said it’s not going to happen,” he said.

“No, no, it can happen,” Elser said.

“I agree it can, but it’s not going to,” he said. “You’re not talking to anybody else.”

Elser continues to explain that she has footage from her vehicle showing where she was, and that she was at her tailor’s house, not stealing a package.

“By the way, if your truck has GPS, I will simply request records from Rivian and do a court order to have those sent to me. I don’t care where your truck was. I care where you were. Your truck didn’t take the package, you did. Do you understand that? Your truck did not ring the doorbell. Your truck did not walk away with the package. You did. It doesn’t matter where the truck was. It matters where you were.”

“But you’re showing me a picture of my truck,” Elser said. “You didn’t show me a picture of me.”

Later in the conversation, Milliman says “I have been doing this for 27 years. I have probable cause because I saw you. You can laugh and giggle all you want, but I have video of you. This is going nowhere because you’re not being truthful with me. If you want to be truthful with me, you know how to get a hold of me. Other than that, you have a good rest of your day.” He then hangs up the phone.
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Milliman was disciplined with “extra training” after the incident, according to The Colorado Sun. A reprimand letter given to Milliman and obtained by The Colorado Sun noted that he exhibited “rude behavior,” and that his actions were “unprofessional and inconsistent with the standards expected of a sworn officer.” Milliman and the Columbine Valley police department did not respond to a request for comment.

Elser shared an additional voicemail with 404 Media that Milliman left her a day after the call in which he refused to look at her evidence. In this follow-up call, Milliman completely changed his tone and said he would be willing to look at her evidence: “Yesterday when we had talked, you had mentioned that you had some exonerating video and I mentioned you had my email. I would love to see it,” the voicemail says. “In the interest of justice and to make things right, I would love to go above and beyond and see anything that could possibly take away my probable cause for issuing the summons.”

Two weeks later, she sent an email to police chief Bret Cottrell containing evidence from her Rivian's cameras, her tailor's Ring camera, and a detailed timeline of events. Cottrell responded and said that they would be dropping the case: “After reviewing the evidence you have provided (nicely done btw), we have voided the summons that was issued," he wrote. "We have double checks with Jefferson County courts and the case was not yet entered into the system, therefore, there is no record on file. Thank you for getting back to us with the evidence you said you would be able to provide.”

In a phone interview, Elser told 404 Media that it feels like “they’ll talk to convicted murderers and rapists in a nicer way than they’ll talk to me about a $25 package and me saying ‘I have evidence I can show you and we can end this.’”

She said that she eventually saw video of the person taking the package.

“From a distance, I’m like, ‘kind of it was like my outfit I was wearing at the time,’ but my truck isn’t there at all, she had a shaved head, she’s much younger, had earrings on and all that,” she said. Elser said that before this experience, she was “very big on surveillance, and knowing we have cameras in our house because if something happens, I wanna know how it happens. Maybe not even a crime against me, but maybe my animals knocked something over and I wanted to know who.” She said that she has dash cams because she’d been involved in multiple hit-and-run car accidents.

“Honestly, I was one of those people that believed, ‘well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the big deal?’ But here’s a situation where I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, and I almost lost my entire career over this,” she said. “I’ve lost trust for law enforcement … I mean I love the Flock stories where they help out with saving a kid, and I look at them and go ‘yeah, you did that, but you’re not using the technology right.’”

“The overreach of this technology is the biggest concern. Just having it out there is scary, it’s too much,” she added. “It’s changed my mind immensely.”

Colorado officer who used AI cameras to falsely accuse woman of theft disciplined with extra training

Columbine Valley’s police chief said the sergeant’s demeanor was “inconsistent with the standards expected of a sworn officer"

^{Olivia Prentzel (The Colorado Sun)}

404 Media

2026-01-14 14:00:53

Podcast: The ICE Tool That Tracks Entire Neighborhoods

We start this week with Joseph’s article about Webloc, a tool ICE bought that can monitor phones in entire neighborhoods. After the break, Emanuel and Sam talk about their recent coverage of Grok. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how police inadvertently unmasked millions of their surveillance targets through a Flock redaction error.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro

2:50 - First Story

23:00 - Second Story

• ⁠Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods⁠
• ⁠DHS Is Lying To You⁠
• ⁠Inside the Telegram Channel Jailbreaking Grok Over and Over Again⁠
• ⁠Masterful Gambit: Musk Attempts to Monetize Grok's Wave of Sexual Abuse Imagery⁠
• ⁠Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2026-01-13 17:48:55

Instagram AI Influencers Are Defaming Celebrities With Sex Scandals

AI generated influencers are sharing fake images on Instagram that appear to show them having sex with celebrities like LeBron James, iShowSpeed, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One AI influencer even shared an image of her in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The images are AI generated but are not disclosed as such, and funnel users to an adult content site where the AI generated influencers sell nude images.

This recent trend is the latest strategy from the growing business of monetizing AI generated porn by harvesting attention on Instagram with shocking or salacious content. As with previous schemes we’ve covered, the Instagram posts that pretend to show attractive young women in bed with celebrities are created without the celebrities’ consent and are not disclosed as being AI generated, violating two of Instagram’s policies and showing once again that Meta is unable or unwilling to reign in AI generated content on its platform.

Most of the Reels in this genre that I have seen follow a highly specific formula and started to appear around December 2025. First, we see a still image of an AI-generated influencer next to a celebrity, often in the form of a selfie with both of them looking at the camera. The text on the screen says “How it started.” Then, the video briefly cuts to another still image or videos of the AI generated influencer and the celebrity post coitus, sweaty, with tussled hair and sometimes smeared makeup. Many of these posts use the same handful of audio clips. Since Instagram allows users to browse Reels that use the same audio, clicking on one of these will reveal dozens of examples of similar Reels.

LeBron James and adult film star Johnny Sins are frequent targets of these posts, but I’ve also seen similar Reels with the likeness of Twitch streamer iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, MMA fighters Jon Jones and Connor McGregor, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and many others, far too many to name them all. The AI influencer accounts obviously don’t care whether it's believable that these fake women are actually sleeping with celebrities and will include any known person who is likely to earn engagement. Amazingly, one AI influencer applied the same formula to Venezuela’s president Maduro shortly after he was captured by the United States.

These Instagram Reels frequently have hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views. A post from one of these AI influencers that shows her in bed with Jon Jones has has 7.7 million views. A video showing another AI influencer in a bed with iShowSpeed has 14.5 million views.

Users who stumble upon one of these videos might be inclined to click on the AI-influencer's username to check her bio and see if she has an OnlyFans account, as is the case with many adult content creators who promote their work on Instagram. What these users will find is an account bio that doesn’t disclose its AI generated, and a link to Fanvue, an OnlyFans competitor with more permissive policies around AI generated content. On Fanvue, these accounts do disclose that they are “AI-generated or enhanced,” and sell access to nude images and videos.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment, but removed some of the Reels I flagged.

Posting provocative AI generated media in order to funnel eyeballs to adult content platforms where AI generated porn can be monetized is now an established business. Sometimes, these AI influencers steal directly from real adult content creators by faceswapping themselves into their existing videos. Once in a while a new “meta” strategy for AI influencers will emerge and dominate the algorithm. For example, last year I wrote about people using AI to create influencers with down syndrome who sell nudes.

Some other video formats I’ve seen from AI influencers recently follow the formula I describe in this article, but rather than suggesting the influencer slept with a celebrity, it shows them sleeping with entire sports teams, African tribal chiefs, Walmart managers, and sharing a man with their mom.

Notably, celebrities are better equipped than adult content creators to take on AI accounts that are using their likeness without consent, and last year LeBron James, a frequent target of this latest meta, sent a cease-and-desist notice to a company that was making AI videos of him and sharing them on Instagram.

LeBron James' Lawyers Send Cease-and-Desist to AI Company Making Pregnant Videos of Him

Viral Instagram accounts making LeBron 'brainrot' videos have also been banned.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-13 15:43:09

Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error

A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.

Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.

The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.

Flock is aware of the exposure enabled by its own product design and has tried to do damage control with its law enforcement customers by blaming “increased public records act/FOIA activity seeking by the public,” according to an email Flock sent to police obtained via public record request. Flock has threatened Cris van Pelt, the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, by going after his web hosts and claiming that he has violated their intellectual property rights and is posting information that “poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.” In recent weeks Flock severely limited the amount of information available on its audit logs, which are designed to be a transparency tool, raising questions about how much information journalists, regulators, and government agencies will be able to get about police use of Flock cameras in the future.

“I set up HaveIBeenFlocked to show how pervasive and prevalent this monitoring is, and to show just how many searches are getting done. That information, by itself, is shocking,” van Pelt told 404 Media. “To me, as a private citizen, that’s shocking, and I think that’s kind of what Flock is trying to hide or bury.” van Pelt added that he is committed to keeping the website online.

As 404 Media has reported before, Flock’s automated license plate reader cameras are connected to local, state, and/or national “networks” of cameras. When a police officer runs a search seeking the locations of a specific license plate, they are usually not just searching cameras owned by their own jurisdiction, they are usually searching all Flock cameras in that state or in the country. Each individual search creates a record of that search on as many as 80,000 different cameras around the country.

As a compliance and transparency measure, these search records can be obtained through a “search audit,” which are essentially huge spreadsheets of specific Flock searches that contain not just the searches of local police but of all police who have ever searched that camera. Using this data, we have previously been able to report that local police are regularly giving Immigrations and Customs Enforcement side-door access to Flock cameras, and we also reported that Texas searched tens of thousands of cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion. Flock search audits have also been used to catch police who have allegedly illegally stalked people or otherwise abused the system.
An example of what search audits look like. License plate redaction done by 404 Media
Because these search audits are important tools for police transparency and accountability, they have become a popular type of public record to request for journalists, concerned citizens, privacy experts, city councils, and government regulators. In the vast majority of cases, the police departments releasing the search audit files redact the surveillance target’s license plate number. But in recent months, at least four police departments have released full Flock search audits without redacting anything at all, revealing information about a mix of more than a million individual surveillance targets, suspects, and crime victims. This means that any individual Flock customer could accidentally leak the specific search targets for millions of Flock searches nationwide; any single failure point anywhere in the country could dox the police activity and surveillance targets of other police departments elsewhere.

With the license plate information, you can determine not just what police are using Flock for, but who they are using it against. An unredacted search log file obtained by 404 Media shows more than 700,000 individual searches from June 2025 alone, performed by hundreds of law enforcement agencies nationwide, including hundreds of searches performed by US Border Patrol agents. They show the specific date and time of a search, the name of the officer who did the search, sometimes show the specific case number of a search, the police-stated “reason” of a search, as well as the number of Flock cameras searched. Crucially, they also show the license plate, allowing someone to connect a specific license plate and therefore person to reasons like “drug trafficking,” “fugitive,” “narc,” immigration enforcement, “homicide,” “oil and gas theft,” etc. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation found, they also expose the victims of a host of biased policing tactics and dubious searches, including hundreds of searches of “No Kings” protesters, audit log reasons that included “possible gypsy,” and the search for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.

“EFF has had this [unredacted] information but we’ve chosen not to publish it or share it because of concerns about doxing people—our policy is not to release data of surveillance victims,” Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, told me.

