404 Media

2025-10-11 13:00:44

Mole-Rats Could Hold the Key to Living Longer

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that lived long, played hard, crashed out, and topped it off with a glass of claret.

First off, it’s Naked Mole-Rat Week! Or at least it should be, given that there are multiple new studies about these rodents, which are neither moles nor rats, but are certifiably naked. Then: dogs on benders; ships on ice; and an aged wine with notes of oak, blackberry, and aggressive trade policy.

The age of Man is over; the time of the Mole-Rat has come

Yamakawa, Masanori et al. “Quantitative and systematic behavioral profiling reveals social complexity in eusocial naked mole-rats.” Science Advances.

Y. Chen et al. “A cGAS-mediated mechanism in naked mole-rats potentiates DNA repair and delays aging.” Science.

What a whirlwind week it’s been for the naked mole-rat beat, with studies that shed light into the complex social behavior of these burrowing rodents as well as their extreme longevity. Let’s make like a naked mole-rat and dig in!

Naked mole-rats didn’t get the memo about being a normal mammal and instead opted for a “eusocial” society similar to insects that is ruled by a colony queen with an entourage of breeder males, which are supported by a caste system of non-breeding workers. It’s super weird, but it seems to be working out for them because they can live to nearly 40 years old—ten times longer than most animals their size—and they are highly resistant to cancer and a host of other deathbringers.

Scientists took a closer look at the palace intrigue of these rodents by setting up several colonies in laboratory conditions and tracking their movements with microchips. The results revealed that queens are bossy bullies that get so tired from shoving their subjects around that they have to take frequent royal naps.
Different chambers in the experiment. Image: Yamakawa, Masanori et al.
Non-breeding workers, meanwhile, fell into six main “clusters” including cleaners, transport specialists, caretakers, diggers, and a group that just kind of idly loafs around (my spirit mole-rat cluster).

“Breeding females patrol burrows and display agonistic dominance toward nonbreeders paralleling queen aggression in primitively eusocial insects,” said Masanori Yamakawa of Kumamoto University. Meanwhile, non-breeding “cluster 1 individuals (high mobility and garbage occupancy) may serve as transport specialists, whereas those in cluster 4 (low mobility and frequent occupancy of nonfunctional chambers) may engage primarily in digging tasks. Cluster 5 individuals, who frequently occupied toilet chambers, may contribute to cleaning-related roles.”

In addition to this window into mole-rat social behavior, a new genetic analysis identified the critical role of an enzyme called cGAS, a common component in animal immune systems, in extending the lives of these subterranean super-agers.

Whereas cGAS may hinder DNA repair in most animals, including humans and mice, the naked mole-rat has evolved a version of the enzyme with four modified amino acids that enhances DNA repair . Naturally, the researchers also engineered some fruit flies with this naked mole rat enzyme—you gotta mess with fruit flies or it’s not science—and lo and behold, the juiced flies lived to about 70 days, roughly ten days longer than the control group.

“Our work provides a molecular basis for how DNA repair is activated to contribute to the exceptional longevity during evolution in naked mole-rats,” said researchers led by Yu Chen of Tongji University in Shanghai. “These findings support the notion that efficient DNA repair decelerates the aging process and raise the possibility that targeting cGAS to enhance DNA repair could provide an intervention strategy for promoting longevity.”

All those past adventurers were looking for the Fountain of Youth in the wrong places; it wasn’t in some beautiful tropical grove, but rather a stanky underground rodent pit.

In non-naked-mole-rat news…

Sit. Stay. Stage an intervention.

Mazzini, Alja et al “Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toy play.” Scientific Reports.

Dogs can literally get addicted to the game, according to a study that probed “‘excessive toy motivation” in domestic dogs as “a potential parallel to behavioral addictions in humans.” What this means in practice is that researchers enlisted 105 dogs to play with a lot of really fun toys and about a third of them got totally hooked.
youtube.com/embed/6hDndTOibQs?…
Thirty-three of the playful pooches “exhibited behaviors consistent with addictive-like tendencies including an excessive fixation on toys, reduced responsiveness to alternative stimuli, and persistent efforts to access toys,” said researchers led by Alja Mazzini of the University of Bern. “Dogs [are] the only non-human species so far that appears to develop addictive-like behaviours spontaneously without artificial induction.”
A bull terrier during tug-of-war play. Image: Alja Mazzini
While this an interesting scientific conclusion, the study is perhaps most notable for producing delightful footage of dogs in the midst of full-on toy benders. Like all of us who struggle with bad habits and fixations, these dogs will just have to take it one play at a time.

The enduring Endurance mystery

Tuhkuri, Jukka. Why did Endurance sink? Polar Record.

Endurance, the ship crushed by ice in 1915 during Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition, was actually not all that endurant, according to Jukka Tukuri of Aalto University who concludes in a new study that “Shackleton was well aware of the risks related to the strength of Endurance, but chose to use it anyway.”

“This ship is not as strong as the Nimrod constructionally” wrote Shackleton of Endurance in a letter to his wife in 1914, comparing it to his previous Antarctic ride. “There is nothing to be scared of as I think she will go through ice all right only I would exchange her for the old Nimrod any day now except for comfort.”

You have to love the phrase “there is nothing to be scared of” in a letter from a guy on his way to the South Pole in a rickety ship that is definitely going to sink the following year. I’m sure Mrs. Shackleton was totally comforted by this! Tukuri provides many other fascinating diary entries to support his conclusion that “Endurance was not among the strongest ships of its time.”
The wreck of Endurance. Image: © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
That said, Endurance spent more than a century two miles under the Antarctic seas before the wreck was amazingly rediscovered and photographed in 2022. It’s still looking pretty good, even if Shackleton’s decision to set sail in it does not hold up as well.

A toast to the 17th century

Leary, Charlie. “Tasting 1660s Bordeaux claret: temporal transformation and wine economics.” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.

To fight off that polar chill, let’s warm up for the (North American) long weekend with a really, really aged glass of wine. A new study upends the traditional narrative about the emergence of Bordeaux claret as a desired wine in the 1600s, suggesting it was not strictly developed in response to tariffs (Sike! I used wine to lure you into a disguised tariff story).

“The advent of a stronger, darker style of Bordeaux red wine, known as claret, in the English market has drawn substantial scholarly interest because it played a pivotal role in the balance of trade and international political economy during the eighteenth century,” said author Charlie Leary, a wine historian.

“Economic historians have posited that Bordeaux vignerons developed high-quality, high-priced claret in response to England’s fixed, volume-based tariffs on French wine,” he continued. “This article…shows that the new claret style pre-existed England’s tariff regime.”

With that, cheers to lost years and jeers to economic fears.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toy play - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toy play

^Nature

404 Media

2025-10-10 15:52:24

Behind the Blog: Sinkholes and Site Seizures

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 a ransomware gang, book bans, and infrastructure.

JOSEPH: I thought I’d give you something from the digital underground that happened last night. So recently a group that goes by the name Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (I know, it’s a mouthful) has been threatening to dump data from customers of Salesforce. The group’s name is an amalgamation of a bunch of other English-speaking loosely connected hacking groups: Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, Shiny Hunters, etc. This latest iteration is trying to get Salesforce to pay a ransom; Salesforce says it won’t. The group says it has data from all sorts of companies, including Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more.

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Behind the Blog: Sinkholes and Site Seizures

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-10 12:15:52

Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse to Use AI to ‘Go 5x Faster’

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

A Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media .

“Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, said (AI4P is AI for Productivity). The idea is that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working—not just using it to go 5 percent more efficiently.

“Our goal is simple yet audacious: make Al a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone, so that using Al becomes second nature—just like any other tool we rely on,” the message read. “It also means integrating Al into every major codebase and workflow.” Shah added that this doesn’t just apply to engineers. “I want to see PMs, designers, and [cross functional] partners rolling up their sleeves and building prototypes, fixing bugs, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible,” he wrote. “I want to see us go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down. And 5X faster to get to how our products feel much more quickly. Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea, and feedback loops are measured in hours—not weeks. That's the future we're building.”

Meta’s metaverse products, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company to highlight, have been a colossal timesink and money pit, with the company spending tens of billions of dollars developing a product that relatively few people use.

Zuckerberg has spoken extensively about how he expects AI agents to write most of Meta’s code within the next 12 to 18 months. The company also recently decided that job candidates would be allowed to use AI as part of their coding tests during job interviews. But Shah’s message highlights a fear that workers have had for quite some time: That bosses are not just expecting to replace workers with AI, they are expecting those who remain to use AI to become far more efficient. The implicit assumption is that the work that skilled humans do without AI simply isn’t good enough. At this point, most tech giants are pushing AI on their workforces. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in July that he expects AI to completely transform how the company works—and lead to job loss. "In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," he said.

Many experienced software engineers feel like AI coding agents are creating a new crisis, where codebases contain bugs and errors that are difficult to fix since humans don’t necessarily know how specific code was written or what it does. This means a lot of engineers have become babysitters who have to fix vibe coded messes written by AI coding agents.

In the last few weeks, a handful of blogs written by coders have gone viral, including ones with titles such as: “Vibe coding is creating braindead coders,” “Vibe coding: Because who doesn’t love surprise technical debt!?,” “Vibe/No code Tech Debt,” and “Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code.”

In his message, Shah said that “we expect 80 percent of Metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year, with rapid growth in engineering usage and a relentless focus on learning from the time and output we gain.” He went on to reference a series of upcoming trainings and internal documents about AI coding, including two “Metaverse day of AI learning” events.

“Dedicate the time. Take the training seriously. Share what you learn, and don’t be afraid to experiment,” he added. “The more we push ourselves, the more we’ll unlock. A 5X leap in productivity isn’t about small incremental improvements, it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we work, build, and innovate.” He ended the post with a graphic featuring a futuristic building with the words “Metaverse AI4P Think 5X, not 5%” superimposed on top.

A Meta spokesperson told 404 Media “it's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work."

Vibe/No Code Tech Debt

Vibe/No Code Tech Debt Like many, I’ve been dabbling with Vibe and No Code — to see who and what are coming for my lunch. At the same time, I’m reading all the articles on the rise in tech debt …

^{Greg Thomas (Medium)}

404 Media

2025-10-09 15:34:17

Data Hoarder Uses AI to Create Searchable Database of Epstein Files

A data hoarder on Reddit used AI to create a searchable database of more than 8,100 files about Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee, making it one of the easiest ways to search through a very messy batch of files.

The project, called Epstein Archive and released on Github, allows people to search the database to find files that mention specific people, organizations, locations, and dates.

Thousands of people are named in the more than 33,295 pages worth of files released by the House Oversight Committee last month as part of its investigation into Epstein. The files, which are partial and redacted (as in, they are not the “full Epstein files”), were subpoenaed by the committee from the Department of Justice. The files were released to the public in an extremely poorly organized Google Drive folder, and were released primarily as jpg and tif images of documents, which are not in any discernible order. Because of this, they have been an absolute nightmare to search.

The Redditor, nicko170, said they had a large language model transcribe, collate, and summarize the documents and built the database to make the files more easily searchable.

“It processes and tries to restore documents into a full document from the mixed pages - some have errored, but will capture them and come back to fix,” they wrote. “Not here to make a buck, just hoping to collate and sort through all these files in an efficient way for everyone.”

On the project’s GitHub, they further explain how it was built:

“This project automatically processes thousands of scanned document pages using AI-powered OCR to:

• Extract and preserve all text (printed and handwritten)
• Identify and index entities (people, organizations, locations, dates)
• Reconstruct multi-page documents from individual scans
• Provide a searchable web interface to explore the archive

This is a public service project. All documents are from public releases. This archive makes them more accessible and searchable.”

The database only features OCR’ed transcripts of the files and not images of the files, though it does tell users the filename so they can go and download the actual document themselves. Like essentially all OCR and LLM projects, there are some errors. Some of the transcripts are gibberish, presumably caused by blurry or illegible type and handwriting on the source documents. But the project represents a pretty good use of AI technology, because the source documents themselves are so messy and were released in such a terrible format that is extremely time consuming to go through them.

The database is indeed pretty usable; I was able to quickly find files that mention Donald Trump (which have already been widely reported on).

To be clear, there are no new files included in this tool, but for people who are looking to explore what has been released in a coherent, straightforward way, this is one of the better options out there. Besides releasing the database and the code for it on Github, they have also turned the entire project into a torrent file, meaning it cannot be easily deleted from the internet.

Oversight Committee Releases Epstein Records Provided by the Department of Justice - United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability

United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability

^{Oversight Committee Republicans Verified account}

404 Media

2025-10-09 15:26:05

The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare

A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.

The hack, carried out by a group that is attempting to extort Discord, shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ identity documents, and specifically in the context of verifying their age. Discord started asking users in the UK, for example, to upload a selfie with their ID as part of the country’s age verification law recently.

💡
Do you know anything else about this breach? 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 about to get really ugly,” the hackers wrote in a Telegram channel, which 404 Media joined, while posting user data on Wednesday. A source with knowledge of the breach confirmed to 404 Media that the data is legitimate. 404 Media granted the source anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive incident.

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The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-09 15:00:26

A New 'Nanoparticle Vaccine' Prevented Cancer In Mice, Study Says

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday.

Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.

It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.

“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”

“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system.

Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors.

What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells.

Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.

“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”

One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.

“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.

Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors.

“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”

That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all.

“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”

Nanoparticles and microparticles for drug and vaccine delivery - PMC

Nanoparticles are polymeric particles in the nanometer size range whereas microparticles are particles in the micrometre size range. Both types of particle are used as drug carriers into which drugs or antigens may be incorporated in the form of ...

^{pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov}

404 Media

2025-10-09 14:33:06

Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America

Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread, highly successful effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This movement has leveraged these successes to seize power not just in city councils and local school boards but has succeeded in making censorship and “anti wokeness” one of the dominant political ideologies in the United States.

We have successfully gained access to public records that show, for example, how a local group in Idaho successfully got a police officer to go hunting for “obscene” books at the public library, the playbook behind getting "Drag Storytime" library events canceled, how superintendents in Florida couldn’t figure out how to comply with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and have spoken to numerous librarians, scientists, and professors to learn how educational freedom, free access to information, and historic archives are under attack. Today—which happens to be the fourth day of Banned Books Week—we are proud and excited to announce that we will be continuing and ramping up this work over the next year with the help of a grant from our friends and colleagues at government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. (We’re also excited to partner with Muckrock on this new piece of limited edition merch it made for Banned Books week).

From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.”

Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media.

As always, we will need some help from our readers. We need help deciding what to look for, which school districts and cities to seek public records from, and need leads on where we should point our reporting efforts. During the height of the pandemic, many city councils made their meeting minutes and meeting transcripts searchable, so we have a good sense of the types of organizations and communities that have been most severely affected by educational censorship and book bans, and have a good idea of where to get started. But if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know by emailing jason@[url=https://web.brid.gy/404media.co]404 Media[/url] or by reaching out to Jason securely over Signal at jason.404. And if you want to further support this work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber or by donating to our tip jar.

Tip Jar

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-09 13:02:20

National Guardsman Planned American Caliphate on Discord, Sent 3D Printed Guns to Al Qaeda, Feds Say

The FBI accused a former National Guardsman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma of trying to sell 3D printed guns to Al Qaeda. According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department in September, 25-year-old Andrew Scott Hastings used a Discord server to plan a Caliphate in America and shipped more than 100 3D printed machine gun conversion kits to an undercover FBI operative who claimed he had contacts in the terrorist organization.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The Army Times first reported the story after the DOJ unsealed the charging documents. According to the court records, Hastings first landed on the radar of authorities in 2019 when a co-worker at an Abuelo’s restaurant in Tulsa called the police to report he’d been talking about blowing things up. When the cops interviewed Hastings, he told them he was just interested in chemistry and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. In 2020, the cops interviewed his mom. “Hastings’ mother, Terri, told TPD that her son was on the [autism] spectrum, was socially active online, and had converted to Islam.”

According to Terri, odd incidents piled up. She said that someone mailed Hastings a Quran, that he’d once received an order of chicken wings paid for by someone in Indonesia, and that he’d once threatened his family with a can of gasoline. “She also mentioned an incident in the family home where Hastings became enraged when she cooked bacon, and thereafter called someone she described as his ‘handler,’” according to court records.

The charging documents said the FBI got involved in 2024 because of a Discord server called “ARMY OF MUHAMMAD.” Discord cooperated with the FBI investigation and granted access to some of Hastings’ records to authorities. The FBI alleged that Hastings met with several other people on the Discord server and plotted terror attacks against Americans. At this time, Hastings worked for the National Guard as an aircraft powertrain repairer and held a SECRET-level national security clearance.

The charging documents detailed Hastings' alleged plot to establish a caliphate in the US via Discord. “[T]he most important theater right now is cyberspace…we need an actionable plan we can start work on--something slow and Ling(sic) term not hasty and slapdash,” Hastings allegedly said on Discord. “I think it would be best if we create a channel and I’ll list a physical training routine.”

“If we get 9-10 guys maybe inshaAllah we can …we could put headquarters in the USA cuz yk [you know] if we are fighting them the military is prohibited from operations on the homeland only ntnal [sic] guard and agencies can operate within borders…[y]ou need to contest air land and cyberspace…what my plan addresses is how to contest all of these at once while providing more aid than harm we can do in collateral and taking out targets of higher strength.”

According to the FBI’s version of events, Hastings talked about moving the group off of Discord and onto Signal because he believed Discord wasn’t secure. He also bragged about police interrogating him about explosives and “claimed to have made a firearm and discussed making a nuclear rocket.”

“We don’t want democracy lol,” he said on Discord, according to court records. “We want caliphate”

Hastings talked about other groups he was in contact with on Signal, offered to make training videos about weapon handling, and told others on the Discord server that he knew how to make firearms and was willing to ship them to like-minded militants. “I already have some small arms components partially finished and nearly ready to issue,” he said, according to the charging document. “I’ll send one photo but wanna remain kinda anonymous.”