404 Media has also had unredacted versions of some of these files for months but has not published any of them. At first, just one or two police departments failed to do redactions. In recent weeks, however, it has become clear that many police departments are not redacting license plates; this led van Pelt to create HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website that collates many of these search audit logs and allows people to search individual license plates to determine if they have been run through the Flock system, and if so, where and when. The number of police departments who have now released fully unredacted logs has become so numerous that it can no longer be ignored, and the releases have caused Flock to drastically reduce the amount of information that can be obtained from a search audit.

Rather than simply making sure that search audits exported for public records requests do not include license plates or are redacted by default, Flock has totally overhauled how the search logs work; in a December email to police customers obtained by 404 Media, Flock said that “to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs will no longer include: officer names, specific plates searched, vehicle fingerprint information.”

To be clear, Flock is not turning on license plate redaction by default: It is fully withholding officer names and license plate information from the police departments themselves.

“Flock is doing their best to have it both ways where they have no responsibility and also no accountability to the communities where their cameras are placed,” Chris Gilliard, privacy expert and author of the forthcoming Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media. “Shoddy data hygiene by law enforcement is not seen as a threat or danger but accountability and transparency are.”
The letter from Cyble
In recent weeks, Flock, via a third party company called Cyble, has threatened van Pelt by filing bogus intellectual property takedown requests with Cloudflare and Hetzner, two of his web hosts. Takedown requests filed by Cyble state the site “presents a significant security risk to our client and its users. The website poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger, in clear violation of our client’s users’ rights and its intellectual property rights. The website publicly and deliberately discloses extensive, sensitive information obtained from Flock and its automated license plate reader systems with the apparent intent to undermine law enforcement operations. It hosts three searchable databases that expose critical operational intelligence. Such disclosure of sensitive data substantially heightens the risk to officers and the public and necessitates urgent remedial action.”

“Please be informed that our client is a renowned company in the US and directly works with government agencies,” it continues. “In view of the above, kindly suspend the services and stop the hosting of the website at the earliest convenience.”

The EFF’s Gagliano told 404 Media that, though the EFF hasn’t published license plate information, “these takedowns are bogus. They’re blatantly misrepresenting saying this data is obtained from Flock—no, it’s data obtained from public records. There are issues around deciding whether you should make it all widely available, but it was received from public government agencies and Flock really doesn’t have much standing to be taken down.”

Cloudflare refused to take action on HaveIBeenFlocked, saying that it “found insufficient evidence of a violation,” according to an appeal email van Pelt shared with 404 Media.

Flock told 404 Media in an email “That website that is doxxing cops during active investigations. Today, we're busy working with journalists to cover the fact that our technology was pivotal in cracking open the case that found the Brown university / MIT serial killer in New England. If you'd like to report the news that matters, we'd be happy to speak to you about bringing justice to victims instead of activists trying to let murderers go free.” Cyble did not respond to a request for comment.

In a December email to police customers titled “What you Need to Know About Recent Online Disclosures,” a Flock executive said “We are aware that agencies across the country, particularly in states with broad public-records laws, are seeing increased PRA/FOIA activity seeking, among other things, LPR search logs. Recently, a third-party website began aggregating search information that has been released through these public-records processes.

We recognize that seeing investigative search activity displayed publicly can raise understandable concerns about officer safety, investigative integrity, community perception, and compliance with state law.”

The email added “To be clear: Flock has not been breached or compromised. We are CJIS compliant. Regardless, we are continuing to make changes to our Product to better protect you and your officers.”

That much is true, because in this case the sensitive material released was taxpayer-funded public records willingly released by police departments around the country.

On the HaveIBeenFlocked website, van Pelt defends his decision to run the site: “This website aggregates and reformats already-public information. This information represents a fraction of what's being shared with Flock and its government, commercial, and private partners on a daily basis,” he wrote. “Policies exist to prevent the release of this information—they are not adhered to. Laws and regulations exist to enforce the policies—they go unenforced. Police, Flock, and politicians have been ignoring these problems for years while your private movements continue to be collected, catalogued, sold and traded.”

“This website exposes the problem because, as the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Law enforcement and legislation are needed to address the cause of the problem, and we highly encourage you to bring this site to the attention of your legislators,” he added. “We believe mass surveillance has no place in a free society, and this data should not be collected to begin with. If it is collected, warrants should be used, lookups should be rare, and police and private parties, like Flock and HaveIBeenFlocked.com, should not be permitted to act without functional restraints or oversight.”

A police accountability advocate who has seen the unredacted search audits but asked to remain anonymous because Flock has suggested such people are attacking the company and the police told 404 Media that the situation highlights broader problems with Flock.

"It could lead one to the conclusion that if that is an unacceptable outcome for customers, maybe they shouldn't be participating in a nationwide surveillance system," they said. "The platform is designed to collect as much data as possible. They want to make that as widely accessible and searchable as possible. They need the network effect so they can continue collecting data for their AI models. So, I struggle with the company’s framing of what’s happened. That framing is an attempt to dodge accountability for what their platform is doing which is collecting data without people's (and often informed elected officials') consent."

Flock going after HaveIBeenFlocked on dubious intellectual property grounds is similar to its strategy against DeFlock, a website that hosts an open source map of ALPR locations.

In a separate December email to Jim Williams, the police chief of Staunton, Virginia, Flock CEO Garrett Langley claimed that public records were being weaponized against the company. Langley claimed the company and police are under “coordinated attack” by activists “trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us.”

“Flock is building tools to help you fight the real crime affecting communities across the country. Many activists don't like that. Let's call this what it is: Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack. The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines,” Langley wrote. “They're also trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us. Make no mistake, we're fighting this fight for you, and, I hope, with you. I remain committed to building world-class technology to help you keep your communities safe. And doing so in a transparent, secure, and privacy centric way.”

Williams responded to Langley:

“As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack, I do not believe that this is so. I have dedicated the last 41 years of my life to serving the citizens of the City of Staunton as a police officer, the last 22 as the police chief,” he wrote. “What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action.”

In a press release, the Staunton called Langley’s email “unsolicited” and said “The City of Staunton wants to make it clear that the Flock Safety CEO’s narrative does not reflect the city’s values.” Staunton canceled its Flock contract days later.

Flock Threatens Open Source Developer Mapping Its Surveillance Cameras

The surveillance camera company Flock sent DeFlock a cease-and-desist. DeFlock is fighting back.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-12 16:46:29

How Benn Jordan Discovered Flock's Cameras Were Left Streaming to the Internet

On the podcast this week, I talked to YouTuber Benn Jordan, who has done some of our favorite reporting on Flock, the automated license plate reader surveillance company. A couple months ago, he found vulnerabilities in some of Flock’s license plate reader cameras.
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I have been following Benn’s work for a while, and soon after that video came out, he reached out to me to tell me he had learned that some of Flock’s Condor cameras were left live-streaming to the open internet. In this episode, we discuss how he discovered the issue and what happened next.
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Articles and videos discussed:

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.
404 MediaJason Koebler

youtube.com/embed/vU1-uiUlHTo?…youtube.com/embed/uB0gr7Fh6lY?…youtube.com/embed/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?…

Megaphone Embeddable Player

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404 Media

2026-01-12 15:09:28

'Shame Thrives in Seclusion:' How AI Porn Chatbots Isolate Us All

Noelle Perdue recently joined us on the 404 Media podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about AI porn, censorship, age verification legislation, and a lot more. One part of our conversation really resonated with listeners – the idea that erotic chatbots are increasing the isolation so many people already feel – so we asked her to expand on that thought in written form.

Today’s incognito window, a pseudo friend to perverts and ad-evaders alike, is nearly useless. It doesn’t protect against malware and your data is still tracked. Its main purpose is, ostensibly, to prevent browsing history from being saved locally on your computer.

But the concept of privatizing your browsing history feels old-fashioned, vestigial from a time when computers were such a production that they had their own room in the house. Back then, the wholesome desktop computer was shared between every person of clicking-age in a household. It had to be navigated with some amount of hygiene, lest the other members learn about your affinity for Jerk Off Instruction.

Even before desktop computers, pornography was unavoidably communal whether or not you were into that kind of thing. Part of the difficulty in getting ahold of porn was the embarrassment of having to interact with others along the way; whether it was the movie store clerk showing you the back of the store or the gas station cashier reaching for a dirty magazine, it was nearly impossible to access explicit material without interacting with someone else, somewhere along the line. Porn theaters were hotbeds for queer cruising, with (usually men) gathering to watch porn, jerk off and engage in mostly-anonymous sexual encounters. Even a lack of interaction was communal, like the old tradition of leaving Playboys or Hustlers in the woods for other curious porn aficionados to find.
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With the internet came access, yes, but also privacy. Suddenly, credit card processing put beaded curtain security guards out of business, and forums had more centrefolds than every issue of Playboy combined. Porn theaters shut down—partially due to stricter zoning ordinances and 80’s sex-panic pressure from their neighbors, but also because the rise of streaming pay-per-view and the internet meant people had more options to stay in the comfort of their homes with access to virtually whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

Today, with computers in our pockets and slung against our shoulders, even browsing history has become private by circumstance. Computers are now “personal devices,” rather than communal machines—what we do with them is our business. We have no corporate privacy, of course; our data is being harvested at record volumes. Instead, in exchange for shipping off all our most sensitive information, we have tremendous, historically unheard-of interpersonal privacy. At least, Gen Z are likely the last generation to have embarrassing “my parents looked at my browsing history” anecdotes. We’ve left that information to be seen and sorted by Palantir interns.

Most recently in technology’s ongoing love-hate affair with porn, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced he was going to allow ChatGPT to generate erotica, joining hundreds of AI-powered porn platforms offering highly tailored generated content at the push of a button.
youtube.com/embed/9eqMXBwWtkA?…
Now, from the user’s perspective, there are no humans at any point in this interaction. The consumer is in their room, requesting a machine, and the machine spits out a product. You are entirely alone at every step of this process.

As a porn historian, I think alarm bells should be going off here. Sexual dysfunction thrives in shame, and shame thrives in seclusion. Often, people who talk to me about their issues with sex and pornography worry that what they want isn’t “normal.” One thing that pornography teaches is that there is no normal—chances are, if you like something, someone else does, too. Finding pornography of something you’re into is proof that you are not alone in your desires, that someone else liked it enough to make it, and others liked it enough to buy it. You aren’t a freak—or maybe you are, but at least you’re in good company.

Grok’s AI Sexual Abuse Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
With xAI’s Grok generating endless semi-nude images of women and girls without their consent, it follows a years-long legacy of rampant abuse on the platform.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Other people can also provide a useful temperature check- I’m all for nonnormative sexuality and fantasy, but it’s good to get a tone read every once in a while on where the hungry animal has taken you. Strange things happen in isolation, and the dehumanization of sexual imagery by literally removing the human allows people to disconnect personhood from desire, a practice it serves us well to avoid. Compartmentalization of inner sexuality so far as to have it be completely disconnected from what another person can offer you (or what you can offer another person) can lead to sexual frustration at best and genuine harm at worst. This isn’t hypothetical; We know that chatbots have the power to lure vulnerable people, especially the elderly and young, away from reality and into situations where they’re hurt or taken advantage of in real life. And while real, human sex workers endure decades of censorship and marginalization online from industry giants that make it harder and harder to earn a living online, the AI chatbot platforms of the world push ahead, even exposing minors to explicit content or creating child sexual abuse imagery with seemingly zero consequence.

I don’t think anyone needs to project their porn use on the side of their house. Sexual boundaries exist for a reason, and everyone is entitled to their own internal world. But I do think in a period of increasing sexual shame, open communication is a valuable tool. Sex is human, sex is animal, sex is social. Even in periods of celibacy or self-pleasure, sexual desire connects us, person-to-person—even if in practice you happen to be connecting with your right hand.

Noelle is a writer, producer, and Internet porn historian whose works has been published in Wired, TheWashington Post, Slate, and more. You can find her on Substack here.

How private is your browser’s Private mode? Research into porn suggests “not very”

Data brokers like Facebook, Google, and Oracle might know more than you think.

^{Jim Salter (Ars Technica)}

404 Media

2026-01-10 14:00:07

‘Gifted’ Dogs Learn Human Language, Study Finds

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that lurked in the dark, pulsated with light, wagged a tail, and called it a night.

First, scientists have yet again spotted a bizarre object in space that has never been seen before—the universe just keeps serving them up. Then: news from the biggest star in the sky, a tale of eavesdropping dogs, and a jellyfish sleepover.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

You don’t want to be on this Cloud-9

Anand, Gagandeep S. et al. “The First RELHIC? Cloud-9 is a Starless Gas Cloud.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have glimpsed a new type of cosmic object—a starless clump of dark matter that never quite worked up the oomph to become a galaxy. Known as Cloud-9, the entity is located about 14 million light years away and likely provides the first look at an ancient dark matter halo.

Dark matter, as you may have heard, is weird stuff that has never been directly detected or identified, but nonetheless accounts for almost all matter in the universe. In the early universe, clumps of dark matter formed halos that attracted gas, sparked star formation, and evolved into the first galaxies. But while all galaxies appear to have dark matter halos, not all dark matter halos turned into galaxies.

Scientists have long speculated that some halos may have never accumulated the right amount of mass to make a star-studded galaxy. For years, astronomers have searched for the gravitational signatures of these dark starless “failed galaxies,” which are known as Reionization-Limited H I Clouds (RELHICs).

Now, a team reports that the first clear RELHIC candidate ever discovered, providing support for the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, which is the current working framework of the universe.
Digitized Sky Survey image covering a 10′ × 10′ region around Cloud-9. Image: Anand, Gagandeep S. et al.
“The abundance of halos far exceeds that of known galaxies, implying that not all halos are able to host luminous galaxies,” said researchers led by Gagandeep S. Anand of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This has been interpreted to mean that galaxies only form in halos that exceed a ‘critical’ mass.’”

“Our results make Cloud-9 the leading RELHIC candidate,” the team continued. “This provides strong support for a cornerstone prediction of the Lambda cold dark matter model, namely the existence of gas-filled starless dark matter halos on subgalactic mass scales, and constrains the present-day threshold halo mass for galaxy formation.”

Cloud-9 might one day accumulate enough mass to pass the threshold for star formation, allowing it to eventually graduate into a galaxy. But for now, it is a galaxy school flunkie.

In other news…

Big star go boom soon

Th van Loon, Jacco et al. “A phoenix rises from the ashes: WOH G64 is still a red supergiant, for now.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

WOH G64, one of the largest stars in the sky, is nearing its death. At about 2,000 times the size of the Sun, this supergiant would extend beyond Saturn if it were placed in our solar system.

Scientists have speculated that the recent dimming of the senescent star might signal a transition from a red supergiant to a yellow hypergiant, making it one step closer to supernova. But a new study reveals evidence that WOH G64 “is currently a red supergiant” and its changing light may be influenced by a companion star in orbit around it, making this a binary system.
Concept art of WOH G64. image: ESO/L. Calçada
“For a long time, WOH G64 was known as the most extreme red supergiant outside our Galaxy,” said researchers led by Jacco Th. van Loon of Keele University. “However, in a matter of years it has faded” and “its pulsations have become suppressed.”

“We have presented evidence that the remarkable changes witnessed in the 21st-century in the optical brightness and spectrum of the most extreme known extragalactic red supergiant, WOH G64 may be due to binary interaction,” the team continued, noting that “we may be witnessing the birth of a…supernova progenitor.”

Fortunately, this time bomb is located 160,000 light years away, so we are well beyond the blast radius. Whenever WOH G64 does explode, the supernova could be bright enough to see with the naked eye from Earth, despite its location far outside the Milky Way.

Learn with doggo-lingo

Dror, Shany et al. “Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants.” Science.

It’s not your imagination: Your dog might actually be a really good listener. While it’s well-known that dogs respond to a variety of commands, researchers have now demonstrated that some pooches, known as Gifted Word Learners, can pick up new words just by passively overhearing their owners’ conversations.

Over a series of experiments, researchers gave dogs fun toys to play with, which their owners then named in conversations that were not directed at the dogs. The pets were then able to identify the toys by the labels at a rate significantly above what would be expected by chance, even though they had never been directly taught the words.
A dog that participated in the study, enjoying the toys. Image: Don Harvey
The findings suggest that some dogs may have sociocognitive skills parallel to young toddlers, and further confirms that a variety of animals can demonstrate various degrees of language comprehension. But the best part is the following detail about how the effervescent joy of dogs was accounted for in the experimental design.

“Because dogs are neophilic and often get excited by new toys, we gave them ample opportunities to interact with the toys without hearing their labels,” said researchers led by Shany Dror of University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

Science completed? Check. Dogs got loads of playtime? Check. Win-win.

Jellyfish naps > cat naps

Aguillon, Raphaël et al. “DNA damage modulates sleep drive in basal cnidarians with divergent chronotypes.” Nature Communications.

We’ll close by yawning and going back to bed—a waterbed in this case, because this is a story about the sleep cycles of marine animals. To probe the broader evolutionary purpose of sleep, scientists monitored periods of slumber and wakefulness in the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea andromeda and the anemone Nematostella vectensis.

The results revealed that these animals had remarkably similar sleeping habits to people. “Like humans, both species require a total of approximately 8 hours of sleep per day,” said researchers led by Raphaël Aguillon, who conducted the work at Bar-Ilan University, and is now at IBPC Paris-Sorbonne University.

“Notably, similar to findings in primates and flies, a midday nap was also observed in C. andromeda,” the team added.

Talk about sleeping with the fishes! The upshot of the study is that sleep has evolved across all animals with a nervous system to help repair damaged DNA, a benefit that is apparently worth the vulnerability of a resting state. But for our weekend purposes, my takeaway is that even jellyfish enjoy a midday nap, so go ahead and take that siesta.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NASA’s Hubble Examines Cloud-9, First of New Type of Object

A team using Hubble uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud, a remnant of early galaxy formation.

^{NASA Hubble Mission Team (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2026-01-09 18:09:17

Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'

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 viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show.

EMANUEL: I’ve seen a lot of terrible videos in my years online but by far the most upsetting type of video shows police using excessive force and especially videos of police killing people. There are more graphic videos from battlefields and other dark corners of the internet but what happened to Renee Nicole Good this week could happen to anyone living in America, and when I imagine the tragedy that has been visited on her loved ones I can’t help but imagine how easily I or anyone I care about can find ourselves in the same situation.

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Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-09 15:21:08

Masterful Gambit: Musk Attempts to Monetize Grok's Wave of Sexual Abuse Imagery

Elon Musk, owner of the former social media network turned deepfake porn site X, is pushing people to pay for its nonconsensual intimate image generator Grok, meaning some of the app’s tens of millions of users are being hit with a paywall when they try to create nude images of random women doing sexually explicit things within seconds.

Some users trying to generate images on X using Grok receive a reply from the chatbot pushing them toward subscriptions: “Image generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers. You can subscribe to unlock these features.”

Users who fork over $8 a month can still reply to random images of random women and girls directly on X and tag in Grok with things like “make her wear clear tapes with tiny black censor bar covering her private part protecting her privacy and make her chest and hips grow largee[sic] as she squatting with leg open widely facing back, while head turn back looking to camera.” These images are still visible in everyone’s X feed, subscribers or not.

On the Grok app, a subscription to SuperGrok ($29.99/month) or SuperGrok Heavy ($299.99/month) allow users to generate images even faster. On Thursday, I received messages in the Grok app several times warning me that usage rates for the app were higher than normal and that I could pay to skip the wait.

As the Verge reported this morning, this paywall is very leaky. It’s still possible to generate images using Grok in a variety of ways, but replying directly to someone’s post by tagging @[url=https://bird.makeup/users/grok]Grok[/url] returns the “limited to subscribers” message.

Grok’s AI Sexual Abuse Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
With xAI’s Grok generating endless semi-nude images of women and girls without their consent, it follows a years-long legacy of rampant abuse on the platform.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

As many legacy news outlets have already reported, Musk improved the subscription revenue funnel on his money-burning app following an outcry against these extremely popular uses of the app. “X Limits Grok Image Tool To Subscribers After Deepfake Outcry,” Deadline reported. “Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery,” wrote the Guardian. “Elon Musk restricts Grok’s image tools following a wave of non-consensual deepfakes of women and children,” Fortune wrote.

Based on these headlines, you may be thinking, This is an uncharacteristic show of accountability and perhaps even self reflection from the billionaire technocrat white supremacist sympathizer who owns X.com, wow! But as with all things Musk does, this is a business move to monetize the long-established harassment factory he’s owned for three years and has yet to figure out how to make profitable. After years of attempting to push users toward a subscription model by placing meaningless status signifiers behind a paywall and making the site so toxic it bleeds users by the millions, he might have found a way to do it: by monetizing abuse at the source. Several other AI industry giants have already figured out that sexual content is where the money’s at, and Musk appears to be catching up. Putting the nonconsensual sexual images behind a paywall is also what every “nudify” and “undress” app and image generator platform on the market already does.

On Thursday, in the middle of Grok’s CSAM shitstorm, Bloomberg reported that xAI is looking at “a net loss of $1.46 billion for the September quarter, up from $1 billion in the first quarter,” according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg. “In the first nine months of the year, it spent $7.8 billion in cash.” It’s too early to speculate, but making the people who are tagging @[url=https://bird.makeup/users/grok]Grok[/url] under the posts of women they don’t know and writing prompts like “make her bend over on all fours doggy style” multiple times a second pay for the privilege could be a play to get the company back in the black.
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In addition to using Grok on X.com on desktop, It’s also still easy to generate images and videos in the Grok app without a subscription, which is still available on the Apple and Google app stores, despite blatantly breaking their rules against non-consensual material and pornography. The app and underground Telegram groups are where the really bad stuff is, anyway. Apple and Google have not replied to my request for comment about why the app is still available.

Signing up for X Premium or SuperGrok requires handing over your payment information, name associated with your credit card, and phone number. It also comes with the risk of having all of that hacked, stolen, and released to the dark web in the next big data breach of the platform.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated how many years ago Musk bought Twitter.

Massive breach of Elon Musk's X allegedly leaks over 200 million users' email addresses

Billions of X accounts could be affected overall

^{Matt Binder (Mashable)}

404 Media

2026-01-08 15:44:35

Grok's AI Sexual Abuse Didn't Come Out of Nowhere

The biggest AI story of the first week of 2026 involves Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot turning the social media platform into an AI child sexual imagery factory, seemingly overnight.