The FBI said it slipped an “Online Covert Employee” (OCE) into Hastings’ life on March 26, 2025. Posing as a person on eBay, the FBI employee told Hastings he had contacts with Al Qaeda. “The OCE then recommended they move the conversation to Telegram or Signal, the latter of which Hastings said did not even have ‘a backdoor,’ meaning it could not be hacked or intercepted by law enforcement.”

The issue, of course, is that Hastings was speaking with an FBI employee. Over the next few months, Hastings spoke with the OCE about using a 3D printer to manufacture weapons for them with the eventual goal of getting them in the hands of Al Qaeda. Hastings allegedly told the OCE that he’d been discharged from the military and needed to make money.

In the summer of 2025, the FBI alleged that Hastings started mass printing Glock parts and switch conversion kits for Al Qaeda. “Hastings told the OCE he was moving out of his parent’s home in July 2025 after they complained about the noise and smell created when he 3D printed weapons,” the court documents said. The FBI allegedly has video of Hastings at a post office shipping multiple packages that summer that authorities said contained more than 100 3D printed switches, two 3D printed lower receivers for a Glock, and one 3D printed Glock slide.

The FBI has charged Hastings with attempting to provide material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations and illegal possession or transfer of a machinegun. The Justice Department considers every single 3D conversion kit Hastings shipped an individual machinegun, even when they’re not installed.

Former Guardsman charged with trying to provide weapons to al-Qaida

A 25-year-old former Army National Guardsman faces federal charges that he attempted to provide al-Qaida with 3D-printed weapons.

^{Todd South (Army Times)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 19:10:39

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

💡
Do you work at Apple or Google and know anything else about these app removals? 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.

Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.

The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.

“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.

Screenshots of Eyes Up.

The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.

Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.

“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told 404 Media “Like any other government agency, DHS is required to follow the law. The collection of video evidence is a powerful tool of oversight to ensure that the government respects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike. People have a right to film interactions with law enforcement in public spaces and to share those videos with others.”

“If DHS is concerned that the actions of their own officers might inflame public opinion against the agency, they should work to increase oversight and accountability at the agency — rather than seek to have the evidence banned,” he added.

Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.

Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”

ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby.

Apple also removed another similar app called Red Dot, 404 Media reported. Google did the same thing, and described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Apple also removed an app called DeICER.
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Yet, Eyes Up differs from those apps in that it does not function as a real-time location reporting app.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.

Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”

The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

The emails are essentially identical to those sent to the developer of ICEBlock which 404 Media previously reported on.

In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.

Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.

The app is available on Google's Play Store.

Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.

^{Pablo Manríquez (Migrant Insider)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 14:50:35

People Are Crashing Out Over Sora 2’s New Guardrails

Sora, OpenAI’s new social media platform for its Sora 2 image generation model, launched eight days ago. In the first days of the app, users did what they always do with a new tool in their hands: generate endless chaos, in this case images of Spongebob Squarepants in a Nazi uniform and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting or throwing Pikachus on the grill.

In little over a week, Sora 2 and OpenAI have caught a lot of heat from journalists like ourselves stress-testing the app, but also, it seems, from rightsholders themselves. Now, Sora 2 refuses to generate all sorts of prompts, including characters that are in the public domain like Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content,” the app said when I tried to generate Dracula hanging out in Paris, for example.

When Sora 2 launched, it had an opt-out policy for copyright holders, meaning owners of intellectual property like Nintendo or Disney or any of the many, many massive corporations that own copyrighted characters and designs being directly copied and published on the Sora platform would need to contact OpenAI with instances of infringement to get them removed. Days after launch, and after hundreds of iterations of him grilling Pokemon or saying “I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us!” flooded his platform, Altman backtracked that choice in a blog post, writing that he’d been listening to “feedback” from rightsholders. “First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote on Saturday.

But generating copyrighted characters was a huge part of what people wanted to do on the app, and now that they can’t (and the guardrails are apparently so strict, they’re making it hard to get even non-copyrighted content generated), users are pissed. People started noticing the changes to guardrails on Saturday, immediately after Altman’s blog post. “Did they just change the content policy on Sora 2?” someone asked on the OpenAI subreddit. “Seems like everything now is violating the content policy.” Almost 300 people have replied in that thread so far to complain or crash out about the change. “It's flagging 90% of my requests now. Epic fail.. time to move on,” someone replied.

“Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America's AI industry. I've cancelled my OpenAI PLUS subscription,” another replied, implying that copyright law is leftist.

A ton of the videos on Sora right now are of Martin Luther King, Jr. either giving brainrot versions of his iconic “I have a dream” speech and protesting OpenAI’s Sora guardrails. “I have a dream that Sora AI should stop being so strict,” AI MLK says in one video. Another popular prompt is for Bob Ross, who, in most of the videos featuring the deceased artist, is shown protesting getting a copyright violation on his own canvas. If you scroll Sora for even a few seconds today, you will see videos that are primarily about the content moderation on the platform. Immediately after the app launched, many popular videos featured famous characters; now some of the most popular videos are about how people are pissed that they can no longer make videos with those characters.

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OpenAI claimed it’s taken “measures” to block depictions of public features except those who consent to be used in the app. “Only you decide who can use your cameo, and you can revoke access at any time.” As Futurism noted earlier this week, Sora 2 has a dead celebrity problem, with “videos of Michael Jackson rapping, for instance, as well as Tupac Shakur hanging out in North Korea and John F. Kennedy rambling about Black Friday deals” all over the platform. Now, people are using public figures, in theory against the platform’s own terms of use, to protest the platform’s terms of use.

Oddly enough, a lot of memes for whining about the guardrails and content violations on Sora right now are using LEGO minifigs — the little LEGO people-shaped figures that are not only a huge part of the brand’s physical toy sets, but also a massively popular movie franchise owned by Universal Pictures — to voice their complaints.

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In June, Disney and Universal sued AI generator Midjourney, calling it a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" in the lawsuit, and Warner Bros. Discovery later joined the lawsuit. And in September, Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal sued Chinese image generator Hailuo AI for infringing on its copyright.

Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures Sue Chinese AI Company

In recent months, studios have started to sue AI companies that allow users to generate images and videos of copyrighted characters. They characterize the alleged theft of their content as an existential threat to Hollywood.

^{Winston Cho (The Hollywood Reporter)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 13:35:00

Podcast: The Final Boss of AI Slop

We start this week with a couple of our articles about Sora 2, OpenAI’s new AI slop app. People are already using tools to remove watermarks from its AI-generated videos. Great! After the break, we talk about Apple and Google removing various ICE-spotting apps from their app stores, with Apple doing it after direct pressure from the U.S. government. In the subscribers-only section, we have a substantial update to a story concerning Flock and a woman who self-administered an abortion.
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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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• OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus⁠
• ⁠People Are Farming and Selling Sora 2 Invite Codes on eBay⁠
• ⁠Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web⁠
• ⁠ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’⁠
• ⁠Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’⁠
• ⁠Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime

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

2025-10-08 13:06:18

Cocaine in Private Jets and Sex Toys: What the FBI Found on its Secretly Backdoored Chat App

Private jets loaded with cocaine landing at an airport in Germany. A trafficker stuffing a racing sail boat with drugs and entering a tournament to blend in with other racers before speeding off. Vacuum-sealed layers of methamphetamine inside solar panels. And nearly 60 kilograms of drugs hidden inside a shipment of sex toys.

These are just some of the examples included in a cache of leaked U.S. Department of Justice documents the FBI used to convince a judge to let them continue harvesting messages from Anom. Anom was an encrypted phone and app the FBI secretly took over, backdoored, and ran for years as a tech company popular with organized crime around the world. The Anom operation, dubbed Trojan Shield, was the largest sting operation ever.

The documents provide more insight into the sorts of criminals swept up in the FBI’s investigation, and give behind-the-scenes detail on how exactly the FBI obtained legal approval for such a gigantic, and to some controversial, operation. The leaked documents include the original court orders from Lithuania, which assisted the FBI in collecting the data from Anom devices worldwide, and the FBI’s supporting documentation for those court orders. The documents were not supposed to be released publicly, but someone posted them anonymously online.

💡
Do you know anything else about Anom, Sky, Encrochat, or other encrypted phone companies? 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.

“Like I said this Turbo crew are the Pablo Escobar of this time in that area and got full control there,” one message written by an alleged drug trafficker included in the documents reads.

404 Media showed sections of the documents to people with direct knowledge of the operation who said they appeared authentic. Finnish outlet Yle reported on some of their contents at the end of September, but 404 Media is publishing copies of the documents themselves.

In 2018 the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. In the wake of that, a seller from Phantom Secure and another popular company called Sky offered U.S. authorities their own, in-development encrypted device: Anom. The FBI then took Anom under its wing and oversaw a backdoor placed into the app. This involved adding a “ghost” contact to every group chat and direct message across the platform. The operation started in Australia as a beta test, before expanding to Europe, South America, and other parts of the world, sweeping up messages from cartels to biker gangs to hitmen to money launderers.
A screenshot from the documents.
Some of the documents are formal requests for continued assistance from the U.S. to Lithuania and spell out the sort of criminal activity the FBI has seen on the Anom platform. Several sections name specific and well-known drug traffickers. One is Maximillian Rivkin, also known as “Microsoft.” As I chronicled in my book about Anom, Rivkin was a devilishly creative drug trafficker, constantly making new schemes to smuggle cocaine or other narcotics. The new documents say Rivkin’s Serbia-based organized crime group was involved in the trafficking of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine between South America and Spain. To move the drugs, the group sailed a boat during a November 2020 regatta, a sailing race, “where their travel will be obscured by other boats and sail to the Caribbean,” the documents say. Around two or three weeks later, the boat would then return to Europe with the cocaine, before being dropped off the coast of Spain where another member of the group would pick it up, the documents add.

In another instance Rivkin’s group smuggled cocaine base within juice bottles from Colombia to Europe, according to the documents. In my book, I found Rivkin planned to do something similar with energy drinks.

Dark Wire
Written “in the manner of a good crime thriller” (The Wall Street Journal), the inside story of the largest law-enforcement sting operation ever, in whic…
PublicAffairsLearn more about this author

These sorts of audacious, over-the-top drug smuggling operations were a common sight on Anom, according to my own review of hundreds of thousands of Anom text messages between drug traffickers I previously obtained. The new documents also specifically name Hakan Ayik, who was the head of the so-called Aussie Cartel, which controlled as much as a third of all drug importation into Australia, and who at one point was Australia’s most wanted criminal. Ayik discussed sending a massive 900 kilograms of cocaine through Malaysia to Australia concealed within shipments of scrap metal, according to the documents.

“Can you give me roughly the coordinates where’s the better place to meet outside Indonesian waters,” Ayik, using the moniker Oscar, said in one of the messages included in the documents.
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Both Rivkin and Ayik were later arrested by Turkish authorities. Ayik was also known as the “encryption king,” likely due to his prolific selling of encrypted communication devices to organized criminals.

Other examples in the documents include a Dutch drug trafficking group involving a man called Guiliano Domenico Azzarito. That group smuggled cocaine between South America and Europe with private jet flights into small and medium sized airports the group controls, according to the documents. “Look we can move 20 tons easily every month from here in the future,” one message said.

Another describes Baris Tukel, a high-ranking Comanchero motorcycle gang member who was later charged by the U.S. for helping to spread Anom devices, discussing plans to hide methamphetamine and MDMA in marble tiles. In another case, a drug trafficker with the username RealG discussed smuggling drugs on a sailboat, inside shipments of bananas and hides, and cocaine base hidden inside fertilizer.

In September 2020, a drug trafficking group smuggled a shipment of cocaine and methamphetamine from the UK, through Singapore, to Australia, according to the documents. Authorities later searched the shipment, and found nearly 60 kilograms of drugs “concealed within 21 boxes of sex toys,” the documents say.
A screenshot from the documents.
The messages included in the document also detail some of the extreme violence Anom users engaged in. Simon Bekiri, a Comanchero member, discussed an assault against a rival gang, according to the documents. “I even pistol whipped him 3 times and blood was squirting out of his head almost a meter high in time with his heartbeat (That part was really funny),” one of the messages reads. “But when you say I pistol whipped him, shot him, bashed him and then took off in his car I’ll admit it does sound violent.”

These examples were used to help convince a Lithuanian judge to allow local authorities to continue providing the FBI with Anom messages. In an unusual legal workaround, instead of running the Anom collection server in the U.S., which may have created more legal headaches, the Department of Justice arranged for it to be run in Lithuania. Lithuanian authorities then provided a regular stream of collected Anom messages to the FBI. In all, Anom grew to 12,000 devices and the FBI collected tens of millions of messages before shutting the network down in June 2021.

404 Media first revealed in September 2023 Lithuania was the so-called “third country” that harvested the messages for the FBI. The Department of Justice has never formally acknowledged Lithuania’s role despite the leaked documents further corroborating 404 Media’s reporting.

Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI

For years the FBI ran its own encrypted phone company to intercept messages from thousands of people around the globe. One country was critical to that operation, whose identity was unknown to the public. Until now.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-07 13:25:06

Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web

Sora 2, Open AI’s new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes.

A simple search for “sora watermark” on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.
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Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he’s not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. “It was predictable,” he said. “Sora isn’t the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn’t the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.”
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Hours after its release on September 30, Sora 2 emerged as a copyright violation machine full of Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pickachus. Open AI has tamped down on that kind of content after the initial thrill of seeing Rick and Morty shill for crypto sent people scrambling to download the app. Now that the novelty is wearing off we’re grappling with the unpleasant fact that Open AI’s new tool is very good at making realistic videos that are hard to distinguish from reality.

To help us all from going mad, Open AI has offered watermarks. “At launch, all outputs carry a visible watermark,” Open AI said in a blog post. “All Sora videos also embed C2PA metadata—an industry-standard signature—and we maintain internal reverse-image and audio search tools that can trace videos back to Sora with high accuracy, building on successful systems from ChatGPT image generation and Sora 1.”

But experts say that those safeguards fall short. “A watermark (visual label) is not enough to prevent persistent nefarious users attempting to trick folks with AI generated content from Sora,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, told 404 Media.

Tobac also said she’s seen tools that dismantle AI-generated metadata by altering the content’s hue and brightness. “Unfortunately we are seeing these Watermark and Metadata Removal tools easily break that standard,” Tobac said of the C2PA metadata. “This standard will still work for less persistent AI slop generators, but will not stop dedicated bad actors from tricking people.”

As an example of how much trouble we’re in, Tobac pointed to an AI-generated video that went viral on TikTok over the weekend she called “stranger husband train.” In the video, a woman riding the subway cutely proposes marriage to a complete stranger sitting next to her. He accepts. One instance of the video has been liked almost 5 million times on TikTok. It didn’t have a watermark.

“We're already seeing relatively harmless AI Sora slop confusing even the savviest of Gen Z and Millennial users,” Tobac said. “With many typically-savvy commenters naming how ‘cooked’ we are because they believed it was real. This type of viral AI slop account will attempt to make as much money from the creator fund as possible before social media companies learn they need to invest in detecting and limiting AI slop, before their platform succumbs to the Slop Fest.”

But it’s not just the slop. It’s also the scams. “At its most innocuous, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata accelerates the enshittification of the internet and tricks people with inflammatory content,” Tobac said. “At its most malignant, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata could lead to every day people losing their savings in scams, becoming even more disenfranchised during election season, could tank a stock price within a few hours, could increase the tension between differing groups of people, and could inspire violence, terrorism, stampede or panic amongst everyday folks.”

Tobac showed 404 Media a few horrifying videos to illustrate her point. In one, a child pleads with their parents for bail money. In another, a woman tells the local news she’s going home after trying to vote because her polling place was shut down. In a third, Sam Altman tells a room that he can no longer keep Open AI afloat because the copyright cases have become too much to handle. All of the videos looked real. None of them have a watermark.

“All of these examples have one thing in common,” Tobac said. “They’re attempting to generate AI content for use off Sora 2’s platform on other social media to create mass or targeted confusion, harm, scams, dangerous action, or fear for everyday folk who don’t understand how believable AI can look now in 2025.”

Farid told 404 Media that Sora 2 wasn’t uniquely dangerous. It’s just one among many. “It is part of a continuum of AI models being able to create images and video that are passing through the uncanny valley,” he said. “Having said that, both Veo 3 and Sora 2 are big steps in our ability to create highly visual compelling videos. And, it seems likely that the same types of abuses we’ve seen in the past will be supercharged by these new powerful tools.”

According to Farid, Open AI is decent at employing strategies like watermarks, content credentials, and semantic guardrails to manage malicious use. But it doesn’t matter. “It is just a matter of time before someone else releases a model without these safeguards,” he said.

Both Tobac and Farid said that the ease at which people can remove watermarks from AI-generated content wasn’t a reason to stop using watermarks. “Using a watermark is the bare minimum for an organization attempting to minimize the harm that their AI video and audio tools create,” Tobac said, but she thinks the companies need to go further. “We will need to see a broad partnership between AI and Social Media companies to build in detection for scams/harmful content and AI labeling not only on the AI generation side, but also on the upload side for social media platforms. Social Media companies will also need to build large teams to manage the likely influx of AI generated social media video and audio content to detect and limit the reach for scammy and harmful content.”

Tech companies have, historically, been bad at that kind of moderation at scale.

“I’d like to know what OpenAI is doing to respond to how people are finding ways around their safeguards,” Farid said. “We are seeing, for example, Sora not allowing videos that reference Hitler in the prompt, but then users are finding workarounds by simply describing what Hitler looks like (e.g., black hair, black military outfit and a Charlie Chaplin mustache.) Will they adapt and strengthen their guardrails? Will they ban users from their platforms? If they are not aggressive here, then this is going to end badly for us all.”

Open AI did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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404 Media

2025-10-07 13:01:32

Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime

In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media, also show that the Flock search was performed more than two weeks after the woman had the abortion. The documents were created as part of an arrest affidavit against the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her at gunpoint on the day she took the abortion pill.