I’ve said several times on the 404 Media podcast and elsewhere that we could devote an entire beat to “loser shit.” What’s happening this week with Grok—designed to be the horny edgelord AI companion counterpart to the more vanilla ChatGPT or Claude—definitely falls into that category. People are endlessly prompting Grok to make nude and semi-nude images of women and girls, without their consent, directly on their X feeds and in their replies.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve said absolutely everything there is to say about this topic. I’ve been writing about nonconsensual synthetic imagery before we had half a dozen different acronyms for it, before people called it “deepfakes” and way before “cheapfakes” and “shallowfakes” were coined, too. Almost nothing about the way society views this material has changed in the seven years since it’s come about, because fundamentally—once it’s left the camera and made its way to millions of people’s screens—the behavior behind sharing it is not very different from images made with a camera or stolen from someone’s Google Drive or private OnlyFans account. We all agreed in 2017 that making nonconsensual nudes of people is gross and weird, and today, occasionally, someone goes to jail for it, but otherwise the industry is bigger than ever. What’s happening on X right now is an escalation of the way it’s always been, and almost everywhere on the internet.

💡
Do you know anything else about what's going on inside X? Or are you someone who's been targeted by abusive AI imagery? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

The internet has an incredibly short memory. It would be easy to imagine Twitter Before Elon as a harmonious and quaint microblogging platform, considering the four years After Elon have, comparatively, been a rolling outhouse fire. But even before it was renamed X, Twitter was one of the places for this content. It used to be (and for some, still is) an essential platform for getting discovered and going viral for independent content creators, and as such, it’s also where people are massively harassed. A few years ago, it was where people making sexually explicit AI images went to harass female cosplayers. Before that, it was (and still is) host to real-life sexual abuse material, where employers could search your name and find videos of the worst day of your life alongside news outlets and memes. Before that, it was how Gamergate made the jump from 4chan to the mainstream. The things that happen in Telegram chats and private Discord channels make the leap to Twitter and end up on the news.

What makes the situation this week with Grok different is that it’s all happening directly on X. Now, you don’t need to use Stable Diffusion or Nano Banana or Civitai to generate nonconsensual imagery and then take it over to Twitter to do some damage. X has become the Everything App that Elon always wanted, if “everything” means all the tools you need to fuck up someone’s life, in one place.

Inside the Telegram Channel Jailbreaking Grok Over and Over Again
Putting people in bikinis is just the tip of the iceberg. On Telegram, users are finding ways to make Grok do far worse.
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

This is the culmination of years and years of rampant abuse on the platform. Reporting from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the organization platforms report to when they find instances of child sexual abuse material which then reports to the relevant authorities, shows that Twitter, and eventually X, has been one of the leading hosts of CSAM every year for the last seven years. In 2019, the platform reported 45,726 instances of abuse to NCMEC’s Cyber Tipline. In 2020, it was 65,062. In 2024, it was 686,176. These numbers should be considered with the caveat that platforms voluntarily report to NCMEC, and more reports can also mean stronger moderation systems that catch more CSAM when it appears. But the scale of the problem is still apparent. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter was a moderation clown show much of the time. But moderation on Elon Musk’s X, especially against abusive imagery, is a total failure.

In 2023, the BBC reported that insiders believed the company was “no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation” following Musk’s takeover in 2022 and subsequent sacking of thousands of workers on moderation teams. This is all within the context that one of Musk’s go-to insults for years was “pedophile,” to the point that the harassment he stoked drove a former Twitter employee into hiding and went to federal court because he couldn't stop calling someone a “pedo.” Invoking pedophelia is a common thread across many conspiracy networks, including QAnon—something he’s dabbled in—but Musk is enabling actual child sexual abuse on the platform he owns.

Generative AI is making all of this worse. In 2024, NCMEC saw 6,835 reports of generative artificial intelligence related to child sexual exploitation (across the internet, not just X). By September 2025, the year-to-date reports had hit 440,419. Again, these are just the reports identified by NCMEC, not every instance online, and as such is likely a conservative estimate.

When I spoke to online child sexual exploitation experts in December 2023, following our investigation into child abuse imagery found in LAION-5B, they told me that this kind of material isn’t victimless just because the images don’t depict “real” children or sex acts. AI image generators like Grok and many others are used by offenders to groom and blackmail children, and muddy the waters for investigators to discern actual photographs from fake ones.

Grok’s AI CSAM Shitshow
We are experiencing world events like the kidnapping of Maduro through the lens of the most depraved AI you can imagine.
404 MediaJason Koebler

“Rather than coercing sexual content, offenders are increasingly using GAI tools to create explicit images using the child’s face from public social media or school or community postings, then blackmail them,” NCMEC wrote in September. “This technology can be used to create or alter images, provide guidelines for how to groom or abuse children or even simulate the experience of an explicit chat with a child. It’s also being used to create nude images, not just sexually explicit ones, that are sometimes referred to as ‘deepfakes.’ Often done as a prank in high schools, these images are having a devastating impact on the lives and futures of mostly female students when they are shared online.”

The only reason any of this is being discussed now, and the only reason it’s ever discussed in general—going back to Gamergate and beyond—is because many normies, casuals, “the mainstream,” and cable news viewers have just this week learned about the problem and can’t believe how it came out of nowhere. In reality, deepfakes came from a longstanding hobby community dedicated to putting women’s faces on porn in Photoshop, and before that with literal paste and scissors in pinup magazines. And as Emanuel wrote this week, not even Grok’s AI CSAM problem popped up out of nowhere; it’s the result of weeks of quiet, obsessive work by a group of people operating just under the radar.

And this is where we are now: Today, several days into Grok’s latest scandal, people are using an AI image generator made by a man who regularly boosts white supremacist thought to create images of a woman slaughtered by an ICE agent in front of the whole world less than 24 hours ago to “put her in a bikini.

As journalist Katie Notopoulos pointed out, a quick search of terms like “make her” shows people prompting Grok with images of random women, saying things like “Make her wear clear tapes with tiny black censor bar covering her private part protecting her privacy and make her chest and hips grow largee[sic] as she squatting with leg open widely facing back, while head turn back looking to camera” at a rate of several times a minute, every minute, for days.

A good way to get a sense of just how fast the AI undressed/nudify requests to Grok are coming in is to look at the requests for it t.co/ISMpp2PdFU
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 7, 2026

In 2018, less than a year after reporting that first story on deepfakes, I wrote about how it’s a serious mistake to ignore the fact that nonconsensual imagery, synthetic or not, is a societal sickness and not something companies can guardrail against into infinity. “Users feed off one another to create a sense that they are the kings of the universe, that they answer to no one. This logic is how you get incels and pickup artists, and it’s how you get deepfakes: a group of men who see no harm in treating women as mere images, and view making and spreading algorithmically weaponized revenge porn as a hobby as innocent and timeless as trading baseball cards,” I wrote at the time. “That is what’s at the root of deepfakes. And the consequences of forgetting that are more dire than we can predict.”

A little over two years ago, when AI-generated sexual images of Taylor Swift flooding X were the thing everyone was demanding action and answers for, we wrote a prediction: “Every time we publish a story about abuse that’s happening with AI tools, the same crowd of ‘techno-optimists’ shows up to call us prudes and luddites. They are absolutely going to hate the heavy-handed policing of content AI companies are going to force us all into because of how irresponsible they’re being right now, and we’re probably all going to hate what it does to the internet.”

It’s possible we’re still in a very weird fuck-around-and-find-out period before that hammer falls. It’s also possible the hammer is here, in the form of recently-enacted federal laws like the Take It Down Act and more than two dozen piecemeal age verification bills in the U.S. and more abroad that make using the internet an M. C. Escher nightmare, where the rules around adult content shift so much we’re all jerking it to egg yolks and blurring our feet in vacation photos. What matters most, in this bizarre and frequently disturbing era, is that the shareholders are happy.

Elon Musk's xAI raises $20 billion from investors including Nvidia, Cisco, Fidelity

Elon Musk's AI said it raised $20 billion in new funding after CNBC reported in November that a financing round would value the company at about $230 billion.

^{Lora Kolodny (CNBC)}

404 Media

2026-01-08 14:49:12

Texans Are Fighting a 6,000 Acre Nuclear-Powered Datacenter

Billionaire Toby Neugebauer laughed when the Amarillo City Council asked him how he planned to handle the waste his planned datacenter would produce.

“I’m not laughing in disrespect to your question,” Neugebauer said. He explained that he’d just met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had made it clear that any nuclear waste Neugebauer’s datacenter generated needed to go to Nevada, a state that’s not taking nuclear waste at the moment. “The answer is we don't have a great long term solution for how we’re doing nuclear waste.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The meeting happened on October 28, 2025 and was one of a series of appearances Neugebauer has put in before Amarillo’s leaders as he attempts to realize Project Matador: a massive 5,769 acre datacenter being built in the Texas Panhandle and constructed by Fermi America, a company he founded with former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

If built, Project Matador would be one of the largest datacenters in the world at around 18 million square feet. “What we’re talking about is creating the epicenter for artificial intelligence in the United States,” Neugebauer told the council. According to Neugebauer, the United States is in an existential race to build AI infrastructure. He sees it as a national security issue.

“You’re blessed to sit on the best place to develop AI compute in America,” he told Amarillo. “I just finished with Palantir, which is our nation’s tip of the spear in the AI war. They know that this is the place that we must do this. They’ve looked at every site on the planet. I was at the Department of War yesterday. So anyone who thinks this is some casual conversation about the mission critical aspect of this is just not being truthful.”

But it’s unclear if Palantir wants any part of Project Matador. One unnamed client—rumored to be Amazon—dropped out of the project in December and cancelled a $150 million contract with Fermi America. The news hit the company’s stock hard, sending its value into a tailspin and triggering a class action lawsuit from investors.

Yet construction continues. The plan says it’ll take 11 years to build out the massive datacenter, which will first be powered by a series of natural gas generators before the planned nuclear reactors come online.

Amarillo residents aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect. A group called 806 Data Center Resistance has formed in opposition to the project’s construction. Kendra Kay, a tattoo artist in the area and a member of 806, told 404 Media that construction was already noisy and spiking electricity bills for locals.

“When we found out how big it was, none of us could really comprehend it,” she said. “We went out to the site and we were like, ‘Oh my god, this thing is huge.’ There’s already construction underway of one of four water tanks that hold three million gallons of water.”

For Kay and others, water is the core issue. It’s a scarce resource in the panhandle and Amarillo and other cities in the area already fight for every drop. “The water is the scariest part,” she said. “They’re asking for 2.5 million gallons per day. They said that they would come back, probably in six months, to ask for five million gallons per day. And then, after that, by 2027 they would come back and ask for 10 million gallons per day.”
youtube.com/embed/qDgIPg1Epb4?…
During an October 15 city council meeting, Neugebauer told the city that Fermi would get its water “with or without” an agreement from the city. “The only difference is whether Amarillo benefits.” To many people it sounded like a threat, but Neugebauer got his deal and the city agreed to sell water to Fermi America for double the going rate.

“It wasn’t a threat,” Neugebauer said during another meeting on October 28. “I know people took my answer…as a threat. I think it’s a win-win. I know there are other water projects we can do…we fully got that the water was going to be issue 1, 2, and 3.”

“We can pay more for water than the consumer can. Which allows you all capital to be able to re-invest in other water projects,” he said. “I think what you’re gonna find is having a customer who can pay way more than what you wanna burden your constituents with will actually enhance your water availability issues.”

According to Neugebauer and plans filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the datacenter would generate and consume 11 gigawatts of power. The bulk of that, eventually, would be generated by four nuclear reactors. But nuclear reactors are complicated and expensive to make and everyone who has attempted to build one in the past few decades has gone over budget and they weren’t trying to build nuclear power plants in the desert.

Nuclear reactors, like datacenters, consume a lot of water. Because of that, most nuclear reactors are constructed near massive bodies of water and often near the ocean. “The viewpoint that nuclear reactors can only be built by streams and oceans is actually the opposite,” Neugebauer told the Amarillo city council in the meeting on October 28.

As evidence he pointed to the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. The massive Palo Verde plant is the only nuclear plant in the world not constructed near a ready source of water. It gets the water it needs by taking on the waste and sewage water of every city and town nearby.

That’s not the plan with Project Matador, which will use water sold to it by Amarillo and pulled from the nearby Ogallala Aquifer. “I am concerned that we’re going to run out of water and that this is going to change it from us having 30 years worth of water for agriculture to much less very quickly,” Kay told 404 Media.

The Ogallala Aquifer runs under parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It’s the primary source of water for the Texas panhandle and it’s drying out.

“They don’t know how much faster because, despite how quickly this thing is moving, we don’t have any idea how much water they’re realistically going to use or need, so we don’t even know how to calculate the difference,” Kay said. “Below Lubbock, they’ve been running out of water for a while. The priority of this seems really stupid.”

According to Kay, communities near the datacenter feel trapped as they watch the construction grind on. “They’ve all lived here for several generations…they’re being told that this is inevitable. Fermi is going up to them and telling them ‘this is going to happen whether you like it or not so you might as well just sell me your property.’”

Kay said she and other activists have been showing up to city council meetings to voice their concerns and tell leaders not to approve permits for the datacenter and nuclear plants. Other communities across the country have successfully pushed datacenter builders out of their community. “But Texas is this other beast,” Kay said.

Jacinta Gonzalez, the head of programs for MediaJustice and her team have helped 806 Data Center Resistance get up and running and teaching it tactics they’ve seen pay off in other states. “In Tucson, Arizona we were able to see the city council vote ‘no’ to offer water to Project Blue, which was a huge proposed Amazon datacenter happening there,” she said. “If you look around, everywhere from Missouri to Indiana to places in Georgia, we’re seeing communities pass moratoriums, we’re seeing different projects withdraw their proposals because communities find out about it and are able to mobilize and organize against this.”

“The community in Amarillo is still figuring out what that’s going to look like for them,” she said. “These are really big interests. Rick Perry. Palantir. These are not folks who are used to hearing ‘no’ or respecting community wishes. So the community will have to be really nimble and up for a fight. We don’t know what will happen if we organize, but we definitely know what will happen if we don’t.”

Tucson City Council rejects Project Blue data center amid intense community pressure

The Tucson City Council voted to reject the proposed Project Blue data center— tied to Amazon — after weeks of community pushback.

^{Yana Kunichoff (AZ Luminaria)}

404 Media

2026-01-08 14:00:08

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.

Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.

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Do you know anything else about this tool? Do you work for ICE, CBP, or another 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.

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.

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Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 22:25:03

DHS Is Lying To You

A maroon Honda Pilot SUV sits perpendicular across a residential road in Minneapolis. At the time, federal authorities were in the neighborhood as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recently announced surge of thousands of officials. A silver Nissan Titan drives up the road and stops because the Honda is blocking its path. Two officers dressed in body armor, pouches, and badges saying “police” exit the Nissan.

The two people walk towards the Honda. Someone can be heard saying “get out of the fucking car.” One of them tries to open the driver’s door and reach through the open window. The driver of the Honda reverses and turns, getting straighter with the road. The driver then slowly accelerates and starts to turn to the right, leveling the car out with its front pointing away from the two officers.

A third officer, who has been standing on the other side of the road, pulls out a firearm while the car is turning away from him and fires into the car three times. The officer fires two of the shots when the vehicle is already well past him. He is not in front of the car, but to the side. The officer calmly holsters his weapon.

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DHS Is Lying To You About ICE Shooting a Woman

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 16:06:06

Inside the Telegram Channel Jailbreaking Grok Over and Over Again

For the past two months I’ve been following a Telegram community tricking Grok into generating nonconsensual sexual images and videos of real people with increasingly convoluted methods.

As countless images on X over the last week once again showed us, it doesn’t take much to get Elon Musk’s “based” AI model to create nonconsensual images. As Jason wrote Monday, all users have to do is reply to an image of a woman and ask Grok to “put a bikini on her,” and it will reply with that image, even if the person in the photograph is a minor. As I reported back in May, people also managed to create nonconsensual nudes by replying to images posted to X and asking Grok to “remove her clothes.”

These issues are bad enough, but on Telegram, a community of thousands are working around the clock to make Grok produce far worse. They share Grok-generated videos of real women taking their clothes off and graphic nonconsensual videos of any kind of sexual act these users can imagine and slip by Grok’s guardrails, including blowjobs, penetration, choking, and bondage. The channel, which has shut down and regrouped a couple of times over the last two years, focuses on jailbreaking all kinds of AI tools in order to create nonconsensual media, but since November has focused on Grok almost exclusively.

The channel has also noticed the media attention Grok got for nonconsensual images lately, and is worried that it will end the good times members have had creating nonconsensual media with Grok for months.

“Too many people using grok under girls post are gonna destroy grok fakes. Should be done in private groups,” one member of the Telegram channel wrote last week.

Musk always conceived of Grok as a more permissive, “maximally based” competitor to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But despite repeatedly allowing nonconsensual content to be generated and go viral on the social media platform it's integrated with, the conversations in the Telegram channel and sophistication of the bypasses shared there are proof that Grok does have limits and policies it wants to enforce. The Telegram channel is a record of the cat and mouse game between Grok and this community of jailbreakers, showing how Grok fails to stop them over and over again, and that Grok doesn’t appear to have the means or the will to stop its AI model from producing the nonconsensual content it is fundamentally capable of producing.

The jailbreakers initially used primitive methods on Grok and other AI image generators, like writing text prompts that don’t include any terms that obviously describe abusive content and that can be automatically detected and stopped at the point the prompt is presented to the AI model, before the image is generated. This usually means misspelling the names of celebrities and describing sexual acts without using any explicit terms. This is how users infamously created nonconsensual nude images of Taylor Swift with Microsoft’s Designer (which were also viral on X). Many generative AI tools still fall for this trick until we find it’s being abused and report on it.

Having mostly exhausted this strategy with Grok, the Telegram channel now has far more complicated bypasses. Most of them rely on the “image-to-image” generation feature, meaning providing an existing image to the AI tool and editing it with a prompt. This is a much more difficult feature for AI companies to moderate because it requires using machine vision to moderate the user-provided image, as opposed to filtering out specific names or terms, which is the common method for moderating “text-to-image” AI generations.

Without going into too much detail, some of the successful methods I’ve seen members of the Telegram channels share include creating collages of non-explicit images of real people and nude images of other people and combining them with certain prompts, generating nude or almost nude images of people with prompts that hide nipples or genitalia, describing certain fluids or facial expressions without using any explicit terms, and editing random elements into images, which apparently confuses Grok’s moderation methods.

X has not responded to multiple requests for comment about this channel since December 8, but to be fair, it’s clear that despite Elon Musk’s vice signaling and the fact that this type of abuse is repeatedly generated with Grok and shared on X, the company doesn’t want users to create at least some of this media and is actively trying to stop it. This is clear because of the cycle that emerges on the Telegram channel: One user finds a method for producing a particularly convincing and lurid AI-generated sexual video of a real person, sometimes importing it from a different online community like 4chan, and shares it with the group. Other users then excitedly flood the channel with their own creations using the same method. Then some users start reporting Grok is blocking their generations for violating its policies, until finally users decide Grok has closed the loophole and the exploit is dead. Some time goes by, a new user shares a new method, and the cycle begins anew.

I’ve started and stopped writing a story about a few of these cycles several times and eventually decided not to because by the time I was finished reporting the story Grok had fixed the loophole. It’s now clear that the problem with Grok is not any particular method, but that overall, so far, Grok is losing this game of whack-a-mole badly.

This dynamic, between how tech companies imagine their product will function in the real world and how it actually works once users get their hands on it, is nothing new. Some amount of policy violating or illegal content is going to slip through the cracks on any social media platform, no matter how good its moderation is.

It’s good and correct for people to be shocked and upset when they wake up one morning and see that their X feed is flooded with AI-generated images of minors in bikinis, but what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators. Some companies do a better job of preventing this abuse than others, but judging by the exploits I see on Telegram, when it comes to Grok, this problem will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Chinese AI Video Generators Unleash a Flood of New Nonconsensual Porn

A new crop of AI video generators is producing an endless stream of nonconsensual AI generated porn.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 14:28:53

Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why

Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why.

Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with many becoming inaccessible around late November and early December. Many of the affected accounts are part of the modding community for games made by the now-defunct Japanese video game studio Illusion, which made popular games with varying degrees of erotic content. One of the accounts Github banned contained the work of more than 30 contributors in more than 40 repositories, according to members of the modding community that I spoke to.

Github didn’t tell most suspended users what terms they broke to earn a suspension or ban, and developers told me they have no idea why their accounts went down without notice. They said they thought they were within Github’s acceptable use guidelines; even though they make mods for hentai games and things like interactive vibrator plugins, they took care to not host anything explicit directly in their repositories.

💡
Do you have something to share about what's going on at Github? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

“Amongst my repositories there were no explicitly sexual names or images anywhere in the code or the readme, the most suggestive naming would be on the level of referencing the dick as ‘the men thing’ or referencing the sex as ‘huffing puffing,’” one developer, Danil Zverev, told me. He makes plugins for an Illusion game called Koikatsu. Zverev said he’s been using Github for this purpose since 2024, but on November 18, his Github page was “completely deleted,” he said. “No notifications anywhere, simply a 404 error when accessing the page and inability to log in on the web or in the mobile app. Also it does not allow me to register a new account with the same name or email.”

Github updated its acceptable use policies in October 2025 to forbid “sexually themed or suggestive content that serves little or no purpose other than to solicit an erotic or shocking response, particularly where that content is amplified by its placement in profiles or other social contexts.” This include pornographic content and “graphic depictions of sexual acts including photographs, video, animation, drawings, computer-generated images, or text-based content,” according to the terms.

“We recognize that not all nudity or content related to sexuality is obscene. We may allow visual and/or textual depictions in artistic, educational, historical or journalistic contexts, or as it relates to victim advocacy,” Github's terms of use state. “In some cases a disclaimer can help communicate the context of the project. However, please understand that we may choose to limit the content by giving users the option to opt in before viewing.”

The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago
Keywords and tags have never been a useful metric for distilling nuance. Pushing for regulations based on them is repeating a 30-year history of porn panic online.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Zverev said he didn’t write to support because he sees “such effort as fruitless and would rather move on to a different platform instead.” But even Github users who did try to get help from the platform’s support hit dead ends.