In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.

404 Media’s initial reporting on the incident became national news, has been cited in several government investigations into how Flock is used by police, and has led to several reforms by Flock itself. The company and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly used it as a high-profile example of an ‘activist’ media that is biased against his company. The documents show that the narrative pushed by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and repeated by Flock is not the full story, and that police did consider charging the woman with a crime.

“For months, Flock Safety and the Johnson County Sheriff insisted that she was being searched for as a missing person and accused journalists and advocates of spreading 'clickbait' misinformation,” Rin Alajaji, legislative activist at the EFF, told 404 Media. “Now we have the official records, and they prove the exact opposite: Texas deputies did investigate this woman's abortion as a ‘death investigation,’ they did use Flock Safety’s ALPR network to track her down, and they did consult prosecutors about charging her. The only misinformation came from the company and the sheriff trying to cover their tracks. We’ve warned about this for over a decade now: when a single search can access more than 83,000 cameras across nearly the entire country, the potential for abuse is enormous. This makes it crystal clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it's being used.”

The documents highlight how Flock, whose cameras are installed in thousands of communities around the country, and which 404 Media has revealed police use on behalf of ICE, ultimately may not know what its customers are using the technology for. Flock declined to comment for this article.

According to the documents obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media, police came to the woman’s house to investigate the incident on May 9, after the woman’s partner called the police to report that she had an abortion on April 23, more than two weeks earlier. The arrest report states that they had opened a “death investigation case” regarding the fetus. The woman was not at the house at the time, though there is no indication in the arrest report that the man or the police were concerned about her whereabouts at the time.

“The incident of the abortion/miscarriage occurred on April 23, 2025,” an affidavit for the arrest of her partner says. The partner told police that he was “unaware” that the woman “had ordered a medication, off the internet, from California, that would cause her to abort or miscarry.”

The woman “aborted/miscarried while he was outside and he came in and found blood in the bathroom with what he believed was the non-viable fetus,” it says. They “got into a verbal argument and she left and had not been back to [the house] since that day. [He] collected what he thought was the fetus and put it in the freezer. When [he] was asked why he waited so long to report the incident, his answer was he had to process the event and call his family attorney.”

“Detective [Calvin] Miller [a detective on the scene] was provided FedEx packaging the pill was sent in, photographs of what [the man] believed to be a fetus and the instructions on how to take the medication,” it adds.

Crucially, the affidavit notes “it was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s Office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.”

That same day, Johnson County Sheriff’s Department officials searched the national Flock network—consisting at the time of 88,345 cameras across the country—for the license plate belonging to a Land Rover. The stated reason was “had an abortion, search for female.” The documents do not say the time when the conversation with the District Attorney about possibly charging the woman took place, so it is unclear whether this happened before or after the Flock search. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment for this article sent via email, phone, and fax.

Several days later, on May 14, the woman went to the police and told them that she wanted to tell them her side of the story. According to the affidavit, she said that her partner assaulted her the day she took the pill, and she showed them text messages “where they discussed her ordering the pill and taking the pill.” At some point on April 23, the day she took the pill, the two began arguing. The woman said the man allegedly put a gun to her head in front of the couple’s toddler. She says that he hit her with the butt of the gun, threw her on the bed, choked her, put the gun to her head and demanded that she “beg for your life.” “Scream all you want, no one can hear you, no one is coming to help you,” he said, according to the arrest report. “I’ll kill you right now and take off with the baby.” The man was arrested and charged with assault on May 22.

On May 28, nearly a week after the woman’s partner was arrested for assault, 404 Media learned of the May 9 Flock search by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office using records that were obtained using a public records request. The documents showed thousands of Flock searches throughout the United States, and the reason police stated for doing a given search. We learned that Johnson County performed a search on a Land Rover for the reason of “had an abortion, search for female,” which was particularly notable because abortion rights experts have worried that police surveillance would be turned against women seeking abortions.

On May 29, we reached out to Flock for comment on the incident. Flock told us that the stated reason for the search was not the full story, and that we should call Johnson County Sheriff Adam King to learn more (we had already reached out to the sheriff’s office for comment). “According to the sheriff's office, the deputy did not search for a woman seeking an abortion. In fact, it appears as though the woman may have had self-induced wounds from an unsafe abortion, and the family called the sheriff's office looking for her because she went missing,” a Flock spokesperson said at the time.

404 Media called King, and had a nine-minute phone call with him, during which he asked multiple members of his staff for details about why the search was done and what happened. King told 404 Media that “I wanted to make sure y’all understood what that was: It wasn’t us trying to block a woman from having an abortion. It was a self-administered abortion she gave herself and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital. We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever. That wasn’t the case. We just wanted to get her some medical help and that’s why we did the query on Flock.”

“The family was worried she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention and we weren’t able to get her on the phone, they weren’t able to get her on the phone, that’s why we were checking Flock trying to find her, but it was for her safety,” he said. “That’s all it was about, her safety.”

The only family member mentioned in the court documents is the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her. The Flock search is also not mentioned in the court documents, but it makes clear that the police were told at the time they learned about the abortion that it had actually taken place more than two weeks prior. There is no mention of concern about the woman’s safety in the narrative of events in the arrest report, though there is discussion of police considering whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime.

On June 5, more than a week after 404 Media’s article was published and following subsequent national attention on the story, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office created a new “supplemental report” about the incident in which the officer who ran the Flock search retroactively explained that he was worried about the woman’s safety and used both Flock and another powerful surveillance tool, TLO, to look her up. This supplemental report was also obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media.

“Deputies started to ask communication’s [sic] about looking up the victim due to a large amount of blood being found in the residence,” it states. “I never made scene on this call, just was assisting with trying to locate the victim and her children to check their welfare. I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the [reporting person, the woman’s partner] due to the call and it not making sense […] I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay.”

The report, which does not mention the word “abortion” anywhere, then states that they found her license plate and an address in Dallas. The officer ran a Flock search as well as “a TLO report,” which gave him an additional address to search. TLO is a powerful lookup tool that uses information pulled from credit report header data. 404 Media has reported extensively on this tool in the past.
The case supplemental report shows it was created only after our article was initially publishedFrom the case supplemental report, created June 5
“I entered the vehicle into FLOCK to see if we could see where the victim and her children might be at due to multiple different locations being given for the victim and her children. Deputies had attempted to try and contact the female, but were unsuccessful. The FLOCK hit showed the victim had been in Dallas prior but nothing recent. The reason for the FLOCK search was to find out what city the victim and her children might be in and give us an idea of where to look for them, due to the large area of where the victim and her children cold [sic] be at.”

On June 13, King separately told the Dallas Morning News that “There was no big conspiracy there to be the abortion police [...] That wasn’t our deal, it was all about her safety.” The Dallas Morning News cited a “partial report” that it obtained which appears to be this June 5 document, which notes the “large amount of blood.”

Since we first reported on this incident, Flock and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly stated that our reporting on the incident and an EFF blog post about it was “clickbait,” misleading, and that it oversold what happened in Johnson County. It is not clear if Flock has seen the arrest report or what Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told the company. But Flock and Langley have used King’s initial narrative of the incident to criticize media reporting of the company.

“In this case, it was an unfortunate example of where an activist journalist had a narrative in their mind and they didn’t want to look at the facts of the story, because the facts are, we have one of the most transparent systems one could build,” Langley told Forbes last month. “There was a single word ‘abortion,’ in the search. The natural conclusion is, ‘Oh, they’re searching for this woman because she had an abortion.’ But when you talk to the police department, it’s actually quite a more nuanced story, which is the family called the police department because they were worried for her well-being. It was a missing person’s case because she did administer a self-abortion. They found that woman not too far away eventually. And so when I look at this, I go ‘This is everything’s working as it should be.’”

“A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her when she could have been unwell. She was physically OK, which is great, but due to the current political climate, this was really good clickbait,” Langley said.

The only adult “family member” of the woman who’s mentioned in police reports is her partner, who the woman left after he attacked her with a gun.

Flock and Langley also posted a blog in the aftermath of our reporting and the EFF’s own blog post about the incident in which he said the story was “clickbait-driven reporting and social media rumors,” about the case, and that the Texas abortion case “was purposefully misleading reporting.”

The EFF, he wrote, “is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected.”

“The Sheriff’s Office has reported that a local family called to ask for help–a relative had self-administered an abortion and subsequently ran away. Her family feared she was hurt and asked the Sheriff’s deputy to search for her to the best of their abilities. Deputies performed a nationwide search in Flock, the broadest search possible within the system, to try to locate her as quickly as they could,” Langley wrote. “Luckily, she was found safe and healthy in Dallas a couple of days later. No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

King, the Johnson County Sheriff, previously told 404 Media Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding the woman.

Separately, King was arrested by his own deputies in August on charges of harassing multiple female members of his staff and threatening to arrest them after they reported the harassment. King allegedly made repeated comments about the women’s appearance. Last week, King was additionally charged with aggravated perjury after allegedly lying to a grand jury about what happened. As part of his bond agreement, he has been ordered by a court to not perform background checks on his alleged victims, is not allowed access to “Global Positioning System Data” from Johnson County, and is not allowed access to a video surveillance system owned by the county.

“This update is so disappointing,” a Flock source said when 404 Media told them about the new details of the case. 404 Media granted multiple current and former Flock employees anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press. “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”

The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.

“Reproductive dragnets are not hypothetical concerns. These surveillance tactics open the door for overzealous, anti-abortion state actors to amass data to build cases against people for their abortion care and pregnancy outcomes,” Ashley Kurzweil, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media. “Law enforcement exploitation of mass surveillance infrastructure for reproductive health criminalization promises to be increasingly disruptive to the entire abortion access and pregnancy care landscape. The prevalence of these harmful data practices and risks of legal action drive real fear among abortion seekers and helpers—even intimidating people from getting the care they need,” she added.

“Given Flock's total failure to prevent abuses, law enforcement that have paid for this surveillance technology should immediately lock down their settings for which other agencies can access their data, and should seriously reconsider whether this technology should be installed in their communities in the first place,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “And Republican officials need to stop harassing and harming women.”

Johnson County sheriff allowed to return to work after latest indictment

King was elected sheriff in 2016. He previously served as commander of the South Texas Officers and Prosecutors Human Trafficking Task Force.

^{Doug Myers (CBS Texas)}

404 Media

2025-10-06 14:05:04

Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs

The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation.

“There are libraries that have our books that we've lent to them before all of this happened, and now they can't ship them back to us because their carrier either is flat out refusing to ship anything to the U.S., or they're citing not being able to handle the tariff situation,” Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told me.

After Trump’s executive order ended the de minimis exemption, which allowed people to buy things internationally without paying tariffs if the items cost less than $800, we’ve written several stories about how the decision caused chaos over a wide variety of hobbies that rely on people buying things overseas, especially on Ebay, where many of those transactions take place.

Libraries that share their materials internationally are in a similar mess, partly because some countries’ mail services stopped shipments to and from the U.S. entirely, but the situation for them is arguably even more complicated because they’re not selling anything—they’re just lending books.

“It's not necessarily too expensive. It's that they don't have a mechanism in place to deal with the tariffs and how they're going to be applied,” Relevo said. “And I think that's true of U.S. shipping carriers as well. There’s a lot of confusion about how to handle this situation.”

“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries,” Heather Evans, a librarian at RMIT University in Australia, told me in an email. “It has largely depended on their different procedures as to how much they have been affected. Some who use AusPost [Australia’s postal service] to post internationally have been more impacted and I've seen many libraries put a halt on borrowing to or from the US at all.” (AusPost suspended all shipments to the United States but plans to renew them on October 7).

Relevo told me that in some cases books are held up in customs indefinitely, or are “lost in warehouses” where they are held for no clear reason.

As Relevo explains it, libraries often provide people in foreign institutions books in their collections by giving them access to digitized materials, but some books are still only available in physical copies. These are not necessarily super rare or valuable books, but books that are only in print in certain countries. For example, a university library might have a specialized collection on a niche subject because it’s the focus area of a faculty member, a French university will obviously have a deeper collection of French literature, and some textbooks might only be published in some languages.

A librarian’s job is to give their community access to information, and international interlibrary loans extend that mission to other countries by having libraries work together. In the past, if an academic in the U.S. wanted access to a French university’s deep collection of French literature, they’d have to travel there. Today, academics can often ask that library to ship them the books they want. Relevo said this type of lending has always been useful, but became especially popular and important during COVID lockdowns, when many libraries were closed and international travel was limited.

“Interlibrary loans has been something that libraries have been able to do for a really long time, even back in the early 1900s,” Relevo said. “If we can't do that anymore and we're limiting what our users can access, because maybe they're only limited to what we have in our collection, then ultimately could hinder academic progress. Scholars have enjoyed for decades now the ability to basically get whatever they need for their research, to be very comprehensive in their literature reviews or the references that they need, or past research that's been done on that topic, because most libraries, especially academic libraries, do offer this service [...] If we can't do that anymore, or at least there's a barrier to doing that internationally, then researchers have to go back to old ways of doing things.”

The Trump administration upended this system of knowledge sharing and cooperation, making life even harder for academics in the U.S., who are already fleeing to foreign universities because they fear the government will censor their research.

The American Library Association (ALA) has a group dedicated to international interlibrary lending, called the International Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Committee, which is nested in the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Since Trump’s executive order and tariffs regime, the RUSA STARS International ILL Committee has produced a site dedicated to helping librarians navigate the new, unpredictable landscape.

In addition to explaining the basic facts of the tariffs and de minimis, the site also shares resources and “Tips & Tricks in Uncertain Times,” which encourages librarians to talk to partner libraries before lending or borrowing books, and to “be transparent and set realistic expectations with patrons.” The page also links to an online form that asks librarians to share any information they have about how different libraries are handling the elimination of de minimis in an attempt to crowd source a better understanding of the new international landscape.

“Let's say this library in Germany wanted to ship something to us,” Relevo said. “It sounds like the postal carriers just don't know how to even do that. They don’t know how to pass that tariff on to the library that's getting the material, there's just so much confusion on what you would even do if you even wanted to. So they're just saying, ‘No, we're not shipping to the U.S.’”

Relevo told me that one thing the resource sharing community has talked about a lot is how to label packages so customs agents know they are not [selling] goods to another country. Relevo said that some libraries have marked the value of books they’re lending as $0. Others have used specific codes to indicate the package isn’t a good that’s being bought or sold. But there’s not one method that has worked consistently across the board.

“It does technically have value, because it's a tangible item, and pretty much any tangible item is going to have some sort of value, but we're not selling it,” she said. “We're just letting that library borrow it and then we're going to get it back. But the way customs and tariffs work, it's more to do with buying and selling goods and library stuff isn't really factored into those laws [...] it's kind of a weird concept, especially when you live in a highly capitalized country.”

Relevo said that the last 10-15 years have been a very tumultuous time for libraries, not just because of tariffs, but because AI-generated content, the pandemic, and conservative organizations pressuring libraries to remove certain books from their collections.

“At the end of the day, us librarians just want to help people, so we're just trying to find the best ways to do that right now with the resources we have,” she said.

“What I would like the public to know about the situation is that their librarians as a group are very committed to doing the best we can for them and to finding the best options and ways to fulfill their requests and access needs. Please continue to ask us for what you need,” Evans said. “At the moment we would ask for a little extra patience, and perhaps understanding that we might not be able to get things as urgently for them if it involves the U.S., but we will do as we have always done and search for the fastest and most helpful way to obtain access to what they require.”

Police Bodycam Shows Sheriff Hunting for 'Obscene' Books at Library

Body camera footage from Idaho reveals a sheriff hunting for a YA book he could use for a political stunt.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-04 18:16:45

The Case for Alien Life on Saturn’s Moon Just Got a Boost

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied death, cooked out, bulked up, and capped it off with an extraterrestrial spit-take.

First, prehistoric peoples risked their lives to make art—and it was totally worth it. Then, what’s the best cut of a two-ton armadillo? Next, a funerary procession for a whale, a glow-up for a rogue planet, and a swim in an alien ocean.

Finally, I am so excited that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is now officially out! If you are curious about aliens of the Hellenistic world, centuries-old UFO sightings, a guide to the most promising systems for alien life, and the creepiest solutions to the Fermi Paradox (and more), this book is for you.

This rock art rocks

Guagnin, Maria et al. “Monumental rock art illustrates that humans thrived in the Arabian Desert during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.” Nature Communications.

Some 12,000 years ago, a group of desert artists tiptoed out onto dangerous cliff ledges to engrave the rock with enchanting depictions of camels, gazelles, ibex, wild horses, and other animals living in the shifting sands around them. One wrong step could have led to their deaths, but the artists persisted in an act of creative courage.

Now, archaeologists have discovered the monumental rock art left by this bygone culture in the Nafud desert of northern Saudi Arabia. One particularly dramatic scene was engraved from a tiny sloped ledge 12 storeys off the ground, and depicts 23 life-sized camels and horses in a line that stretches horizontally across 75 feet.

Rock art panels at Jebel Arnaan. Image: Maria Guagnin
“Some of these panels were etched onto cliff surfaces in inaccessible but highly visible locations,” said researchers led by Maria Gaugnin of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. “The difficulty in getting to and engraving these rock surfaces, and their enhanced visibility by height, were clearly attractive for the engravers.”

Though archeologists typically distinguish between rock art and modern graffiti as distinct traditions, there may be overlaps in their intent and execution—including, in this case, possible attraction to the challenges of accessing a dangerous site.

“The precarious nature of the engraving process is particularly evident in the largest recorded panel,” the team said, referring to the 75-footer described above. “This panel would have been accessed by climbing up a cliff and then engraved while standing on a downward sloping ledge, only ~30-50 centimeters in width,” which is roughly a foot across.