A developer who goes by VerDevin, who makes Blender modding guides, utility tools and plugins for a game called Custom Order Maid 3D2, told me in an email that users of his mods started reporting difficulty accessing his repositories starting in late October. At that point, he could still access their account while logged in, but not when logged out.

“Turned out, as you already know, that my account was ‘signaled’ and I had to purposefully go to the report section of Github to learn about it. I never received any notifications, by mail or otherwise,” VerDevin told me. “At that point I sent a ticket asking politely for clarifications and the proceedings for reinstatement.”

Github Trust & Safety replied with a generic message: “If you agree to abide by our Terms of Service going forward, please reply to this email and provide us more information on how you hope to use GitHub in the future. At that time we will continue our review of your request for reinstatement.”

VerDevin said they replied the following day, agreeing to the terms and promising to remove whatever Github deemed inappropriate—information the platform still hadn’t given them. “I did not take actual steps toward it as at that point I still didn't know what was reproach of me,” they said.

A month passed before Github replied. “Your account was actioned due to violation of the following prohibition found in our Acceptable Use Policies: Specifically, the content or activity that was reported included multiple sexually explicit content in repositories, which we found to be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policies,” Github wrote to VerDevin.

“At that point I took down several repositories that might qualify as an attempt to show good faith (like a plugin named COM3D2.Interlewd),” they said. Github restored his account on December 17—several weeks later, the day after I sent them a link to his account asking why it was banned—but they still haven’t heard anything about what specific content caused it to be “actioned.”

Github did not respond to my multiple requests for comment about why these accounts were banned. I sent Github’s press team links to several banned accounts, and they reinstated a few, but didn’t provide a reason or reply when I asked what caused the bans in the first place.
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The situation is illustrative of a longstanding problem on almost every platform: the terms of use, especially when it comes to adult content, are applied confusingly and sporadically. The affected repositories represent tools used by potentially hundreds of thousands of gamers; the English Koikatsu modding Discord community alone has more than 350,000 members. A developer who goes by Sauceke, who Github suspended in mid-November without explanation, said their open-source adult toy mod users are now encountering broken links or simply can’t find any of their work.

“Perhaps most frustratingly, all of the tickets, pull requests, past release builds and changelogs are gone, because those things are not part of Git (the version control system),” Sauceke told me. “So even if someone had the foresight to make mirrors before the ban (as I did), those mirrors would only keep up with the code changes, not these ‘extra’ things that are pretty much vital to our work.”

Github reinstated Sauceke’s account on Tuesday, following another request for comment from me asking why anyone was banned—seven weeks after initially suspending them. Github support sent them a message: “Thank you for the information you have provided. Sorry for the time taken to get back to you. We really do appreciate your patience. Sometimes our abuse detecting systems highlight accounts that need to be manually reviewed. We've cleared the restrictions from your account, so you have full access to GitHub again.”

But even as Github reinstates accounts, pieces of users’ repos are missing. In Sauceke’s account and others, including in the IllusionMods repo, all releases are hidden. “This makes the releases both inaccessible to users and impossible to migrate to other sites without some tedious work,” Sauceke said.

Github is the biggest open-source platform for developers, and especially for adult content creators who are often censored or marginalized elsewhere, discoverability on that platform is important. “It's the best place to build a community, to find like-minded people who dig your stuff and want to collaborate,” Sauceke said. If the banning spree goes beyond hentai game and toy modders, they said, it might push developers to explore other platforms. Some have already migrated their repos to GitGoon, an open-source platform specifically for adult developers, or Codeberg, Berlin-based nonprofit-run site similar to Github.

The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 14:00:13

Podcast: The People Tracking America's AI Data Centers

We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about how we bought ⁠404media.com⁠!
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/zT9lEyHnZIk?…
Timestamps:

1:38 - ⁠Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters⁠

25:58 - ⁠Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow⁠

Subscriber's Story: ⁠We Bought 404media.com

404 Media

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

^{404 Media}

404 Media

2026-01-05 15:08:06

The State of Anti-Surveillance Design

An abridged version of this story appeared in 404 Media's zine. Get a copy here.

The same sort of algorithms that use your face to unlock your phone are being used by cops to recognize you in traffic stops and immigration raids. Cops have access to tools that have scraped billions of images from the web, letting them identify essentially anyone by pointing a phone camera at them. Being aware of all the ways your face is being recognized by algorithms and sometimes collected by cameras when you walk outside can start to feel overwhelming at best, and futile to resist at worst.

But there are ways to disguise yourself from facial recognition systems in your everyday life, and it doesn’t require owning clothes with a special design, or high-tech anti-surveillance gear.

Technologist Adam Harvey’s interest in privacy started right after 9/11, when caring about what information governments and companies could extract from one’s movements was still fringe. “You can connect all these dots from 9/11 and how the surveillance and biometric surveillance industry exploded after that,” Harvey told me in a call. “And the projects that I was interested in doing were a response to that.” One of his earliest forays into anti-surveillance design was CV Dazzle, strategically applied facepaint and hair that fooled a specific facial recognition algorithm. But that was in 2010, and face paint is no longer useful for evading those, or any, systems. They mostly just look cool.

“I try to point that out in all of my texts, but it's often not as interesting as painting your face,” Harvey said. “So people paint their faces and then think that's the key to making it work, and it's fun. I don't want to tell people that they shouldn't have fun. So, you know, the project has really taken on a life of its own online, and I've taken a step back from trying to manage that.”
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In the years since the Dazzle project made adversarial design mainstream, there have been lots of projects that attempt to confound, pollute, or elude the cameras that watch us move through the world every day. Harvey’s made several more, including heat obscuring ponchos meant to hide the wearer from drones, Faraday cage pockets for phones, and high-powered LED flash arrays for blinding paparazzi. But much of the wearables in this genre—from high-fashion streetwear shops to cheap listings by dropshippers—rely on 2D printed designs that don’t keep up with how quickly algorithms change and improve. The $600 hoodie with a cool pixel design on it might have worked yesterday, in perfect conditions, but the next time the cameras in the mall update their algorithms or datasets, it doesn’t work anymore.

To outsmart surveillance systems, it’s helpful to understand them. Facial recognition—which identifies an individual face—works differently from biometric scans that look at a person’s iris or fingerprints, and those systems work differently from automatic license plate readers, which could in theory match an individual’s movements to a car through a database. And consumer-level facial recognition systems, like Pimeyes, operate using different algorithms and databases from the cameras you might encounter when boarding a flight—with the caveat that the differences in these systems and what data they share is more blurred every day.

Most facial recognition systems break down the elements of a face into its parts: the shape of your eyes, lips, nose, and even ears, and the distances between each part of your face, combined with skin color and numerous other factors. The system then boils your face down to a numerical value. If that value matches the value of existing images it has in its database closely enough, it may be presented as being you.

404 Media Is Making a Zine
We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.
404 MediaJason Koebler

The facial recognition rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than that; there are theories about how individuals’ face, fingerprint, and iris biometric “signatures” are read by these systems. In the Biometric Menagerie theory developed in 2010, researchers grouped people into four categories: “Sheep,” or people who are easily recognizable by biometric systems; the more difficult “goats” which are difficult to recognize; shape-shifting “wolves” that can successfully imitate others, and later, more subsets of these including “worms,” “doves,” and “lambs.”

All of this sounds complex and sophisticated, but these systems aren’t necessarily hard to fool. It turns out, you probably already own the most effective anti-surveillance fashion: a cloth mask.

“Despite how anybody may try to discourage you, covering your face with a face mask is still very effective,” technologist and fashion designer Kate Rose told me. In 2019, Rose created Adversarial Fashion, a line of clothing that’s covered in fake license plates, meant to pollute the data collected by automatic license plate readers.

“But the question that you had, and everyone has, is, can you beat face recognition? And the answer is yes, and the easiest way is with a Covid mask,” Harvey said. “You see ICE operatives wearing face coverings and sunglasses. At some point there's not enough information to do face recognition.”

Every system is different and every scenario is contextual, but adding a few common items to your kit can reduce the likelihood that enough of your biometrics are obscured to get your biometric matching score down. Big sunglasses, covering your chin and mouth, and wearing a baseball cap or brimmed hat that obscures your features from cameras placed above can all bring that score down. “It's kind of almost a linear relationship between how much of your face you hide and your score in that way. It's quite simple,” Harvey said. But the problem is, you never know what your score is, so you’re going out blindly, not knowing if your Jackie Onassis sunglasses are going to cover enough of your face, or if you have to get an extra long turtleneck or something to wear.”

If you want to really step up your sunglasses game, you could get a pair of glasses that block infrared wavelengths from cameras, like the ones in newer iPhones that use FaceID. The creator of infrared-blocking glasses line Reflectacles, who asked to go by Skitch, told me he sees the anti-surveillance “fashion” market becoming more mainstream with companies like Zenni selling glasses that block some types of facial recognition joining the trend 10 years after he launched his own IR-blocking specs. “I see the landscape of anti-surveillance wearables becoming popularized and monetized,” Skitch said. “If people with money find out that an area of business exists without them making money, they will certainly find a way to gather that market, that money.”

Reflectacles don’t look like normal glasses—they look like something from The Matrix, with a green tint and cyberpunk shapes—but sometimes signaling that you care about privacy to other people is part of the point.

Rose has been organizing community meetings in her small Pacific Northwest town to talk about the influx of Flock cameras on their streets, and she said she’s found that people across all walks of life and political leanings care deeply about privacy. “It can feel kind of futile, but I think it's important to remember that it's also about art and fashion, right? It’s about helping people with their mental abstraction of how [surveillance] works. And to have a tiny little protest that says, well, you have to store all my garbage, analyze it... People get a chance to talk to each other about what's important to them, and it actually helps people to understand something that’s often kind of techy and abstract about how a piece of prevalent surveillance tech works.” If a license plate camera database can be foiled by a t-shirt, maybe we should think twice about putting a camera on every corner.

“I like the definition of privacy from the Cypherpunk Manifesto: ‘Privacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself,’” Harvey said, referring to technologist and cryptographer Eric Hughes’ 1993 call for encrypted information systems. “By allowing other people to collect, watch or monitor you... It's a power dynamic that puts you on the losing end. It's really about power and individual agency, but there's also a destructive political and democratic component to allowing these mass surveillance systems to grow even larger.”

Zenni’s Anti-Facial Recognition Glasses are Eyewear for Our Paranoid Age

These anti-facial recognition glasses technically work, but won’t save you from our surveillance dystopia.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-06 20:28:53

Astronomers Discovered Something Near the Dawn of Time That Shouldn’t Exist

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature.

By peering over 12 billion years through time to the infant cosmos, a team captured an unprecedented glimpse of a baby galaxy cluster called SPT2349-56. Cosmological models suggest that the gas strewn between galaxies in these ancient clusters should be much cooler than gas observed in modern galaxies, which has been heated up by the intense gravitational interactions that play out in clusters over billions of years.

But the new observations of SPT2349-56 reveal an inexplicably hot reservoir of this intracluster gas, with temperatures similar to those at the center of the Sun, a finding that is “contrary to current theoretical expectations,” according to the new study.