“Today the sandstone is too degraded to reach the ledge safely, and the panel was documented using a drone,” they added.” The friable nature of the substrate and the slope of the narrow ledges suggest the engravers likely risked their lives to create this art.”
The rock ledge where the main panel was engraved. Image: Monumental rock art panel at Jebel Misma (JMI18)
Talk about commitment to the craft. Given the high stakes and the spectacular scale of the panels, this art must have been a cherished touchstone to these early desert peoples. During the ice age, this region was extremely arid and virtually impenetrable, but as the glacial cover receded, oases and other pockets of habitability had opened up to nomads.

The rock art proves that these wanderers were not only navigating the terrain, but imprinting their culture and worldview onto it. For countless generations, these grand visions welcomed peoples passing through the desert, serving as a landmark and a cultural heirloom, before they faded into obscurity.

“Freshly engraved against the varnish, the images would have had considerable visual impact,” the team concluded. “The engravings, which may have been created over a time span of millennia, would have reminded people of ancient symbolisms and beliefs of their group, which likely structured their highly seasonal lives and thus enhanced their ability to thrive in these marginal landscapes.”

In other news…

I’m so hungry, I could eat a giant ground sloth

Prates, Luciano et al. Extinct megafauna dominated human subsistence in Southern South America before 11,600 years ago. Science Advances.

At the same time that the desert artists were engraving cliff walls, people in South America were devouring giant sloths, giant armadillos, mastodons, and other megafauna that have since gone extinct—potentially because they were so tasty.

That’s the upshot of a new study of archaeological sites in Argentina and Chile that date back some 12,000 years to the late Pleistocene period. The results revealed a preference for mega-big game—like beefy ground sloths and car-sized armadillos—bolstering the case that humans may have played a significant role in their extinction.
Megafaunal species were preferred prey for humans in Southern South America. Image: Luciano Prates et al. Megafaunal reconstructions in the figure were provided and authorized by Megafauna 3D Project (megafauna3d.org)
“The late Pleistocene extinction of terrestrial megafauna… is one of the most spectacular changes in American mammal history, and its cause is one of the most hotly debated issues in archaeology and paleoecology,” said researchers led by Luciano Prates of Universidad Nacional de la Plata.

“Here, we have shown… that extinct megafauna—at the apex of the prey ranking—were the main prey of early foragers, particularly in regions with high abundance and diversity, such as the Pampas, Patagonia, and central Chile,” the team concluded.

While climate and other factors certainly played a role in these extinctions, there may well be a more obvious culprit [looks at humanity; humanity belches; the belch smells like Pleistocene megafauna].

The world’s saddest version of “Baby Beluga”

Hudson, Justine M. and Watt, Cortney A. “Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas) Behavior Towards a Dead Conspecific.” Marine Mammal Science.

“How do animals react to dead or dying conspecifics? Do they comprehend death? Do they grieve? These are the fundamental questions asked in the field of comparative thanatology, which focuses on how animals respond to death.”

Phew, what a heavy lead-in to a study. Nonetheless, a team has now explored these questions with drone observations of beluga whales responding to a dead beluga calf in Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba. The baby may have been a stillborn or perhaps died shortly after birth, as there were no signs of trauma on its body.
Drone footage of the calf. Image: Hudson, Justine M. and Watt, Cortney A.
“We documented 15 instances where belugas from outside of the video frame swam directly towards the dead calf, including 4 mother-calf pairs and 11 individuals,” said Justine Hudson and Cortney Watt of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “The dead calf was surrounded by free-swimming belugas for the entire duration of the video.”

“The dead calf and surrounding belugas were recorded for ~4 min and 17 s before the depleted drone battery required us to land, and we were unable to relocate the calf after changing the batteries,” they added.

Even the battery was too bummed out to endure. But while loss of life is sad, it’s all in a day’s work for a comparative thanatologist.

Rogue planets grow up so fast

Almendros-Abad, Victor et al. “Discovery of an Accretion Burst in a Free-floating Planetary-mass Object.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The record for most epic bulk-up has been broken by a rogue planet that is gaining an astonishing six billion tonnes of mass per second—an unprecedented rate of swole. The planet, named Cha 1107-7626, is about five to 10 times as massive as Jupiter and does not orbit any star. And why should it? Who needs a star when you’re radiant all by yourself?

Indeed, scientists discovered the world thanks to the light generated by its record growth-spurt, which peaked for at least two months this summer and was still glowing strong when observations stopped in August 2025, showing “the strongest accretion rates measured” in a planet, according to the study.
Artist concept of Cha 1107-7626. Image: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser
“These kinds of accretion bursts are key events in the early evolution of stars,” said researchers led by Victor Almendros-Abad of the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy. “Our target is the lowest mass object observed thus far that is going through an accretion burst” and provides “a glimpse into the nature of accretion in planetary-mass objects.”

A sneak peek of an alien ocean

Khawaja, Nozair et al. “Detection of organic compounds in freshly ejected ice grains from Enceladus’s ocean.” Nature Astronomy.

Shout out to the Enceladus-heads: Scientists have discovered new chemicals in the sea spray of this Saturnian moon that hint at organic processes and hydrothermal activity within its interior ocean, boosting the case that it may be habitable.

In 2008, the NASA-ESA Cassini orbiter gulped some alien seawater as it flew through plumes that erupt from Enceladus’s south pole. Now, scientists have reanalyzed data from one particularly speedy run through the moon sprinkler—during which Cassini reached 40,000 miles per hour—exposing “previously unobserved molecular fragments,” according to a study.

The “freshly ejected” compounds included organic molecules like ethers, ethyls, and partial remnants of what might be larger compounds bearing nitrogen and oxygen, said researchers led by Nozair Khawaja of the University of Berlin. These chemicals hint at “a hydrothermal origin” and “the synthesis and evolution of organics.”

In other words, Enceladus likely has seafloor environments similar to hydrothermal vent systems on Earth, which are hotspots for life. Whether the moon’s vents also have weird creepy crawlies on them is a question that is keeping many of us up at night, so could someone please just send a scuba team there already?

With that, may you enter your weekend with a spritz of fresh organic moon mist.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-10-03 16:02:19

Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’

Both Google and Apple recently removed Red Dot, an app people can use to report sightings of ICE officials, from their respective app stores, 404 Media has found. The move comes after Apple removed ICEBlock, a much more prominent app, from its App Store on Thursday following direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials. Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.

The move signals a broader crackdown on apps that are designed to keep communities safe by crowdsourcing the location of ICE officials. Authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September and who killed a detainee, searched his phone for various tracking apps. A long-running immigration support group on the ground in Chicago, where ICE is currently focused, told 404 Media some of its members use Red Dot.

💡
Do you know anything else about these apps and their removal? Do you work at Google, Apple, or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“Ready to Protect Your Community?” the website for Red Dot reads. “Download Red Dot and help build a stronger protection network.”

The site provides links to the app’s page on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. As of at least Friday, both of those links return errors. “This app is currently not available in your country or region,” says the Apple one, and “We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server,” says the Google one.

The app allows people to report ICE presence or activity, along with details such as the location and time, according to Red Dot’s website. The app then notifies nearby community members, and users can receive alerts about ICE activity in their area, the website says.

Google confirmed to 404 Media that it removed Red Dot. Google said it did not receive any outreach from the Department of Justice about this issue and that it bans apps with a high risk of abuse. Without talking about the shooting at the ICE facility specifically, the company said it removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app. Google said apps that have user generated content must also conduct content moderation.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Google added in a statement that “ICEBlock was never available on Google Play, but we removed similar apps for violations of our policies.”

Google’s Play Store policies say the platform does not allow apps that “promote violence” against “groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, immigration status, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” but its published policies do not include information about how it defines what types of groups are protected.

Red Dot did not respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday Apple told 404 Media it removed multiple ICE-spotting apps, but did not name Red Dot. Apple did not respond to another request for comment on Friday.

On Thursday Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” referring to Apple removing his own app. ICEBlock rose to prominence in June when CNN covered the app. That app was only available on iOS, while Red Dot was available on both iOS and Android.

“ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution,” Aaron continued. “We are determined to fight this with everything we have. Our mission has always been to protect our neighbors from the terror this administration continues to reign down on the people of this nation. We will not be deterred. We will not stop. #resist.”

That move from Apple came after pressure from Department of Justice officials on behalf of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe,” Bondi told Fox. The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond Bondi's earlier comments.

The current flashpoint for ICE’s mass deportation effort is Chicago. This week ICE raided an apartment building and removed everyone from the building only to ask questions later, according to local media reports. “They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," one neighbor, Eboni Watson, told ABC7. “That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'f*** them kids.’”

Brandon Lee, communications lead at Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told 404 Media some of the organization’s teams have used Red Dot and similar apps as a way of taking tips. But the organization recommends people call its hotline to report ICE activity. That hotline has been around since 2011, Lee said. “The thing that takes time is the infrastructure of trust and training that goes into follow-up, confirmation, and legal and community support for impacted families, which we in Illinois have been building up over time,” he added.

“But I will say that at the end of the day it's important for all people of conscience to use their skills to shine some light on ICE's operations, given the agency's lack of transparency and overall lack of accountability,” he said, referring to ICE-spotting apps.

In ICEBlock’s case, people who already downloaded the app will be able to continue using but will be unable to re-download it from the Apple App Store, according to an email from Apple Aaron shared with 404 Media. Because Red Dot is available on Android, users can likely sideload the app—that is, install it themselves by downloading the APK file rather than from the Play Store.

The last message to Red Dot’s Facebook page was on September 24 announcing a new update that fixed various bugs.

Update: this piece has been updated to include a response from the Department of Justice.

ICE agents raid South Shore apartments; Trump says Chicago could become military training ground

Anti-ICE protesters marched up Michigan Avenue on Tuesday evening.

^{Cate Cauguiran (ABC7 Chicago)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 13:36:21

Can You Win a Congressional Seat Without Social Media?

Carleigh Beriont is running for Congress, and if you know about her campaign, it’s definitely not for the same reason you’ve learned about other local politicians in recent years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a household name in part because of her ability to use social media and livestreams to talk to people directly. Zohran Mamdani hasn’t even won an election yet, but is already a national political figure thanks in part to his fluency on TikTok.

Beriont, on the other hand, is not using social media at all. She’s been on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook in the past, but has not been on social media since 2020 after getting frustrated with the kind of discussions and divisiveness she saw there.

Beriont is a former union organizer, a teacher, and vice chair of the local Select Board. Now, she is not only trying to win the Democratic primary for the New Hampshire District 1 congressional race, she has also made social media abstinence a part of her platform.

Eric Schildge, Beriont’s husband, reached out to me after reading my article about an Instagram account promoting Holocaust denial t-shirts, and explained that Beriont was promoting herself as an “anti-social Democrat” because she thinks “Democracy works better offline.”

According to Beriont’s campaign manager Carly Colby, Beriont raised over $232,000 from over 2,300 individual donors. Over 250 of these individuals donated in response to receiving a message specifically about Carleigh not using social media.

I called Beriont to find out why she thinks it’s possible to win an election without social media.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

404 Media: Why did you get off social media?
Carleigh Beriont: I'm a millennial, so I grew up like when Facebook required the .edu and it was a great way to connect with new classmates going into college and old friends when you had moved away from where you grew up, which I did. During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests [in 2020], there were a number of conversations that I saw happening on my feed where one relative would post something and a friend from school would post something, and they'd be yelling at each other, and I was like, these people don't even know each other and they're fighting online. It just felt like the experience was getting more and more degraded. It was more and more ads, more and more videos, less and less communication between people, and I signed off because I think that it was making it hard for me as an academic and a parent and someone who was very busy, to think clearly.

I was always worried about what I was going to say or that people were going to jump all over me, and I thought that was unhealthy. When I ran for office the first time in New Hampshire, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it without social media. But I also realized that talking to people on the phone and meeting them at their doors or speaking in libraries, people weren't as angry or as opposed to one another as I'd been led to believe based on social media. And so I started to think, well, what if we don't use social media running for Congress? I mean, you've seen this week how bad things have gotten [Editor’s note: this interview took place the week Charlie Kirk was shot], and I just don't think that democracy works well online. We're seeing Donald Trump try to force the sale of Tiktok to one of his biggest supporters’ children. We're seeing Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos sitting in the front row of Trump's inauguration. They had better seats than Greg Abbott did, and these people are making billions of dollars off of us, and they are destroying our democracy in the process. I don't want to be a part of it. So when I think of what can I do, What can I change, we decided not to use social media during the campaign because we don't want to live in a world where that is where our politics take place, and how they're outsourced, because we don't think that it's productive for democracy.

404 Media: I told my colleagues I was doing this interview and one of them joked that the headline for the story could be: “Can You Win an Election Without Telling Anyone You’re Running?” I hate social media also but I think I have to use it to promote our articles. Don’t you think it’s a necessary evil for you as well?
Beriont: It's so funny. I wish I could get a shirt that was like, “necessary evil?”. I do think that it's evil. I don't know that it's necessary. This campaign is a test for that. It's one thing for people who are trying to promote themselves or trying to sell things to use social media. I think it's another for our political leaders who are in a position where they should be holding corporations and the people who run them, like Mark Zuckerberg, responsible for their actions.

We're watching how the government is literally using that to surveil us and fire people for things that they're allegedly posting that are inappropriate about Charlie Kirk's assassination and things like that. It's incredibly risky for people to be using social media who are trying to preach a message of connection and community and democracy and equality and respect and dignity. I am not seeing those things on social media. Most of what people see, I believe a lot of it is AI. I believe a lot of it is an attempt to sell you something. I believe little of it is things that your friends and family are using as a way to actually connect. In New Hampshire, we've seen local police departments shut down the comment sections on their Facebook. We see political candidates deleting things that they don't like or comments that are negative. And so I think it just skews our sense of what's real and what's possible right now. And so that's why we're not using it.

Instead, we're doing something I'm calling district dialogs. As a facilitator and teacher, I'm happy to involve myself in messy, awkward conversations with people. I love teaching people how to stay in conversations and hold spaces. And so we're asking people what they wish politicians understood better. And we've had about 40 of these conversations throughout the district, and in almost every one we're hearing the same things from people who are exhausted by social media. They go on to check something, and two hours later they realize that they've lost two hours of their life, or they tried to find a post from a candidate, and instead, they got sucked into like some type of Nazi propaganda. And it's just such a shitty way to run a communication system and to run a country, and I think that we've done too much outsourcing to it, so it needs to stop.

404 Media: How are you reaching people without social media?
Beriont: We've been meeting in like public libraries and school cafeterias and church basements and driveways and living rooms, and asking people to bring some of their friends, or if it's a local democratic committee or some type of organization, asking them to invite people, and just sitting around and asking one another what we think we need to be doing right now. What people are saying after those meetings is they're so grateful that they had a chance to hear other people and to be heard, and they don't feel alone, and social media makes them feel alone. It makes them feel crazy, it makes them feel overwhelmed. And actually sitting and talking with the people in your community about what you can do to make it better is, I think, an antidote for a lot of that feeling of overwhelm and disassociation that people have right now.

I ask people what they think about my position on social media, and the number of people, especially millennials, say “I wish I could throw my phone out the window.” It seems to be really the political consultants and people who work in politics who are the most opposed to this idea, in part, because, for a lot of people, it's a low lift way to get involved. I think we have to ask ourselves whether it's actually an effective way of making a difference right now. I don't believe that that's the case in 2025.

404 Media: Have you done any polling or do you have any data that shows that this strategy is working?
Beriont: We haven't done any polling yet. It's tricky because there's six other people in this primary right now, one of the things that I think has been differentiating me is my willingness to sit and have a conversation. So a lot of politicians are operating the way that they have been trained to, which is to show up at a place, get a picture for Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, and then leave and people notice and are frustrated with that because they don't feel like they're actually getting an opportunity to talk with the people that want to represent them. As someone who has been on the other side of that, I decided to run because I was really frustrated with all of these monologues and these directed cameras telling me how to think or how to feel or how to vote or why, you know, the sense of reality that I had was wrong. And I think people really want more dialogue right now. They want more real, authentic exchanges. And I think they deserve that, and I think that that needs to be the foundation for democratic politics going forward.

404 Media: When I was in the VICE union there was an organizer with Writers Guild of America East who told us that support for the union on social media doesn’t mean anything, and can be counter productive because it makes people feel like they’re supporting the union without actually supporting it. Is your no social media approach to campaigning influenced by your experience in union organizing?Beriont: Yeah, absolutely. I was one of the people that helped organize the graduate student union at Harvard with the UAW. I think you're absolutely right about that. I also think that local politics has been great for this, because it's nonpartisan. And one of the things that I've realized is that in order to get things done in a space that is politically quite divided, you can't just be posting shit about your opponents the minute you don't get your way. You need to really build relationships and recognize that you're not always going to get your way, and this is true in a negotiation. When you show up to bargain at a table, you don't assume that you're going to get every single one of the things that you ask for, but you assume that people meet you in good faith and you'll be able to move forward. And I think that a lot of the relationship building and the coalition building that we need right now is lacking at the national level. We're seeing people, pouring fuel on partisan fires and preaching to the choirs, and they're doing that to raise more money, and it's not winning over anybody, and it's not helping to de-escalate the situation that we're in right now. And I think that it's frankly making us a lot less safe, because instead of actually holding social media corporations accountable for what they're posting online, which they could be doing, they're choosing not to do that.

404 Media: Do you think a no social media strategy can work on a national level?
Beriont: Absolutely. I think it's well suited to New Hampshire because this is a state that is very used to hands on democracy. Our State House has 400 state reps in it, and we used to have the first primary in the nation. So most people in New Hampshire who are politically active are used to interacting with political candidates and politicians and getting to know them quite well, and expect that from their politicians. This is a state where the majority of politicians who run, if they're posting anything on Facebook, they're probably going to get like, two or three likes. And it just doesn't seem to be the most effective way to organize in a place like this. But I also think that, at the very least, we should be asking our politicians to get offline and stop exacerbating tensions on platforms that are only benefiting billionaires. They're buying our politicians. They're buying our politics. And it needs to stop somewhere. So it should probably start with the people who are attempting to be our leaders.

404 Media

2025-10-03 11:53:19

Behind the Blog: Open-Source Drama and Saudi-Approved Humor

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 characters in open source, that Saudi comedy festival, and asking ourselves if we're haters.

EMANUEL: I swear I try my best not to use Behind the Blogs to pat myself on the back, but I’m very happy with how my piece about the recent Ruby Drama turned out. I got a lot of interesting responses to the the article, some of which I hope will result in new articles soon, but mostly I was happy that it appears I didn’t fuck up any of the details in what was a highly complicated, technical, and controversial story for people who care about this stuff.

That is not to say that I didn’t get any constructive criticism, some of which I’d like to address here. One piece of feedback I got from multiple people in the camp that is angry with Ruby Central’s ousting of contributors is their view that the article underplays the role David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) played in this saga, and the political views he’s expressed on social media over the years.

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Behind the Blog: Open-Source Drama and Saudi-Approved Humor

This week, we discuss characters in open source, that Saudi comedy festival, and asking ourselves if we're haters.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 02:19:17

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

The developer of ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, has said he is determined to fight back after Apple removed the app from its App Store on Thursday. The removal came after pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox which first reported the removal. Apple told 404 Media it has removed other similar apps too.

“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”

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

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ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’

Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-02 14:42:04

Earth Is Getting Darker, Literally, and Scientists Are Trying To Find Out Why

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It’s not the vibes; Earth is literally getting darker. Scientists have discovered that our planet has been reflecting less light in both hemispheres, with a more pronounced darkening in the Northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new trend upends longstanding symmetry in the surface albedo, or reflectivity, of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In other words, clouds circulate in a way that equalizes hemispheric differences, such as the uneven distribution of land, so that the albedos roughly match—though nobody knows why.

“There are all kinds of things that people have noticed in observations and simulations that tend to suggest that you have this hemispheric symmetry as a kind of fundamental property of the climate system, but nobody's really come up with a theoretical framework or explanation for it,” said Norman Loeb, a physical scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, who led the new study. “It's always been something that we've observed, but we haven't really explained it fully.”

To study this mystery, Loeb and his colleagues analyzed 24 years of observations captured since 2000 by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), a network of instruments placed on several NOAA and NASA satellites. Instead of an explanation for the strange symmetry, the results revealed an emerging asymmetry in hemispheric albedo; though both hemispheres are darkening, the Northern hemisphere shows more pronounced changes which challenges “the hypothesis that hemispheric symmetry in albedo is a fundamental property of Earth,” according to the study.

Loeb and his colleagues suggest that asymmetry is primarily driven by the effects of climate change, reductions in aerosol pollution, and natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and wildfires. Since snow and ice are highly reflective, the thinking goes, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets due to anthropogenic gas emissions is causing a reduction in albedo, especially in the Northern hemisphere.

Meanwhile, aerosols—which stimulate the formation of clouds—are causing uneven regional albedo changes. For example, the international effort to remove harmful commercial aerosols from the atmosphere has resulted in a drop in these substances over the Northern hemisphere, and therefore cloud cover, exacerbating the darkening effect. In the Southern hemisphere, aerosol-heavy clouds generated just over the past few years by disasters like the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires and the 2021 to 2022 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption may have brightened the albedo relative to the Northern hemisphere.

“The amount of aerosols has been increasing in the Southern hemisphere, and they've been decreasing in the Northern hemisphere,” explained Loeb. “Since aerosols reflect solar radiation, that would give you this asymmetry where you're seeing darkening in the Northern hemisphere compared to the southern Hemisphere.”

“All of these pieces added together give you this trend,” he continued. “But what was mysterious to me was that the clouds weren't compensating. If this hemispheric symmetry is a fundamental property of the system, the clouds should be giving you more reflection in the Northern hemisphere to compensate for the non-cloud properties. And I don’t see that—at least, not yet.”

Loeb’s team was able to spot this trend thanks to the long-term observations collected by CERES, a program that dates back to the late 1990s. The program has monitored the evolution of albedo in high resolution over decades, enabling the scientists to spot the new divergence from the normal symmetry.

“CERES has really opened up a new avenue of research that we couldn't do before,” Loeb said. “We had some measurements of Earth's radiation budget, but we struggled to have the same level of quality of the data.”

“Right now it's wonderful because we have very precise measurements over 25 years from CERES,” he continued. “It’s a unique opportunity for us to study things like this symmetry in a new light.”

To that end, Loeb and his colleagues plan to continue monitoring the asymmetry with CERES and probing its possible causes with more sophisticated climate models. The researchers are watching for signs that the symmetry might reemerge in the future, or if asymmetry is perhaps the new normal.

The overall darkening of Earth’s albedo is already accelerating the effects of climate change, and an asymmetric hemispheric darkening could produce its own complex impacts, including disruptive shifts in precipitation.

It’s very difficult to tease out the individual components that merge to create such complicated dynamics (Loeb calls it “unscrambling the egg”). To make matters worse, NASA is facing major cuts from the Trump administration, especially to its Earth observation satellites. CERES is due for one more launch in 2027, but these instruments are getting “long in the tooth,” Loeb said, and another program will eventually have to take up the mantle. Until then, researchers across disciplines will puzzle over why Earth is anomalously darkening, and what it might mean if this asymmetry is here to stay.

“We'll keep measuring and keep studying it, and I think this study should open the avenue for others to look at it,” Loeb concluded.

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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.

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404 Media

2025-10-02 14:24:41

Red Hat Investigating Breach Impacting as Many as 28,000 Customers, Including the Navy and Congress

A hacking group claims to have pulled data from a GitLab instance connected to Red Hat’s consulting business, scooping up 570 GB of compressed data from 28,000 customers.

The hack was first reported by BleepingComputer and has been confirmed by Red Hat itself. “Red Hat is aware of reports regarding a security incident related to our consulting business and we have initiated necessary remediation steps,” Stephanie Wonderlick, Red Hat’s VP of communications told 404 Media.

A file released by the hackers and viewed by 404 Media suggested that the hacking group may have acquired some data related to about 800 clients, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, the US Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center, the Federal Aviation Administration, Bank of America, AT&T, the U.S. House of Representatives, and Walmart.

“The security and integrity of our systems and the data entrusted to us are our highest priority,” she said. “At this time, we have no reason to believe the security issue impacts any of our other Red Hat services or products and are highly confident in the integrity of our software supply chain.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Red Hat is an open source software company that provides Linux-based enterprise software to a vast number of companies. As part of its business, Red Hat sells consulting contracts to users to help maintain their IT infrastructure. A hacking group that calls itself the Crimson Collective claims it breached a Red Hat GitLab repository that contained information related to Red Hat’s consulting clients.

“Since RedHat doesn't want to answer to us,” the hackers wrote in a channel on Telegram viewed by 404 Media, suggesting they have attempted to contact Red Hat. “Over 28000 repositories were exported, it includes all their customer's CERs [customer engagement reports] and analysis of their infra' [infrastructure] + their other dev's private repositories, this one will be fun,” the message added.. A CER is an internal document consultancy firms use to understand how its clients interact with their business. For an IT firm like Red Hat, this kind of document would contain a lot of information about a client's tech infrastructure including configuration data, network maps, and information about authentication tokens. A CER could help someone breach a network.

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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

“We have given them too much time already to answer lol instead of just starting a discussion they kept ignoring the emails,” the message added.In another message, the group said it had “gained access to some of their clients' infrastructure as well, already warned them but yeah they preferred ignoring us.”

404 Media viewed data related to the breach and attempted to contact some of the affected clients, including the US Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City and T-Mobile, but did not hear back.

Joseph Cox contributed additional reporting to this article.

Correction: this piece has been updated to say that the breach impacted a Red Hat GitLab, not a GitHub.

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{playlist.megaphone.fm}

404 Media

2025-10-02 13:57:13

Government Shutdown Causes Even More Confusion for U.S. Visa Applicants

Amid the government shutdown, visa applicants are facing more confusion and are worried about potential delays, as some services essential to their application processes are “under maintenance” due to lapses in funding.

The Foreign Labor Application Gateway website, which employers use for labor certification and immigration applicants use to access documentation for their applications, is down due to the shutdown, with an “Under Maintenance” notice on the site in place of the portal.

The federal government shut down on Wednesday, as Republican legislators refuse to budge on their desired cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act healthcare subsidies. The last government shutdown was in 2018, also under President Donald Trump, and lasted 35 days.

“Due to a lapse in funding, all foreign labor certification activities administered by the Department’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) have been suspended,” the site currently says. “During this suspension, access to the Foreign Labor Application Gateway (FLAG), will be disabled and will not permit system users to prepare and submit new applications as well as submit any information associated with applications pending a final determination.”
Screenshot of flag.dol.gov as of Oct. 2
A notice on the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs site says consular operations domestically and abroad will remain operational, however, including passports, visas, and assisting American citizens abroad. Consular services, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), are almost entirely fee-funded and only a small part of their funding is reliant on congress. The American Immigration Council notes that for this reason, application interviews, naturalization ceremonies, biometrics processing, and other parts of the immigration system should continue as usual, and past reports have shown that only one percent of the USCIS would likely need to be furloughed during a shutdown, but that backlogs and increased immigration enforcement from the Trump administration could mean even that one percent could create more delays.

The Office of Foreign Labor Certification website shows a notice about a lapse in appropriations: “This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services,” the site says. “The last update to the site was 10/1/2025.  Updates to the site will start again when the Federal government resumes operations.”

An Australian applicant for an E3 visa — a specific type of temporary, non-immigrant work visa for Australian citizens — told 404 Media that not being able to access the FLAG website means she can’t access or download the Department of Labor-certified Labor Condition Application she needs for her visa appointment in two weeks.

“If the shutdown is lifted prior to my visa appointment, I’ll download the LCA and be on my way. If however the shutdown goes on past my appointment date, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said.

The immigration and visa application process, overhauled by the Trump administration since taking office, has already caused chaos and confusion for applicants. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that adds a $100,000 fee for applicants to the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. US-based workers visiting abroad during the announcement rushed to travel back to the US after Trump’s announcement left them only hours before Trump’s deadline at midnight on Sunday, while some employers, especially small startups, scrambled to pay the fees for their workers.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

H-1B visa: US tech sector scrambles in the face of $100,000 fees

Startups and smaller firms could bear the brunt of Trump's new H-1B visa fee, and some fear it could thwart US innovation.

^{Danielle Kaye (BBC News)}

404 Media

2025-10-01 20:56:37

AI-Generated Biography on Amazon Tries to Capitalize on the Death of a Beloved Writer Kaleb Horton

On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE.

Some of these obituary writers were shocked and disgusted to discover an AI-generated “biography” of Kaleb Horton was suddenly for sale on Amazon.

“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘A.I.’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances,” writer Luke O’Neil, who wrote an obituary for Horton, told me in an email. “This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this.”

The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was published on September 27 as well, is 74 pages long, and has all the familiar signs of the kind of AI-generated books that flood Amazon’s store on a daily basis.

Even at just 74 pages, the book was produced at superhuman speed. That appears to be the normal cadence for the author, Jack C. Cambron, who has no online footprint outside of online bookstores, and who has written dozens of biographies and cookbooks since his career as an author appeared out of thin air earlier in September. He has written biographies about director Cameron Crowe, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, and pop singer Madison Beer, to name just a few. There’s no consistent pattern to these biographies other than a lot of the people they’re about have been in the news recently.

All these books also have obviously AI-generated covers, which is the most obvious and one of the most insulting signs that Horton’s biography is AI-generated as well: The person on the cover looks nothing like him.

AI-generated books on Amazon are extremely common and often attempt to monetize whatever is happening in the news or that people are searching for at any given time. For example, last year we wrote about a flood of AI-generated books about the journalist Kara Swisher appearing on Amazon leading up to the release of her memoir Burn Book. In theory, someone who might be interested in the book or Swisher might search for her name on Amazon and buy one of those AI-generated books without realizing it’s AI-generated. We’ve seen this same strategy flood public libraries with AI-generated books as well.

"Although many of us online appreciated him and have paid tribute to him as a writer, any real reporting about him—like the kind he did for the figures he obsessed over, and which he would deserve—would reflect that Kaleb was a human being and a complicated guy," Matt Pearce, another journalist who wrote about Horton's passing, told me in an email. "This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us."

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it removed the AI-generated Horton biography shortly after we reached out for comment. The company has said that it does not want these books in its store in response to our story about the AI-generated Kara Swisher books last year, but obviously is not taking any meaningful action to stop them.

“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for customers and authors and have content guidelines governing which books may be listed for sale," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told me in an email last year. "We do not allow AI-generated content that creates a poor customer experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to evaluate content in our store. We have removed a number of titles that violated our guidelines.”

Update: This post has been updated with comment from Matt Pearce. This post has also been updated to note Amazon removed the AI-generated biography shortly after we reached out for comment.

The last magazine writer

What left with Kaleb Horton.

^{Matt Pearce}

404 Media

2025-10-01 20:29:04

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus

Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park’s Cartman doing ASMR; a pixel-perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn’t actually exist; a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or La La Land; Rick and Morty in Minecraft; Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild; Rick and Morty talking about Sora; Toad from the Mario universe deadlifting; Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian; Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence, and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture.

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Sora 2 is the new video generation app/TikTok clone from OpenAI. As AI video generators go, it is immediately impressive in that it is slightly better than the video generators that came before it, just as every AI generator has been slightly better than the one that preceded it. From the get go, the app lets you insert yourself into its AI creations by saying three numbers and filming a short video of yourself looking at the camera, looking left, looking right, looking up, and looking down. It is, as Garbage Day just described it, a “slightly better looking AI slop feed,” which I think is basically correct. Whenever a new tool like this launches, the thing that journalists and users do is probe the guardrails, which is how you get viral images of SpongeBob doing 9/11.

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The difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X’s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people’s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work. I recall a time when Nintendo and the Pokémon Company sued a broke fan for throwing an “unofficial Pokémon” party with free entry at a bar in Seattle, then demanded that fan pay them $5,400 for the poster he used to advertise it. This was the poster:

With the release of Sora 2 it is maddening to remember all of the completely insane copyright lawsuits I’ve written about over the years—some successful, some thrown out, some settled—in which powerful companies like Nintendo, Disney, and Viacom sued powerless people who were often their own fans for minor infractions or use of copyrighted characters that would almost certainly be fair use.

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No real consequences of any sort have thus far come for OpenAI, and the company now seems completely disinterested in pretending that it did not train its tools on endless reams of copyrighted material. It is also, of course, tacitly encouraging people to pollute both its app and the broader internet with slop. Nintendo and Disney do not really seem to care that it is now easier than ever to make Elsa and Pikachu have sex or whatever, and that much of our social media ecosystem is now filled with things of that nature. Instagram, YouTube, and to a slightly lesser extent TikTok are already filled with AI slop of anything you could possibly imagine.And now OpenAI has cut out the extra step that required people to download and reupload their videos to social media and has launched its own slop feed, which is, at least for me, only slightly different than what I see daily on my Instagram feed.

The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

OpenAI boosts size of secondary share sale to $10.3 billion

OpenAI is allowing current and former employees to sell more than $10 billion worth of stock in a secondary share sale.

^{MacKenzie Sigalos (CNBC)}

404 Media

2025-10-01 18:34:27

People Are Farming and Selling Sora 2 Invite Codes on eBay

People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the new account and repeat the process.

On eBay, there are about 20 active listings for Sora 2 invite codes and 30 completed listings in which invite codes have sold. I bought a code from a seller for $12, and received a working code a few minutes later. The moment I activated my account, I was given four new codes for Sora 2. When I went into the histories of some of the sellers, many of them had sold a handful of codes previously, suggesting they were able to get their hands on more than four invites. It’s possible to do this just by cycling through accounts; each invite code is good for four invites, so it is possible to use one invite code for a new account for yourself, sell three of them, and repeat the process.

There are also dozens of people claiming to be selling or giving away codes on Reddit and X; some are asking for money via Cash App or Venmo, while others are asking for crypto. One guy has even created a website in which he has generated all 2.1 billion six-digit hexadecimal combinations to allow people to randomly guess / brute force the app (the site is a joke).

The fact that the invite codes are being sold across the internet is an indication that OpenAI has been able to capture some initial hype with the release of the app (which we’ll have much more to say about soon), but does not necessarily mean that it’s going to be some huge success or have sustained attention. Code and app invite sales are very common on eBay, even for apps and concert tickets (or game consoles, or other items) that eventually aren’t very popular or are mostly just a flash in the pan. But much of my timeline today is talking about Sora 2, which suggests that we may be crossing some sort of AI slop creation rubicon.

Sora Invite for sale | eBay

Get the best deals for Sora Invite at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!

^eBay

404 Media

2025-10-01 14:40:13

Kodak Is Selling Its Own Film Again for the First Time in a Decade

Kodak announced two new stocks of color film on Wednesday, in a move that has excited the photography world and which indicates that the photography giant is directly distributing still photography film again.

“To help meet the growing demand for film, Kodak is excited to announce the launch of two color-negative films, KODACOLOR 100 and KODACOLOR 200, in 135 format rolls,” Kodak said in an Instagram post. “For the first time in over a decade, Kodak will sell these films directly to distributors, in an effort to increase supply and help create greater stability in a market where prices have fluctuated. These films are sub-brands of existing Kodak films and offer the same high quality you’ve come to expect from Kodak.”

That quote is key—there are various types of Kodak film on the market right now. Those films are all made by Eastman Kodak (the legendary 133-year-old photography company) but they are sold through a totally separate company called Kodak Alaris, which is a UK-based company spun off from Eastman Kodak in 2012 as part of its bankruptcy. Since then, Kodak Alaris has had the sole right to distribute the still film stocks that Eastman Kodak manufactures. The sense in the photography community is that this arrangement is, at best, annoying and that it has perhaps led Kodak to not focus as much on making new film stocks as it should; there was further concern last year after Kodak Alaris was sold to a private equity firm.