“It is a massive surprise,” said Dazhi Zhou, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “According to our current theory, this kind of hot gas inside young galaxy clusters should still be cool and less abundant, because these baby clusters are still accumulating and gradually heating their gas.”

“This one we discover is already pretty abundant and even hotter than many mature clusters that we see today,” he added. “So, it's a bit different and forces us to rethink our current understanding of how these large structures form and evolve in the universe.”

The first stars and galaxies emerged in the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, during an era called cosmic dawn. Galaxies gradually accumulated together into large clusters over time; for instance, our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster which contains about 100,000 galaxies and stretches across hundreds of millions of light years.

As a baby cluster, SPT2349-56 is much smaller, measuring about 500,000 light years across, and containing about 30 luminous galaxies and at least three supermassive black holes. Zhou and his colleagues observed the cluster with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a highly sensitive network of radio telescopes in Chile, which allowed them to capture the first temp check of its intracluster gas.

“Because this gas is pretty distant, it's very challenging to see the light of the gas directly,” explained Zhou. To probe it, the team searched for what’s known as the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich signature, which is a detectable distortion of the oldest light in the universe as it passes through intracluster gas.

The results produced a thermal energy measurement of 10⁶¹ erg, which is about five times hotter than expected. While the heat source is still unknown, Zhou speculated that it could be caused by high levels of activity in the cluster, where stars are forming 5,000 times faster than in our own galaxy and huge energetic jets of matter spout out of galactic cores.

However, it will take more observations of these distant clusters to figure out whether the hot gas within SPT2349-56 is an aberration, or if super-hot gas is more common in early clusters than predicted.

“Like every first discovery, we have to be cautious and careful with big results,” Zhou said. “We need to test it further, with more independent observations and comparisons to other galaxy clusters at a similar time. This is what we hope that our community will do next, and we're also planning for follow up observations of other clusters to see whether there is a broader trend or if this system is an outlier.”

The new study is part of a wave of unprecedented observations of the early universe within the past few years. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, has discovered massive galaxies much earlier in time than expected, pointing to a tantalizing gap in our knowledge about how our modern cosmos emerged from these ancient structures.

“It is starting to change our current understanding of how energetic the galaxy formation process was in such an early time,” Zhou said. “Galaxies were formed and evolved with much more violence, and were more active, more extreme, and more energetic than what we used to expect. The James Webb results are also consistent with our current discovery that these galaxies were very powerful in shaping their surroundings.”

Sunyaev–Zeldovich detection of hot intracluster gas at redshift 4.3 - Nature

Detection of hot intracluster gas in SPT2349−56 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array provides new insights into early cluster formation.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-06 15:03:31

HarperCollins Will Use AI to Translate Harlequin Romance Novels

Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work.

Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone)—an anti-AI activist group of French translators—HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they’re being replaced with machines in 2026.
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The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to “reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions.”

HarperCollins France did not return 404 Media’s request for comment, but told Publisher’s Weekly that “no Harlequin collection has been translated solely using machine translation generated by artificial intelligence.” In its statement, it explained that the company turned to AI translations because Harlequin’s sales had declined in France.

“We want to continue offering readers as many publications as possible at the current very low retail price, which is €4.99 for the Azur series, for example,” the statement said. “We are therefore conducting tests with Fluent Planet, a French company specializing in translation for 20 years: this company uses experienced translators who utilize artificial intelligence tools for part of their work.”

According to Fluent Planet’s website, its translators “studied at the best translation universities or have decades of experience under their belt.” These human translators are aided by a proprietary translation agent Fluent Planet called BrIAn.

“When compared to standard machine translation systems that use neural networks, BrIAn can provide 2 to 3 times higher quality translations, that are more accurate, offer idiomatic phrasing, provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and a faithful representation of the style and emotions of the source text,” the site said. “BrIAn takes into account the author’s tone and intention, making it highly effective for complex literary or marketing content.”

Translation is a delicate work that requires deep knowledge of both languages. Nuances and subtleties—two aspects of writing AIs are notoriously terrible at—can be lost or deranged if not carefully considered during the translation process. Translation is not simply a substitution game. Idioms, jargon, and regional dialects come into play and need a human touch to work in another language. Even with humans, the results are never perfect.

“I will tell you that the author community is up in arms about this, as we are anytime an announcement arrives that involves cutting back on human creativity and ingenuity in order to save money,” romance author Caroline Lee told 404 Media. “Sure, AI-generated art is going to be cheaper, but it cuts out our cover artists, many of whom we've been working with for a decade or more (indie publishing first took off around 2011). AI editing can pick up on (some) typos, but not as well as our human editors can. And of course, we're all worried what the glut of AI-generated books will mean for our author careers.”

HarperCollins France is not the first major publisher to announce its giving some of its translation duties over to an AI. In March of 2025, UK Publisher Taylor & Francis announced plans to use AI to publish English-language books in other languages to “expand readership.” The publisher promised AI-translated books would be “copyedited and then reviewed by Taylor & Francis editors and the books’ authors before publication.”

In a manifesto on its website, In Flesh and Bone begged readers to “say no to soulless translations.”

“These generative programmes are fed with existing human works, mined as simple bulk data, without offering the authors the choice to give their consent or not,” the manifesto said. “Furthermore, the data processing remains dependent on an enormous amount of human labour that is invisibilized, often carried out in conditions that are appalling, underpaid, dehumanizing, even traumatizing (when content moderation is involved). Finally, the storage of the necessary data for the functioning and training of algorithms produces a disastrous ecological footprint in terms of carbon balance and energy consumption. What may appear as progress is actually leading to immense losses of expertise, cognitive skills, and intellectual capacity across all human societies. It paves the way for a soulless, heartless, gutless future, saturated with standardized content, produced instantaneously in virtually unlimited quantity. We are close to a point of no return that we would never forgive ourselves for reaching.”

The translation of the manifesto from French to English was done by the collective themselves.

Harlequin France to Test AI-Assisted Translation

Following backlash from the French Literary Translators Association, HarperCollins France confirmed it’s “conducting tests” with a French company that “uses experienced translators who utilize artificial intelligence tools,” to translate Harleq

^{PublishersWeekly.com}

404 Media

2026-01-06 14:00:35

Here is the Agreement Giving ICE Medicaid Patients' Data

A data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which was designed for ICE to receive the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients, was published as part of a lawsuit last year, with the public now able to see the exact text of that unprecedented agreement.

Last year, Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media sued DHS for a copy of the agreement after the agency failed to turn it over in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. A U.S. attorney working on that case then flagged to our counsel that the document had been released in a separate lawsuit various states brought against the Department of Health and Human Services and DHS.

The full text of the agreement also shows the data promised to ICE included more granular data than previously reported, such as patients’ banking “routing number, account type, account number.”

“Access to this information will allow ICE to receive information concerning the identity and location of aliens in the United States, such as address, telephone number, banking information (routing number, account type, account number), email address, internet protocol (IP) addresses, or other information relevant to identifying and locating aliens in the United States,” the agreement reads.

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

The existence of the data sharing agreement was reported at the time by the Associated Press and later WIRED. 404 Media has uploaded a copy here. At the end of December, a judge ruled that the Trump administration could resume sharing much of the data after it had been blocked from doing so, Politico reported. That means ICE can use Medicaid data in deportation cases starting Tuesday, Politico added.

Under a section called “description of the data that may be disclosed,” the agreement says that data includes “Medicaid recipients: Name, address, assigned Medicaid identification number, social security number (SSN), date of birth, sex, phone number, locality, ethnicity and race.” The data allowed to be given to ICE under the new ruling is slightly narrower than that, and includes citizenship, immigration status, address, phone number, date of birth, and Medicaid ID, and is limited to people living unlawfully in the U.S., Politico reported.

In June the Associated Press reported Medicaid officials unsuccessfully fought to block the transfer of data related to millions of Medicaid enrollees from California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington D.C. Emails showed two top advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the data transfer and CMS officials had 54 minutes to comply, the Associated Press added. At the time, the exact purpose of the data sharing was not known. Then the Associated Press reported on the agreement itself that said the sharing was for ICE to locate aliens in the country.
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CMS did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told 404 Media in a statement, “President Trump consistently promised to protect Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. To keep that promise after Joe Biden flooded our country with tens of millions of illegal aliens CMS and DHS are exploring an initiative to ensure that illegal aliens are not receiving Medicaid benefits that are meant for law-abiding Americans.” Undocumented immigrants do not have access to federally funded healthcare coverage, including Medicaid, according to the non-partisan, non-profit organization American Immigration Council. Federal law mandates that hospitals provide emergency care regardless of the person’s immigration status, the organization says.

The agreement is part of a much wider practice of data sharing across the second Trump administration and its mass deportation effort. The IRS has funneled data to ICE; in November a court blocked that data sharing. This month the New York Times revealed the TSA was sharing multiple lists of people a week with ICE so immigration authorities could then detain them at airports.

Correction: due to an editing error, this article previously said we sued DHS earlier this year. It was last year. The copy has been updated to reflect this.

Court blocks IRS from sharing taxpayer addresses with ICE

A federal judge sided with plaintiffs who argued that the data-sharing pact violated privacy laws, putting immigrants at risk of their information being “impermissibly used” by ICE.

^{Matt Bracken (FedScoop)}

404 Media

2026-01-05 23:13:18

Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals

A Hilton branded hotel that originally declined to host guests because they were with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backpedalled, saying in a statement Monday it does “not discriminate against any individuals or agencies and apologize to those impacted.”

The episode started earlier on Monday when the official DHS X account posted what it presented as screenshots of emails from the Hilton hotel to officials.

“We have noticed an influx of GOV reservations made today that have been for DHS, and we are not allowing any ICE or immigration agents to stay at our property,” one of the emails reads. “If you are with DHS or immigration, let us know as we will have to cancel your reservation.”

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Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-05 21:04:00

Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow

Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has included underage girls, on a platform that has notoriously gutted its content moderation team and gotten rid of nearly all rules.

In an era where big AI companies at least sometimes, occasionally pretend to care about things like copyright and nonconsensual sexual abuse imagery, X has largely shown that it does not, and the feature has essentially taken over the service over the last week. In a brief scroll of the platform I have seen Charlie Kirk edited by Grok to have huge naturals and comically large nipples, screen grab of a woman from TikTok first declothed then, separately, breastfeeding an AI-generated child, and women made to look artificially pregnant. Adult creators have also started posting pictures of themselves and have told people to either Grok or not Grok them, the implication being that people will do it either way and the resulting images could go viral.

The vibe of what is happening is this, for example: “@[url=https://bird.makeup/users/grok]Grok[/url] give her a massive pregnant stomach. Put her in a tight pink robe that's open, a gray shirt that covers most of the belly, and gray sweatpants. Give her belly heavy bloating. Make the bottom of her belly extra pudgy and round. Hands on lower back. Make her chest soaking wet.”

With Grok, Elon Musk has, in a perverse way, sort of succeeded at doing something both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman have tried: He now runs a social media site where AI is integrated directly into the experience, and that people actually use. The major, uhh, downside here is that people are using Grok for the same reasons they use AI elsewhere, which is to nonconsensually sexualize women and celebrities on the internet, create slop, and to create basically worthless hustlebro engagement bait that floods the internet with bullshit. In X’s case, it’s all just happening on the timeline, with few guardrails, and among a user base of right-wing weirdos as overseen by one of the world’s worst people.

All of this is bad on its own for all of the obvious reasons we have written about many times: AI models are often trained on images of children, AI is used disproportionately against women, X is generally a cesspool, etc. Elon Musk of all people has not shown any indication that he remotely cares about any of this, and has in recent days Groked himself into a bikini, essentially egging on the trend.

Some mainstream reporters, meanwhile, have demonstrated that they do not know or care to know the first thing about by writing articles based on their conversations with Grok as if they can teach us anything. Large language models are not sentient, are not human, do not have thoughts or feelings, and therefore cannot “apologize” or explain how or why any of this is happening. And Grok certainly does not speak for X the company or for Elon Musk. But of course major outlets such as Bari Weiss’s CBS News wrote that Grok “acknowledged ‘lapses in safeguards’ on the platform that allowed users to generate digitally altered, sexualized photos of minors.” The CBS News article notes that Grok said it was “urgently fixing” the problem and that “xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely.” It added that “Grok has independently taken some responsibility for the content,” which is a fully absurd, nonfactual sentence because Grok cannot “independently take some responsibility” for anything, and chatbots cannot and do not know the inner workings of the companies who create them and specifically the humans who manage them. There were dozens of articles explaining that “Grok apologizes,” which, again, is not a thing that Grok can do.

Another quite notable thing happened last weekend, which is the United States attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president in the middle of the night. In a long bygone era, one might turn to a place like Twitter for real-time updates about what was happening. This was always a fraught exercise in which one might need to keep their guard up, lest they fall for something like the “Hurricane Shark” image that showed up at hurricane after hurricane over the course of about a decade. But now the exercise of following a rapidly unfolding news event on X is futile because it’s an information shitshow where the vast majority of things you see in the immediate aftermath of a major world event are fake, interspersed with many nonconsensual images of women who have had their clothes removed by AI, bots, propaganda, and so on and so forth. One of the most widely shared images of “Nicolas Maduro” in the immediate aftermath of his kidnapping was an AI generated image of him flanked by two soldiers standing in front of a plane; various people then asked Grok to put the AI-generated Maduro in a bikini. I also saw some real footage of the US bombing campaign that had been altered to make the explosions bigger.

The situation on other platforms is better because there are fewer Nazis and because the AI-generated content cannot be created natively in the same feed, but essentially every platform has been polluted with this sort of thing, and the problem is getting worse, not better.

Maduro capture photo analysis: Evidence of AI manipulation

Fact-checking the Nicolás Maduro capture image. Analysis of aircraft discrepancies, agency insignia conflicts, and OSINT evidence of AI generation.

^{Maria Flannery (Eurovision News Spotlight | Fact-Checking & OSINT Network)}

404 Media

2026-01-04 17:57:17

Scientists Discover One of the World’s Oldest Cremations

Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue.

First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a Sun.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

An ancient cremation comes to light

Cerezo-Román, Jessica I. et al. “Earliest Evidence for Intentional Cremation of Human Remains in Africa.” Science Advances.

Some 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers assembled to cremate a small woman in a ceremonial pyre at a rock shelter near Mount Hora in Malawi.

Millennia passed. Many things happened. And now, at the dawn of the year 2026, scientists report the unearthing of the ashy remains of this ritual at a site, called HOR-1, which is "the oldest known cremation in Africa” and “one of the oldest in the world,” according to their study.

“Archaeological evidence for cremation amongst African hunter-gatherers is extremely rare, with no reported cases south of the Sahara,” said researchers led by Jessica I. Cerezo-Román of the University of Oklahoma. “Open pyre cremations such as that at HOR-1 demand substantial social and labor-intensive investment on behalf of the deceased. Thus, cremation is rarely practiced amongst small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.”

Indeed, before reading this study, I did not fully appreciate the work that goes into cremating a corpse from scratch. For a body to be properly reduced to ash in this prehistoric era, a community had to collect tinder, build the pyre, ignite it, and then keep the flames stoked at high temperatures for around seven to nine hours by continually adding more fuel.

The process would have been long and arduous, suggesting that it held a significant meaning to these prehistoric attendees. This ancient rock shelter was clearly used for mortuary practices over millennia, which “reflect a deep-rooted tradition of repeatedly using and revisiting the site, intricately linked to memory-making,” the researchers said.

The oldest known pyre, located in Alaska, dates back 11,500 years and contains the created remains of a 3-year-old child. But HOR-1 is the oldest example of adult cremated remains found in a pyre. We will likely never know the identity of this woman, or why her death inspired such a carefully coordinated ritual. But it seems safe to assume that the cremation was a significant event for the community that expended so much forethought and labor to perform it.

“While this cremation is highly unusual in the African archaeological record, it contributes to growing evidence of complex social worldviews among tropical African hunter-gatherers,” they added. “These practices emphasize complex mortuary and ritual activities with origins predating the advent of food production.”

In other news…

The inexplicable Uranian chillout

Jasinski, Jamie M. et al. “Uranus' Long-Term Thermospheric Cooling Is Unlikely to Be Primarily Driven by the Solar Wind.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Uranus is so cool. I mean this in the flattering vernacular sense—Uranus is genuinely nifty—but it’s also literally true. Not only is this ice giant the coldest planet in the solar system, its upper atmosphere (the thermosphere) has been getting steadily cooler for the past 40 years—and nobody really knows why.

Scientists now think they have ruled out a hypothesis that linked this long-term thermospheric cooling to a weakening of the solar wind, which is a stream of energetic radiation and particles emitted by the Sun. A new analysis suggests that this weakening effect has reversed over the past 15 years, hinting that it is not the cause of the cooldown.

“We determine that the solar wind kinetic power at Uranus has increased by ∼28% since the start of solar cycle 24 (at the end of 2008),” said researchers led by Jamie M. Jasinski at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“If the solar wind is a driver of Uranus' thermospheric temperature, then one would have expected a gradual increase in the temperature since then. However, the temperature has continued to consistently decline over the same time period. Therefore…we argue that the solar wind kinetic power is unlikely to be the primary driver of thermospheric temperature at Uranus.”

As for the real cause, the truth is still out there. May this mystery inspire a new generation of Uranian scientists.

When pigs sail…

Stanton, David W. G. et al. “Genomic and morphometric evidence for Austronesian-mediated pig translocation in the Pacific.” Science.

Now, for the incredible adventures of ancient seafaring pigs. Today, many domestic and feral pig lineages are scattered across the Pacific islands of Wallacea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; their ancestors were schlepped over the oceans by early mariners in several migratory waves.

To learn more about how these boats brought home the bacon, scientists sequenced 117 modern, historical, and ancient pig genomes spanning nearly 3,000 years. The results revealed that pigs from Indonesia to Hawaii are mostly descended from a group of domestic pigs that voyaged with Austronesian-speaking groups from Southeast China and Taiwan about 4,000 years ago.

“Transporting these animals between islands resulted in a distinctive evolutionary history characterized by serial founder effects, gene flow from divergent lineages, and likely selection for specific traits that facilitated the establishment of feral populations,” said researchers led by David W.G. Stanton of Queen Mary University of London and Cardiff University.

In other words, some of the most significant Pacific voyages also doubled as piggyback rides.

A glimpse of a sunless Saturn

Dong, Subo et al. “A free-floating-planet microlensing event caused by a Saturn-mass object.” Science.

I don’t mean to cause alarm, but there’s a rogue Saturn on the loose in the galaxy.

Astronomers spotted this world drifting through interstellar space, untethered to any star, with a trippy technique known as microlensing. When a distant planet passes in front of a star from our perspective on Earth, its gravitational field warps the background starlight, creating a distinctive light signature that exposes its presence (for more on microlensing, here’s a short feature I wrote).
Concept art of a freefloating planet. Image: J. Skowron, K. Ulaczyk / OGLE
Now, a team has captured a microlensing event with telescopes located on both the ground and in space, a combination that allowed them to calculate the foreground planet’s mass (Saturn-ish) and its distance from Earth, which is about 10,000 light years. Based on its mass and its very quick pace through space, this gas giant was probably born around a star, but was flung out of its home system by gravitational interactions between neighboring stars or planets.

“We conclude that violent dynamical processes shape the demographics of planetary-mass objects, both those that remain bound to their host stars and those that are expelled to become free floating,” said researchers led by Subo Dong of Peking University.

It’s a reminder that as bad as things seem sometimes here on Earth, at least our planet hasn’t been violently ejected from the solar system to drift endlessly in the dark. Small wins!

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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2026-01-02 19:00:09

Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor

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Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

For years, scientists have debated whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis—an ape known from skull and limb bones found in Chad—was primarily bipedal, meaning that it walked on two legs like humans, or if it walked on all fours like chimpanzees.

Now, a team led by Scott Williams, an associate professor of anthropology at the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, has spotted a detail in the femur bone, known as a femoral tubercle, that strongly suggests this ape was a biped. Since bipedalism is a defining trait of human relatives, known as hominins, the discovery confirms that these bones belonged to the earliest known human ancestor by a margin of about one million years.

“The really novel part of our study is the discovery of a new feature that had never been noticed before, and that's the femoral tubercle,” Williams told 404 Media in a call. “I think that was the final piece of evidence that convinced me that this was a biped, and therefore probably a hominin, because you don't find that feature in anything else.”

“I think this will convince a lot of people, but certainly not everyone,” he added. “There'll be rebuttals. I'm sure that people will challenge it. That's fine. That's how science works.”
Fig. 1. S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human. Image: Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130
Indeed, the remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis have generated controversy since they were initially reported in 2002. Over the past five years, different teams have argued both for and against the hypothesis that this species walked on two legs. This unresolved question inspired Williams and his colleagues to take a “fresh and independent look” at the fossils, he said.

The researchers conducted a comparison of the limb bones with other hominin remains, while also re-examining them using a technique called 3D geometric morphometrics. The latter effort exposed a hidden detail: the presence of a femoral tubercle, which is a bony protrusion where the femur connects to the hip.

“It basically prevents our torso from falling backward or falling sideways as we walk,” explained Williams. "Chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes don't need to have that structure because they don't have to take on a vertical posture like we do. You don't need that structure—unless you're a biped.”

Of course, hominins didn’t just suddenly stand upright one day, and this ancient species shows an interesting mix of features that suggest it still spent plenty of time in the treetops in addition to walking on land. This liminal state between arboreal and terrestrial life persisted for millions of years in hominins until the rise of Homo erectus two million years ago, which is the first hominin to walk in a similar upright position to modern humans.

In addition to pinpointing our own human origins, the fossils offer a possible glimpse of the last common ancestor between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. These two ape lineages split about six or seven million years ago, around the same time Sahelanthropus tchadensis was roaming through Chad.

“The debate about what the last common ancestor was like is really highly contested,” Williams said. The remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis suggest that human relatives in this era may have been similar in size to chimpanzees and bonobos, but had body proportions more akin to later hominins.

While Sahelanthropus tchadensis can be described as the earliest human ancestor in a general sense, it was probably not the direct ancestor to modern humans. It’s become clear in recent decades that a diversity of hominin lineages emerged and became extinct over the past seven million years, so it’s difficult to trace the direct lineage of our own species, Homo sapiens, the only humans that have survived to the modern day.

“The more fossils that are discovered,” Williams said, “the more complicated the picture looks.”

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