What remains unclear is what KODACOLOR actually is; in the photography world, many “new” films are rebranded versions of other films that are on the market, are rereleased versions of film that had been previously discontinued, or are respooled versions of movie film that have been altered for still photography.

The Wednesday announcement of KODACOLOR makes clear that Eastman Kodak will be selling KODACOLOR directly to photography stores itself, which suggests that the company has wrested at least some control over the distribution of its films from Kodak Alaris, and raises all sorts of exciting possibilities about the future of Kodak film. The details of how or why it did this are not yet available and Kodak did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it is notable that while Kodak manufactures about a dozen different types of film including Kodak Gold, Ektar, Portra, and Colorplus, the only “still film” listed on the Kodak website is now the new KODACOLOR film stocks.

Regardless of the reasoning or specifics behind the news, the announcement of new film stocks from the most important film company in the world is the latest sign of the enduring and resurgent popularity of analog film photography. And it at least shows that Kodak is interested in creating new types of film for the hobby; as Petapixel points out, it is Kodak’s “first new film in a very long time.” In recent years, there has been a handful of new film stocks announced and released, most notably a type of film called Phoenix from a company called Harman, which is made in a new factory in England and, according to the company, has been “hugely successful.”

SIGNIFICANT ONGOING INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM - Harman Technology Ltd

HARMAN TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES SIGNIFICANT ONGOING INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM HARMAN technology Ltd, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of analogue photographic films, darkroom papers, and photo chemicals, has further reaffirmed…

^{ilfordphoto (Harman Technology Ltd)}

404 Media

2025-10-01 14:25:57

404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation Sue DHS

Last week Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed a lawsuit against the multiple parts of the U.S. government demanding they hand over a copy of an agreement that shares the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients with ICE. The data sharing marked a watershed moment for ICE and its access to highly sensitive data that is ordinarily siloed off from the agency. We believe it’s important for the public to see this unprecedented data sharing agreement for themselves.

As the Associated Press wrote when it first reported on the data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agreement will give ICE the ability to find “the location of aliens.” The data shared includes home addresses and ethnicities, according to the Associated Press.

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Do you know anything else about this data sharing agreement? 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.

Both Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed similar Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with DHS and CMS seeking a copy of the agreement. Neither agency provided the requested records in time, so we have now filed the lawsuit. In 404 Media’s case, CMS acknowledged the request but has not provided the records, and DHS did not even acknowledge the request at all.

404 Media’s request asked for a copy of the specific agreement, and if the agencies were unable to locate it, to alternatively provide copies of all agreements between DHS and CMS from this year.

“Despite having received the FOIA requests, and despite their obligations under the law, Defendants have failed to notify Plaintiffs of the scope of documents that they will produce or the scope of documents that they plan to withhold in response to the FOIA requests,” the lawsuit reads.
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Freedom of the Press Foundation is a non-profit organization that monitors press freedom issues in the U.S. and trains journalists on how to keep themselves and their sources safe. It regularly sues the U.S. government for access to records.

The data sharing agreement is just one of a growing list of ways that ICE is sourcing highly sensitive, and sometimes legally protected, information as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. ProPublica reported on the vast system the IRS is building to share millions of taxpayers’ data with ICE. 404 Media previously reported ICE has gained access to ISO Claimsearch, a massive insurance and medical bill database to find deportation targets. The database is nearly all encompassing and contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills.

Separately, 404 Media filed a lawsuit against ICE in September for access to the agency’s $2 million spyware contract.

If you want to support this work, become a paid subscriber here. If you would like to make a larger, tax deductible donation, please email us at donate@404media.co.

Membership

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

^{Outpost Staff (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-01 13:00:43

Podcast: Landlords Demand Your Workplace Logins to Scrape Paystubs

We start this week with Joseph’s article about landlords and income verification companies demanding login details from potential renters so the companies can log in and scrape their paystubs. That has some potential legal issues for everyone involved! After the break, 18 lawyers tell us why they used AI. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel breaks down the massive drama around Ruby.
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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/KtvSBb6rtHE?…

• Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs
• 18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It
• How Ruby Went Off the Rails

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

2025-10-01 13:00:01

A Bullet Crashed the Internet in Texas

The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.

“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline.
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“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.

Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.

This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.

“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”

WFAA

The official YouTube channel of WFAA-TV and WFAA.com.

^YouTube

404 Media

2025-09-30 21:46:34

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.

Surveillance contractors around the world create massive datasets of phones’, and by extension people’s movements, and then sell access to the data to government agencies. In turn, U.S. agencies have used these tools without a warrant or court order.

“The Biden Administration shut down DHS’s location data purchases after an inspector general found that DHS had broken the law. Every American should be concerned that Trump's hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

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

The ICE document is redacted but says a product made by a contractor called Penlink “leverages a proprietary data platform to compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing both forensic and predictive analytics.” The products the document is discussing are Tangles and Webloc.

Forbes previously reported that ICE spent more than $5 million on these products, including $2 million for Tangles specifically. Tangles and Webloc used to be run by an Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs joined Penlink in July 2023.

The new documents provide much more detail about the sort of location data ICE will now have access to, and why ICE chose to buy access to this vast dataset from Penlink specifically.

“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” the document reads. The agency said that the issue with other companies was that they required analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources,” which increased the chance of missing “connections between online behaviors and physical movements.”
A screenshot from the document.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) conducted market research in May and June, according to the document. The document lists two other companies, Babel Street and Venntel, which also sell location data but which the agency decided not to partner with.

404 Media and a group of other media outlets previously obtained detailed demonstration videos of Babel Street in action. They showed it was possible for users to track phones visiting and leaving abortion clinics, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. Venntel, meanwhile, was for some years a popular choice among U.S. government agencies looking to monitor the location of mobile phones. Its clients have included ICE, CBP, and the FBI. Its contracts with U.S. law enforcement have dried up in more recent years, with ICE closing out its work with the company in August, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.

The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.

Penlink did not respond to a request for comment on how it gathers or sources its location data.
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Regardless, the documents say that “HSI INTEL requires Penlink's Tangles and Weblocas [sic] an integral part of their investigations mission.” Although HSI has historically been focused on criminal investigations, 90 percent of HSI have been diverted to carry out immigration enforcement, according to data published by the Cato Institute. Meaning it is unclear whether use of the data will be limited to criminal investigations or not.

After this article was published, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told 404 Media in a statement “DHS is not going to confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods. The fact of the matter is the media is more concerned with peddling narratives to demonize ICE agents who are keeping Americans safe than they are with reporting on the criminals who have victimized our communities.” This is a boilerplate statement that DHS has repeatedly provided 404 Media when asked about public documents detailing the agency’s surveillance capabilities, and which inaccurately attacks the media.

In 2020, The Wall Street Journal first revealed that ICE and CBP were using commercially smartphone location data to investigate various crimes and for border enforcement. I then found CBP had a $400,000 contract with a location data broker and that the data it bought access to was “global.” I also found a Muslim prayer app was selling location data to a data broker whose clients included U.S. military contractors.

In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General published a report that found ICE, CBP, and the Secret Service all broke the law when using location data harvested from phones. The oversight body found that those DHS components did not have sufficient policies and procedures in place to ensure that the location data was used appropriately. In one case, a CBP official used the technology to track the location of coworkers, the report said.

The report recommended that CBP stop its use of such data; CBP said at the time it did not intend to renew its contracts anyway. The Inspector General also recommended that ICE stop using such data until it obtained the necessary approvals. But ICE’s response in the report said it would continue to use the data. “CTD is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden. Accordingly, continued use of CTD enables ICE HSI to successfully accomplish its law enforcement mission,” the response at the time said.

In January 2024, ICE said it had stopped the purchase of such “commercial telemetry data,” or CTD, which is how DHS refers to location data.

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

ICE says it’s stopped using commercial telemetry data

Spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement tells FedScoop that the agency is no longer using commercial telemetry data, but regulations are still scant.

^{Rebecca Heilweil (FedScoop)}

404 Media

2025-09-30 15:14:42

In Unhinged Speech, Pete Hegseth Says He's Tired of ‘Fat Troops,’ Says Military Needs to Go Full AI

Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called America’s Generals to Quantico to meet for an unknown reason. America’s top civilian military leader calling the generals home all at once is strange and unprecedented. It’s the kind of move that often presages something like a major war. But that’s not what he wanted. During a bizarre, unhinged speech before America’s military leadership, Hegseth focused almost entirely on the culture wars and called for the restoration of what he called a “warrior ethos.” He said some of America’s generals are fat, demanded the Pentagon go all in on AI, whined about beards and accountability, told the troops they “kill people and break things for a living,” and plugged his book.

“The speech today is about the nature of ourselves,” Hegseth said. For the next hour, before setting up President Trump for remarks, Hegseth spoke about a new American military that will shave its beards, reduce the number of women in combat, and focus on killing. “To our enemies: FAFO. If necessary, our troops can translate that for you. Peace through strength, brought to you by the warrior ethos.”(FAFO means fuck around and find out.)
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An earlier theme of the speech was more and faster. “This urgent moment, of course, requires more troops, more munitions, more drones, more [Patriot missiles], more submarines, more B-21 bombers,” Hegseth said. “It requires more innovation, more AI in everything and ahead of the curve, more cyber effects, more counter [unmanned aerial systems], more space, more speed. America is the strongest, but we need to get stronger and quickly.”

The alarming speech took most of the attention of social media Tuesday morning and comes at a time where Donald Trump has deployed troops in American cities, has threatened to invade Portland, and told the military they should use American cities as a “training ground.” Hegseth himself has been said to be more or less having a meltdown, according to reporting by The Daily Mail.

The Pentagon has been all in on AI and drones for years now, but it hasn’t gone well. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon is struggling to deploy AI weapons and is worried about catching up to China. A Biden era initiative called Replicator was meant to help bridge the gap between dreams and reality, but hasn’t worked fast enough for its critics. So the Pentagon is turning the project over to Special Operations Command—the part of the Pentagon in charge of its operators—under a new division called Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG). This means that the military leaders who run SEAL Team Six will soon be in charge of getting AI controlled drone swarms to the troops.

Much of Hegseth’s speech was about aesthetics and fitness. For him, a return to the “warrior ethos” meant never seeing a fat general or admiral ever again. “Every member of the joint force at any rank is required to take a PT test twice a year as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year, every year of service,” he said. “Also today, at my direction, every warrior across our joint force is required to do PT every duty day. Should be common sense…but we’re codifying it. And we’re not talking hot yoga and stretching. Real hard PT, either as a unit or an individual. At every level, from the Joint Chiefs to everyone in this room to the lowest private.”

“It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. “If the Secretary of War can do regular, hard PT, so can every member of our joint force. Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops. Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country in the world, it's a bad look. It is bad and it's not who we are.”

Hegseth’s aesthetic concerns extended to facial hair. “This also means grooming standards. No more beards. Long hair. Superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards. It’s like the broken windows theory of policing. When you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes. So you have to address the small stuff,” he said.

There was, of course, a carve out for America’s operators. “ If you want a beard you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave. We don’t have a military full of Nordic Pagans. At my direction, the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos. The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.”

Beards may seem like small stuff in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a hot topic among military recruits. Over the past few years, military recruits have fought and won exemptions for grooming standards based on their religion, often in court. A federal court told the Marine Corps it couldn't force Sikh recruits to shave in 2022. There’s also medical issues. Men with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a condition that causes painful ingrown hairs and razor burn after shaving, have gotten long gotten waivers to exempt them from shaving in the military. Around 60 percent of black men have pseudofolliculitis barbae.

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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

Hegseth made it clear that these new conditions mean there will be fewer women on the frontlines and in physically demanding roles. “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arm physical standards as men,” he said. “When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral. If women can make it excellent,” he said. “If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs. So be it, that is not the intent, but it could be the result.”

The Secretary also said he would end the tyranny of accountability in the military. “We are overhauling an Inspector General process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat,” he said. “We're doing the same with the Equal Opportunity and Military Equal Opportunity policies. The EO and MEO at our department. No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more side-tracking careers, no more walking on eggshells.”

Pentagon acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins is currently investigating Hegseth over his use of an unsecured Signal clone to plan military operations.

A modern military is a technological and logistics machine. A warrior takes many shapes and, if Hegseth wants to go all in on cyber, drones, and AI, then harsh grooming standards and increased physical fitness requirements will cut off many of the brightest minds who could help him fulfill that goal.

That doesn’t seem to matter to Hegseth and Trump as much as aesthetics does. Towards the end of his speech, the Secretary said the Pentagon lost its way. Then he plugged his 2024 book The War on Warriors. “We became the woke department, but not anymore. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again: we are done with that shit,” he said.

“You might say we’re ending the war on warriors. I hear someone wrote a book about that.”

Pete Hegseth is 'crawling out his skin': Pentagon insiders tell of explosive tantrums and erratic behavior... as his wife is accused of making outrageous demands

Insiders in the defense secretary's newly named Department of War say their boss has in the last few weeks been erupting in tirades, raging at staffers and becoming obsessive.

^{Susan Greene (Daily Mail)}

404 Media

2025-09-30 13:36:40

Google Just Removed Seven Years of Political Advertising History from 27 Countries

Google’s Ad Transparency tool no longer shows political online advertisements that ran on its platforms, in the past or present, from any countries in the European Union, making seven years of data from 27 different countries inaccessible.

Liz Carolan, who publishes Irish technology and politics newsletter The Briefing, spotted the change on September 28. Carolan noticed that until last week, Google’s Ad Transparency tool would allow visitors to search ads that have run in countries in the EU going back to 2018, including data about who was targeted, how much was spent on each ad, and for what candidates or parties. This week, political ads from Ireland as well as the other 26 countries in the EU are gone from the Ad Transparency political ads country selection page.

“We had been told that Google would try to stop people placing political ads, a ‘ban’ that was to come into effect this week. I did not read anywhere that this would mean the erasure of this archive of our political history,” Carolan wrote.

The change is in response to the EU’s upcoming Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA), a law set to enter full force on October 10. The TTPA lays out new regulations for advertisers in the EU, including requirements that political ads “must be clearly labelled as such and include information on who paid for it, to which election, referendum, legislative or regulatory process it is linked and whether targeting or ad-delivery techniques have been used,” according to an EU summary of the law, and limits targeting and ad delivery of political advertising to strict conditions, including requiring consent from ads’ targets that their data be used for political advertising. Certain categories of demographic data, like racial or ethnic origin or political opinions, can’t be used for profiling by advertisers.

On August 5, Google posted new guidelines for political ads in EU countries, and said that past ads would still be accessible in the Transparency Center: “As of September 2025, the EU Political Ads Transparency report will be no longer available. However, EU Election Ads previously shown in the Political Ads Transparency Report will remain publicly accessible in the Ads Transparency Center, subject to retention policies.”

In July, Meta also announced it would no longer allow “political, electoral and social issue ads” on its platforms in the EU, “given the unworkable requirements and legal uncertainties” introduced by the TTPA. Past ads from the EU are still visible on Meta’s ad library.

The law dictates that online ads will be available in “an online European repository,” but that repository hasn’t launched yet. Researchers and journalists rely on tools like Google’s Ad Transparency platform and Meta’s similar platform for information on who was running political ads and how; now, they’ll have to wait for that repository to launch.

Google announced in November 2024 that it would stop serving political ads in the EU in October 2025, ahead of the TTPA. “Additionally, paid political promotions, where they qualify as political ads under the TTPA, will no longer be permitted on YouTube in the EU,” Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy for Europe Annette Kroeber-Riel wrote in a company blog post.

“The European Union’s upcoming Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) unfortunately introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms,” Kroeber-Riel wrote. “For example, the TTPA defines political advertising so broadly that it could cover ads related to an extremely wide range of issues that would be difficult to reliably identify at scale. There is also a lack of reliable local election data permitting consistent and accurate identification of all ads related to any local, regional or national election across any of 27 EU Member States. And key technical guidance may not be finalized until just months before the regulation comes into effect.” The law is vague, but doesn’t specifically require platforms to delete past ads. It’s likely that many of the ads stored by Google in the Transparency Center would be in violation of the law today, however; instead of combing through hundreds of thousands of ads, it’s possible Google just removed the entire EU.

Google did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
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An update on political advertising in the European Union

Google will stop serving political advertising in the EU ahead of new regulation in October 2025.

^{Annette Kroeber-Riel (Google)}

404 Media

2025-09-30 13:03:31

18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It

Earlier this month, an appeals court in California issued a blistering decision and record $10,000 fine against a lawyer who submitted a brief in which “nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff’s opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff’s reply brief, are fabricated” through the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The court said it was publishing its opinion “as a warning” to California lawyers that they will be held responsible if they do not catch AI hallucinations in their briefs.

In that case, the lawyer in question “asserted that he had not been aware that generative AI frequently fabricates or hallucinates legal sources and, thus, he did not ‘manually verify [the quotations] against more reliable sources.’ He accepted responsibility for the fabrications and said he had since taken measures to educate himself so that he does not repeat such errors in the future.”

As the judges remark in their opinion, the use of generative AI by lawyers is now everywhere, and when it is used in ways that introduce fake citations or fake evidence, it is bogging down courts all over America (and the world). For the last few months, 404 Media has been analyzing dozens of court cases around the country in which lawyers have been caught using generative AI to craft their arguments, generate fictitious citations, generate false evidence, cite real cases but misinterpret them, or otherwise take shortcuts that has introduced inaccuracies into their cases. Our main goal was to learn more about why lawyers were using AI to write their briefs, especially when so many lawyers have been caught making errors that lead to sanctions and that ultimately threaten their careers and their standings in the profession.

To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any individual case and the sanctions against lawyers, rather than the often elaborate excuses that lawyers told the court when they were caught. Using Charlotin’s database as a starting point, we then pulled court records from around the country for dozens of cases where a lawyer offered a formal explanation or apology. Pulling this information required navigating clunky federal and state court record systems and finding and purchasing the specific record where the lawyer in question tried to explain themselves (these were often called “responses to order to show cause.”) We also reached out to lawyers who were sanctioned for using AI to ask them why they did it. Very few of them responded, but we have included explanations from the few who did.

What we found was incredibly fascinating, and reveals a mix of lawyers blaming IT issues, personal and family emergencies, their own poor judgment and carelessness, and demands from their firms and the industry to be more productive and take on more casework. But most often, they simply blame their assistants.

Few dispute that the legal industry is under great pressure to use AI. Legal giants like Westlaw and LexisNexis have pitched bespoke tools to law firms that are now regularly being used, but Charlotin’s database makes clear that lawyers are regularly using off-the-shelf generalized tools like ChatGPT and Gemini as well. There’s a seemingly endless number of startups selling AI legal tools that do research, write briefs, and perform other legal tasks. While working on this article, it became nearly impossible to keep up with new cases of lawyers being sanctioned for using AI. Charlotin has documented 11 new cases within the last week alone.

This article is the first of several 404 Media will write exploring the use of AI in the legal profession. If you’re a lawyer and have thoughts or firsthand experiences, please get in touch. Some of the following anecdotes have been lightly edited for clarity.

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Are you a lawyer or do you work in the legal industry? We want to know how AI is impacting the industry, your firm, and your job. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

A lawyer in Indiana blames the court (Fake case cited)

A judge stated that the lawyer “took the position that the main reason for the errors in his brief was the short deadline (three days) he was given to file it. He explained that, due to the short timeframe and his busy schedule, he asked his paralegal (who once was, but is not currently, a licensed attorney) to draft the brief, and did not have time to carefully review the paralegal's draft before filing it.”

A lawyer in New York blamed vertigo, head colds, and malware

"He acknowledges that he used Westlaw supported by Google Co-Pilot which is an artificial intelligence-based tool as preliminary research aid." The lawyer “goes on to state that he had no idea that such tools could fabricate cases but acknowledges that he later came to find out the limitation of such tools. He apologized for his failure to identify the errors in his affirmation, but partly blames ‘a serious health challenge since the beginning of this year which has proven very persistent which most of the time leaves me internally cold, and unable to maintain a steady body temperature which causes me to be dizzy and experience bouts of vertigo and confusion.’ The lawyer then indicates that after finding about the ‘citation errors’ in his affirmation, he conducted a review of his office computer system and found out that his system was ‘affected by malware and unauthorized remote access.’ He says that he compared the affirmation he prepared on April 9, 2025, to the affirmation he filed to [the court] on April 21, 2025, and ‘was shocked that the cases I cited were substantially different.’”

A lawyer in Florida blames a paralegal and the fact they were doing the case pro bono (Fake cases and hallucinated quotes)

The lawyer “explained that he was handling this appeal pro bono and that as he began preparing the brief, he recognized that he lacked experience in appellate law. He stated that at his own expense, he hired ‘an independent contractor paralegal to assist in drafting the answer brief.’ He further explained that upon receipt of a draft brief from the paralegal, he read it, finalized it, and filed it with this court. He admitted that he ‘did not review the authority cited within the draft answer brief prior to filing’ and did not realize it contained AI generated content.

A lawyer in South Carolina said he was rushing (Fake cases generated by Microsoft CoPilot)

“Out of haste and a naïve understanding of the technology, he did not independently verify the sources were real before including the citations in the motion filed with the Court seeking a preliminary injunction”

A lawyer in Hawaii blames a New Yorker they hired

This lawyer was sanctioned $100 by a court for one AI-generated case, as well as quoting multiple real cases and misattributing them to that fake case. They said they had hired a per-diem attorney—“someone I had previously worked with and trusted,” they told the court—to draft the case, and though they “did not personally use AI in this case, I failed to ensure every citation was accurate before filing the brief.” The Honolulu Civil Beat reported that the per-diem attorney they hired was from New York, and that they weren’t sure if that attorney had used AI or not.

The lawyer told us over the phone that the news of their $100 sanction had blown up in their district thanks to that article. “ I was in court yesterday, and of course the [opposing] attorney somehow brought this up,” they said in a call. According to them, that attorney has also used AI in at least seven cases. Nearly every lawyer is using AI to some degree, they said; it’s just a problem if they get caught. “The judges here have seen it extensively. I know for a fact other attorneys have been sanctioned. It’s public, but unless you know what to search for, you’re not going to find it anywhere. It’s just that for some stupid reason, my matter caught the attention of a news outlet. It doesn’t help with business.”

A lawyer in Arizona blames someone they hired

A judge wrote “this is a case where the majority of authorities cited were either fabricated, misleading, or unsupported. That is egregious … this entire litigation has been derailed by Counsel’s actions. The Opening Brief was replete with citation-related deficiencies, including those consistent with artificial intelligence generated hallucinations.”

The attorney claimed “Neither I nor the supervising staff attorney knowingly submitted false or non-existent citations to the Court. The brief writer in question was experienced and credentialed, and we relied on her professionalism and prior performance. At no point did we intend to mislead the Court or submit citations not grounded in valid legal authority.”

A lawyer in Louisiana blames Westlaw (a legal research tool)

The lawyer “acknowledge[d] the cited authorities were inaccurate and mistakenly verified using Westlaw Precision, an AI-assisted research tool, rather than Westlaw’s standalone legal database.” The lawyer further wrote that she “now understands that Westlaw Precision incorporates AI-assisted research, which can generate fictitious legal authority if not independently verified. She testified she was unable to provide the Court with this research history because the lawyer who produced the AI-generated citations is currently suspended from the practice of law in Louisiana:

“In the interest of transparency and candor, counsel apologizes to the Court and opposing counsel and accepts full responsibility for the oversight. Undersigned counsel now understands that Westlaw Precision incorporates AI-assisted research, which can generate fictitious legal authority if not independently verified. Since discovering the error, all citations in this memorandum have been independently confirmed, and a Motion for Leave to amend the Motion to Transfer has been filed to withdraw the erroneous citations. Counsel has also implemented new safeguards, including manual cross-checking in non AI-assisted databases, to prevent future mistakes.”

“At the time, undersigned counsel understood these authorities to be accurate and reliable. Undersigned counsel made edits and finalized the pleading but failed to independently verify every citation before filing it. Undersigned counsel takes responsibility for this oversight.

Undersigned counsel wants the Court to know that she takes this matter extremely seriously. Undersigned counsel holds the ethical obligations of our profession in the highest regard and apologizes to opposing counsel and the Court for this mistake. Undersigned counsel remains fully committed to the ethical obligations as an officer of the court and the standards expected by this Court going forward, which is evidenced by requesting leave to strike the inaccurate citations. Most importantly, undersigned counsel has taken steps to ensure this oversight does not happen again.”

A lawyer in New York says the death of their spouse distracted them

“We understand the grave implications of misreporting case law to the Court. It is not our intention to do so, and the issue is being investigated internally in our office,” the lawyer in the case wrote.

“The Opposition was drafted by a clerk. The clerk reports that she used Google for research on the issue,” they wrote. “The Opposition was then sent to me for review and filing. I reviewed the draft Opposition but did not check the citations. I take full responsibility for failing to check the citations in the Opposition. I believe the main reason for my failure is due to the recent death of my spouse … My husband’s recent death has affected my ability to attend to the practice of law with the same focus and attention as before.”

A lawyer in California says it was ‘a legal experiment’

This is a weird one, and has to do with an AI-generated petition filed three times in an antitrust lawsuit brought against Apple by the Coronavirus Reporter Corporation. The lawyer in the case explained that he created the document as a “legal experiment.” He wrote:

“I also ‘approved for distribution’ a Petition which Apple now seeks to strike. Apple calls the Petition a ‘manifesto,’ consistent with their five year efforts to deride us. But the Court should be aware that no human ever authored the Petition for Tim Cook’s resignation, nor did any human spend more than about fifteen minutes on it. I am quite weary of Artificial Intelligence, as I am weary of Big Tech, as the Court knows. We have never done such a test before, but we thought there was an interesting computational legal experiment here.

Apple has recently published controversial research that AI LLM's are, in short, not true intelligence. We asked the most powerful commercially available AI, ChatGPT o3 Pro ‘Deep Research’ mode, a simple question: ‘Did Judge Gonzales Rogers’ rebuke of Tim Cook’s Epic conduct create a legally grounded impetus for his termination as CEO, and if so, write a petition explaining such basis, providing contextual background on critics’ views of Apple’s demise since Steve Jobs’ death.’ Ten minutes later, the Petition was created by AI. I don't have the knowledge to know whether it is indeed 'intelligent,' but I was surprised at the quality of the work—so much so that (after making several minor corrections) I approved it for distribution and public input, to promote conversation on the complex implications herein. This is a matter ripe for discussion, and I request the motion be granted.”

Lawyers in Michigan blame an internet outage

“Unfortunately, difficulties were encountered on the evening of April 4 in assembling, sorting and preparation of PDFs for the approximately 1,500 pages of exhibits due to be electronically filed by Midnight. We do use artificial intelligence to supplement their research, along with strict verification and compliance checks before filing.

AI is incorporated into all of the major research tools available, including West and Lexis, and platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity. [We] do not rely on AI to write our briefs. We do include AI in their basic research and memorandums, and for checking spelling, syntax, and grammar. As Midnight approached on April 4, our computer system experienced a sudden and unexplainable loss of internet connection and loss of connection with the ECF [e-court filing] system … In the midst of experiencing these technical issues, we erred in our standard verification process and missed identifying incorrect text AI put in parentheticals in four cases in footnote 3, and one case on page 12, of the Opposition.”

Lawyers in Washington DC blame Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and an IT error

“After twenty years of using Westlaw, last summer I started using Lexis and its protege AI product as a natural language search engine for general legal propositions or to help formulate arguments in areas of the law where the courts have not spoken directly on an issue. I have never had a problem or issue using this tool and prior to recent events I would have highly recommended it. I failed to heed the warning provided by Lexis and did not double check the citations provided. Instead, I inserted the quotes, caselaw and uploaded the document to ProWritingAid. I used that tool to edit the brief and at one point used it to replace all the square brackets ( [ ) with parentheses.

In preparing and finalizing the brief, I used the following software tools: Pages with Grammarly and ProWritingAid ... through inadvertence or oversight, I was unaware quotes had been added or that I had included a case that did not actually exist … I immediately started trying to figure out what had happened. I spent all day with IT trying to figure out what went wrong.”

A lawyer in Texas blames their email, their temper, and their legal assistant

“Throughout May 2025, Counsel's office experienced substantial technology related problems with its computer and e-mail systems. As a result, a number of emails were either delayed or not received by Counsel at all. Counsel also possesses limited technological capabilities and relies on his legal assistant for filing documents and transcription - Counsel still uses a dictation phone. However, Counsel's legal assistant was out of the office on the date Plaintiffs Response was filed, so Counsel's law clerk had to take over her duties on that day (her first time filing). Counsel's law clerk had been regularly assisting Counsel with the present case and expressed that this was the first case she truly felt passionate about … While completing these items, Counsel's law clerk had various issues, including with sending opposing counsel the Joint Case Management Plan which required a phone conference to rectify. Additionally, Counsel's law clerk believed that Plaintiff’s Response to Defendant's Motion to Dismiss was also due that day when it was not.

In midst of these issues, Counsel - already missing his legal assistant - became frustrated. However, Counsel's law clerk said she had already completed Plaintiff's Response and Counsel immediately read the draft but did not thoroughly examine the cases cited therein … unbeknownst to Counsel and to his dismay, Counsel's law clerk did use artificial intelligence in drafting Plaintiff's Response. Counsel immediately instituted a strict policy prohibiting his staff from using artificial intelligence without exception - Counsel doesn't use artificial intelligence, so neither shall his staff.

Second, Counsel now requires any staff assisting in drafting documents to provide Counsel with a printout of each case cited therein with the passage(s) being relied on highlighted or marked.”

The lawyer also submitted an invoice from a company called Mainframe Computers for $480 which include line items for “Install office,” “printer not working and computer restarting,” “fixes with email and monitors and default fonts,” and “computer errors, change theme, resolution, background, and brightness.”

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18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-29 19:06:57

Reddit Mods Sued by YouTuber Ethan Klein Fight Efforts to Unmask Them

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

Critics of YouTuber Ethan Klein are pushing back on subpoenas that would reveal their identities as part of an ongoing legal fight between Klein and his detractors. Klein is a popular content creator whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. He’s also involved in a labyrinthine personal and legal beef with three other content creators and the moderators of a subreddit that criticises his work. Klein filed a legal motion to compel Discord and Reddit to reveal the identities of those moderators, a move their lawyers say would put them in harm’s way and stifle free speech on the internet forever.

Klein is most famous for his H3 Podcast and collaborations with Hasan Piker and Trisha Paytas which he produced through his company Ted Entertainment Inc. Following a public falling out with Piker, Klein released a longform video essay critiquing his former podcast partner. As often happens with long video essays about YouTube drama, other content creators filmed themselves watching Klein’s essay.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
These are called “reaction” videos and they’re pretty common on YouTube. Klein sued three creators—Frogan, Kaceytron, and Denims—calling their specific reaction videos low effort copyright infringement. As part of the lawsuit, he also went after the moderation team of the r/h3snark subreddit—a board on Reddit that critiques Klein and had shared the Denims video as part of a thread about Klein’s Piker essay.

On July 31, a judge allowed Klein’s lawyers to file a subpoena with Reddit and Discord that would reveal the identities of the people running r/h3snark and an associated Discord server. On September 22, lawyers for the defendants filed a motion to quash the subpoenas.

“On its face, the Action is about copyright infringement,” the latest filing said. “At its heart, however, the Action is about stifling criticism and seeking retribution by unmasking individuals for perceived reputational harms TEI [Klein’s production company] attributes to [John Doe moderators] unrelated to TEI’s intellectual property rights.”

The defendants’ lawyers said the subpoena to unmask moderators should be quashed because Klein can’t prove his case of copyright infringement, but also because revealing such information could put the Does’ in harm’s way. “The balance of equities weighs in favor of Does’ anonymity and quashing TEI’s Subpoenas in their entirety,” the filing said.

As evidence of the danger faced by the Does, the court filing quoted Klein directly. “Listen, guys, at this point you [r/h3snark mods] are totally fucked,” Klein said on a podcast, according to the court filing. “There’s a subpoena that’s going to come. You can’t erase your data. We’re going to get your IP address and find your information.”

“If there’s any justice in the world [the h3snark mods] will lose everything that they care about and I will be the one who makes them lose those things […] through legal means. Through any legal means,” he said, according to the court filing.

The defendants' lawyers paint a grim picture of what might happen should Klein’s subpoenas succeed: they “fear potentially being attacked, or worse, killed, over moderating a subreddit,” the filing said. “These worries extend to all family and friends connected to Does. Does fear their professional lives being ruined, potential sexual violence, extortion, fans showing up to their home, and endless years of harassment due to Ethan’s prolific lies surrounding them. The target he has painted on the moderators would make it unsafe to live openly in any capacity. Some Does also have heightened risk of retaliatory harm due to their religious identities. If their real names are revealed, these Does—and their families—face a real risk of being doxed, stalked, or harassed, as has happened to others in similar situations. In this climate, unmasking Does would expose them to significant and unjustified danger.”

Personal safety wasn’t the only legal argument the moderator’s lawyers put forward. A key part of Klein’s claim is that the Does violated his copyright by hosting links on r/h3snark of other streamers reacting to his video “Content Nuke—Hasan Piker.” His legal case is built around going after content creators for making “low effort” content using his work, but also the anonymous people on Reddit who shared links of those videos.

“The next question is whether creating a discussion thread, which includes a link to a streamer’s channel, where the streamer reacts to a live broadcast while providing her own commentary and criticism, and users visiting the thread engage in their own debate about the live broadcast and reactions thereto, constitutes contributory infringement,” the filing said. “It does not.”

The lawyers also argued that a Reddit “megathread”—a common practice where the moderators of a subreddit create one single space on a board for people to talk about a specific top—are fair use, that the reaction videos were transformative and should be considered fair use, and that the reaction videos increased the public’s exposure to Klein’s video.

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Do you know anything else about this story? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

At the end of the filing, the lawyers returned again to the personal safety of the moderators. They argued that even if Klein’s claim of copyright infringement met the burden of proof, and the lawyers don’t believe it does, the balance of harms is in favor of the moderators. “The personal harms to Does by allowing unmasking, as well as the public harms to online speech and discourse generally, would be irreparable in the private sense and long-reaching in the public sense,” the filing said.

The anonymity of places like Reddit and Discord grant a layer of protection to people seeking to critique power. This case could set a dangerous precedent, the lawyers believe. “If the court allows TEI’s Subpoenas, it would enable TEI to impose a considerable price on Does’ use of the vehicle of anonymous speech—including public exposure, real risks of retaliation and actual harm, and the financial and other burdens of defending the Action,” the filing said.

The filing added: “Very few would-be commentators are prepared to bear costs of this magnitude. So, when word gets out that the price tag of criticizing Ethan is this high—that speech will disappear. But that is precisely what Ethan Klein wants.”

Court Watch

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404 Media

2025-09-29 14:53:21

Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs

Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.

The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.

“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.

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Do you know anything else about any of these companies or the technology landlords are using? 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.

“I am livid,” they added.

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Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-29 13:00:05

How Ruby Went Off the Rails

For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web.

If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community, you probably haven’t heard about any of this, but the tools in question serve as critical infrastructure for gigantic internet services like GitHub, Shopify, and others, so any disruption to them would be catastrophic to those companies, their users, and vast swaths of the internet.

On September 19, Ruby Central, a nonprofit organization that manages RubyGems.org, a platform for sharing Ruby code and libraries, asserted control over several GitHub repositories for Ruby Gems as well as other critical Ruby open source projects that the rest of the Ruby development community relies on. A group of open source developers who had contributed to those projects and maintained them for years had their permissions suddenly revoked. When these developers announced on social media that their access was taken away, many Ruby developers saw the decision as a betrayal of their years-long contributions to the Ruby ecosystem and open source principles more generally. Others accused Ruby Central of succumbing to corporate pressure from companies like Shopify, which they claimed wanted more control over the project.

In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid

I’ve spent the last week talking to people who had direct involvement with Ruby Central’s decision, the contributors who were ousted, and developers in the Ruby community. I’ve heard accusations of greed, toxic personalities, and stories about years-long feuds between people, at times in open disagreement, who ultimately govern some of these important open source tools.

RubyGems.org and other critical Ruby tools have so far not been interrupted during this transition, but the incident sheds light on a basic truth about the internet and open source development: Much of the technology we use every day and take for granted is being maintained by a small number of developers who are not compensated for that work or get paid very little when compared to salaries at big tech companies. Open source development continues to make much of the internet possible, but as some of these tools become more important and financially valuable, they’re subject to more scrutiny and pressure from the community, organizations, and companies that rely on them.

“In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid, and once you start introducing formal organizations and employees and nonprofits and lawyers and all this kind of complexity,” Mike McQuaid, developer of the popular package manager Homebrew, which is built with Ruby, told me. McQuaid has talked to and offered to mediate between Ruby Central and the ousted maintainers. “This is a textbook case of what happens when there's this conflict between what companies want, what nonprofit individuals want, how much responsibility people have when they take money, who gets control and when. How much democracy versus just ‘I have the power to do something, therefore I'm going to do it.’”

With Ruby developers can download and use self-contained packages of code that add different functionalities to a Ruby project. These packages are called gems, and are distributed primarily via RubyGems.org, where developers can upload gems they’ve developed or download gems from other developers.

The ability to download gems and plug them into different projects is very useful and convenient for Ruby developers, but can create complications. Different gems are developed by different teams and are updated at different times with bug fixes and new features, and might not necessarily be compatible or play well with one another as they evolve.

This is where Bundler comes in. As its website explains, “Bundler provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed.” So, for example, if a developer is building a Ruby project and wants to use gems X, Y, and Z, Bundler will pull the versions of those gems that are compatible with one another, providing developers an easy solution for what Bundler describes as “dependency hell.”

Bundler is an open source project that was initially developed by Yehuda Katz, but the GitHub repository for the project was created and was administrated by André Arko. In 2015, Arko also founded a nonprofit trade organization named Ruby Together, which raised funds from developers and companies that use Ruby in order to maintain Bundler and other open source tools.

I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover

RubyGems.org, the site and service, is governed by Ruby Central, a nonprofit founded in 2001, which also organizes several Ruby conferences like RubyConf and RailsConf. In 2022, Arko’s Ruby Together and Ruby Central merged, “uniting the Ruby community’s leading events and infrastructure under one roof,” according to Ruby Central’s site. Bundler’s and RubyGems.org’s work often overlapped both in their goals and the developers who worked on them, but operated across two different GitHub organizations, each with its own repositories. To streamline development of these open source projects, Bundler also joined the Ruby Gems GitHub organization in 2022.

In 2023, Ruby Central established the Open Source Software Committee, which according to its site oversees RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org, focusing on infrastructure stability, security, and sustainability.

A confusing and central point of disagreement between Ruby Central and the maintainers it ousted on September 19 is rooted in the merging of Ruby Together and Ruby Central and the difference between Rubygems.org the service, essentially an implementation of the Ruby Gems codebase on an AWS instance, which both parties agree Ruby Central owns and operates, and the Ruby Gems the codebase that lives in the same GitHub organization as Bundler.

According to a recording of a mid-September Zoom meeting which I obtained between Marty Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, Arko, and the other ousted contributors, Ruby Central maintains that the codebase and GitHub organization became its responsibility when Ruby Central merged with Ruby Together in 2022. The ousted contributors’ position is that members of Ruby Central, like Haught, can be owners of the GitHub organization, but that ownership of the RubyGems codebase and other projects in the GitHub organization belong to the contributors, who don’t have a detailed governance model but historically have governed by consensus.

Arko made this argument to me in a recent interview, but also outlined that argument in a blog post, where he also shared the merger agreement between Ruby Central and Ruby Together. It shows that Ruby Together would dissolve and that Ruby Central would be in charge of raising and allocating funds for development, but does not explicitly say Ruby Central takes ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler projects or the GitHub organization.

To make matters even more complicated, Arko was at once a contributor to these open source projects, a contributor to RubyGems.org the service, an owner of the GitHub organization, and an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee.

In May, Arko resigned his position as an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee, but continued his work as a contributor. Arko told me he resigned his advisory role because of Ruby Central’s last minute invitation of David Heinemeier Hansson, better known online as DHH, as a keynote speaker at RailsConf.

Arko told me he objected to that decision because of DHH’s “horrifying, racist, misogynist, politics” and DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him. In 2021, back at Motherboard, we reported that many employees at DHH’s company, Basecamp, quit after his decision to ban any discussion of politics at work, which many employees saw as squashing discussion about race, bias, and diversity. Arko told me that DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him stemmed from Arko not wanting to support a certain feature DHH wanted added to Bundler, after which DHH demanded Arko be removed from the Ruby Together board.

The current controversy erupted on social media on September 19, when one contributor to the open source projects in the RubyGems and Bundler GitHub organization, Ellen Dash, announced that Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams. At that moment, their permissions and access to the GitHub organization were revoked, meaning they could no longer make any changes or contributions to the code, and Haught, representing Ruby Central, took control.

“I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover,” Dash said in a public “goodbye” letter they shared online. “I consider Ruby Central’s behavior a threat to the Ruby community as a whole. The forceful removal of those who maintained RubyGems and Bundler for over a decade is inherently a hostile action. Ruby Central crossed a line by doing this.”

The news was seen by many developers in the Ruby and open source community as betraying the dedication and labor that Dash, Arko, and other maintainers put into these tools for years.

Ruby Central, meanwhile, describes the move as one centered around security.

“With the recent increase of software supply chain attacks, we are taking proactive steps to safeguard the Ruby gem ecosystem end-to-end,” Ruby Central said in an explanation of its decision. “To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed. This includes both our production systems and GitHub repositories. In the near term we will temporarily hold administrative access to these projects while we finalize new policies that limit commit and organization access rights. This decision was made and approved by the Ruby Central Board as part of our fiduciary responsibility. In the interim, we have a strong on-call rotation in place to ensure continuity and reliability while we advance this work. These changes are designed to protect critical infrastructure that power the Ruby ecosystem, whether you are a developer downloading gems to your local machine [or] a small or large team who rely on the safety and availability of these tools.”

404 Media has covered the kind of recent supply chain attacks targeting open source projects that Ruby Central is referring to. Earlier this month, a critical JavaScript development tool Node Package Manager (NPM), was targeted by a similar supply chain attack. But not everyone in the Ruby development community bought the explanation that security was at the heart of the recent moves. One reason for that is a public statement from a Ruby Central board member and treasurer Freedom Dumlao.

On Substack, Dumlao apologized for the sudden change and how it was communicated.

“If Ruby Central made a critical mistake, it's here,” he wrote. “Could these conversations have been happening in public? Could the concerns we were hearing from companies, users and sponsors have been made more apparent? Probably. But I remind you we don't have a ‘communications team’, no real PR mechanism, we are all just engineers who (like many of you I'm sure) go heads down on a problem until it's solved.”

Dumlao reiterated that RubyGems and Bundler are critical infrastructure that are now increasingly under the threat of supply chain attacks, and said that the companies that rely on them “count” on Ruby Central do everything it can to keep them and their users safe.

However, Dumlao also said that Ruby Central was under “deadline” to make this change.

“Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going,” Dumlao wrote.

In a September 22 video message in response to criticism about its decision to remove maintainers, Ruby Central’s executive director Shan Cureton described a similar dynamic. She said “sponsors and companies who depend on Ruby tooling came to us with supply chain concerns” and that “Our funding and sponsorships are directly tied to our ability to demonstrate strong operational standards. Without those standards in place, it becomes harder to secure the support needed to keep maintainers paid, organize events, and provide resources for developers at every stage of their journey.”

Since Shopify is one of the primary sponsors and funders of Ruby Central, this led some in the Ruby community to believe that Shopify was exerting pressure on Ruby Central to make this change.

“That is not how it happened, and I wish I had been more careful with my wording in that blog post,” Dumlao told me in a Linkedin message when I asked him if Ruby Central was under pressure from Shopify to make these changes.

I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.

After I gave Dumlao my number so we could do a phone interview, I got an email from Cindi Sutera, who was recently brought on as a spokesperson for Ruby Central.

"Ruby Central’s mission is to keep the infrastructure that Rubyists rely on stable, safe, and trustworthy,” she told me. “As part of a routine review following organizational changes, we identified a small number of accounts whose privileges no longer matched current role requirements. The Board voted that it was imperative to align access with our privilege policy to keep the infrastructure that the Ruby community depends on stable. This is our mission.”

Sutera said that the board approved “a temporary administrative hold on certain elevated permissions” while it finalized operator agreements and governance roles.

“To move quickly and transparently, we imposed a clear deadline to complete operator agreements and close gaps,” she said. “We could have communicated earlier that we felt it necessary to move quickly and wish we could have given the community more time to prepare for this action. And now, here we are committed to completing this transition for the stability and security of the Ruby Gems supply chain. More updates are coming as we work through security protocols and stabilization efforts.”

“There’s literally only one company providing the money that is keeping Ruby Central open, and it is Shopify,” Arko told me. “And so I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.”

When I asked Arko why he thought Ruby Central removed him, if it wasn’t for security reasons, Arko said: “totally unprovable speculation is Shopify’s CEO is best friends with DHH, who hates me.” DHH is also a Shopify board member.

“Thanks for the invitation, but not my place to weigh in a lot on this while they're working through these changes,” DHH told me in an email when reached for comment. “But I support them taking steps to secure and professionalize the supply chain work they're doing.”

Shopify did not reply to a request for comment.

As this episode spread on social media, I talked to several people associated with Ruby Central who told me the board was acting in the interest of the RubyGems and the Ruby community. Two sources who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation said that Arko was difficult to work with, questioned how he used funds raised by Ruby Together, and claimed that a new Ruby version manager he’s working on, rv, means he has a conflict of interest with his work on RubyGems and Bundler.

Arko acknowledged to me he heard he’s been difficult to work with in the past. He said that sometimes he’s been able to reach out to people directly and resolve any issues, and that sometimes he hasn’t. He rejected the other allegations, and said that Ruby Together’s financials have always been public.

“It has always been fully public, and the amount has been fixed at $150 an hour for 10 years,” he said, referring to the amount contributors got paid to work on Bundler. Arko added that nobody has ever been paid for more than 20 hours a week, and that the most he’s been able to raise in a single year is $300,000 to pay eight different contributors. “Nobody has gotten a raise for 10 years.”

"As a matter of policy, we don’t discuss individual personnel,” Sutera, the Ruby Central spokesperson, said when I asked if Arko was removed from the GitHub organization because of his previous behavior. “Our recent actions were organization-wide governance measures aimed at aligning access with policy. Our priority is maintaining a stable and secure Ruby Gems supply chain."

McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew and who followed the controversy, told me that even Arko’s harshest critics wouldn’t deny the contributions he’s made to the Ruby community over the years.

Regarding Arko’s blog post about his removal, McQuaid told me it’s good that Arko is crediting other people for their contribution and that he’s following open source principles of community and transparency, but that “his ‘transparency’ here has been selective to things that benefit him/his narrative, he seems unwilling or unable to admit that he failed as a leader in being unwilling or unable to introduce a formal governance process long before this all went down or appoint a meaningful successor and step down amicably.”

The fundamental disagreement here is about who “owns” the GitHub organization that houses Bundler and RubyGems. Technically, Ruby Central was able to assert control because Hiroshi Shibata, a member of the Ruby core team and one of the contributors who has owner-level permissions on the GitHub, made Haught, who revoked the others’ access, an owner as well. Any owner can add or remove any other owner, but when Ruby Central’s board voted to make this change Haught acted immediately and removed Arko, Dash, and others.

However, Arko fundamentally disagrees with the premise that Ruby Central has the right to govern the GitHub organization in any way, and believes that it has always belonged to the group of contributors who had access up until September 19.

Arko said that even if Ruby Central gave him his permissions back, he would not consider the matter resolved until Ruby Central stopped claiming it owns Bundler “but I am definitely not going to hold my breath for that one.”

“When people really care, they're passionate and they're enthusiastic and they argue, and that often looks like drama,” McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew, said when I asked what he thinks this entire affair says about the state of open source development. “But if I had to pick between having the enthusiasm and the drama or losing both, then I'd probably pick the enthusiasm and the drama, because in some ways, the system is somewhat self correcting. Even the stuff that's going on right now, people are having essentially a very public debate about what role do large companies or nonprofits or individual maintainers have in open source. To what extent does someone's level of contribution matter versus what type of person they are? I think these are valuable discussions to be having, and we're having them in the open, whereas if it was in a company, this would all be in a meeting room or with an HR department or in a leadership offsite or whatever.”

A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

What a week it's been as a Ruby Central Board Member.

^{Freedom Dumlao (Freedom’s Substack)}

404 Media

2025-09-27 13:00:05

Humanity’s Toxic Wreckage Is Teeming With Life, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were lost at sea, lost in time, lost in space, and lost in translation.

If you are househunting at the moment, have you considered living on a submerged pile of Nazi munition, or in a charming community of WWI-era ghost ships, or, if you want privacy, maybe a homestead on the Moon? The first studies up this week are all about weird hubs of life here on Earth and perhaps one day off it.

Then, who will serve as general counsel for aliens? Who will feed the megaraptors? And last, the ultimate scientific mystery: what happened to Taylor Swift’s Southern twang?

Who lives in a warhead under the sea?

Vedenin, Andrey et al. “Sea-dumped munitions in the Baltic Sea support high epifauna abundance and diversity.” Communications Earth & Environment.

White, Elizabeth C. et al. “Mapping the “Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay”, Maryland with drone-based remote sensing.” Scientific Data.

By the mid-20th century, millions of tons of munitions from both World Wars had been dumped into coastal waters. Now, scientists reveal that these weapons of death have become bustling hubs of life by attracting fish, mollusks, microbes, among other creatures. Footage captured during submersible dives last year shows thriving aquatic communities on war detritus in the Baltic Sea.

“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic munition compounds, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels, and other epifauna on the munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs, and wooden crates,” said researchers led by Andrey Vedenin of Carl von Ossietzky University. “In this study, for the first time, the composition and structure of epifauna on the surface of marine munitions are described.”
Footage from munitions sites. Image: Vedenin, Andrey et al.
The munitions supported much more life than the surrounding sediment, with an average of around 43,000 organisms per square metre on the munitions compared to about 8,200 organisms on the seafloor. These hotspots were especially interesting given the toxicity levels from the explosive munitions fillings, which often exceeded water quality thresholds for aquatic organisms. (Side note: the authors describe the fillings as “cheesy” due to their texture and yellow color, which made me weirdly hungry for a munitions sandwich).

Some species seemed mildly put off by the contamination, including mussels that kept their shells closed at spots with high concentrations. But for the most part, “the high levels of chemical exposure apparently do not prevent the development of a dense epifauna community on the metal shells, fuse pockets, and transport cases centimeters from the explosive filling,” the team found. “The bare explosive, however, remains mostly free from epifauna, even from the Polydora polychaetes that are known to inhabit a vast variety of substrates.”

Wow, you know it’s bad if even Polydora polychaetes won’t touch it. Those worms live on anything but it seems they draw the line at the naked surface of an explosive.

In a separate study, researchers led by Elizabeth White of Duke University used remote-sensing drones to map out 147 shipwrecks in the eerily named “Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay” in Maryland. These WWI-era ships “have created plentiful wetlands, forests, and aquatic habitats,” according to the study.
youtube.com/embed/RhJ_jOcZZyY?…
“Sediment collected within wrecks has created ship-shaped islands, allowing both aquatic and terrestrial vegetation to flourish,” the team said. “Birds, such as Osprey, nest within this vegetation and on exposed areas of ships, while aquatic organisms such as the endangered Atlantic sturgeon use the subaqueous wreckage as foraging and nursery grounds.”

And there you have it: research about discarded weapons of death and creepy ship graveyards that, somehow, is kind of uplifting.

In other news…

My vacation home is a lunar impact crater

Wang, Siyan et al. “Where Shall We Live on the Moon? Multi-Factor Site Selection and Scenario-Based Planning for Permanent Lunar Habitats.” Acta Astronautica.

The Moon is a harsh mistress, but the harshness is not evenly distributed. To that end, scientists have scouted out the best lunar real estate for future human habitation based on metrics like temperature, topography, solar illumination, dust activity, water resources, and radiation.

“Lunar resources can provide essential support for establishing permanent lunar habitats, suggesting that the Moon may become humanity’s second home,” said researchers led by Siyan Wang of Tongji University. However, the team added that the Moon does come with some design challenges: for example, “lacking an atmosphere, lunar surface temperatures range annually from –171°C to 111°C.”

Setting aside the absence of standard atmospheric amenities, the new study spotlights three promising sites, all of which are mare plains (low-lying basaltic regions) sheltered within the craters Pytheas, Gambart, and Parry. Great locations, but you’re not going to like the commute.

Take me to your lawyer

Puranen, Emma Johanna et al. “Who speaks for extraterrestrial ecosystems?: Why ET should have standing.” Space Policy.

Should aliens have inalienable rights? This question has been debated for years (and I explore it in my new book🔌). In a new study, scientists propose establishing a legal framework for aliens quickly, given the frenzied pace of both astrobiology and commercial space development.

“Humanity stands at the threshold of an unprecedented boom in space activity, with planned mining ventures, increased uncrewed and crewed missions, and escalating commercial interest,” said researchers led by Emma Johanna Puranen of the Open University. “This coincides with a ‘golden age’ of astrobiology, where scientists increasingly favour the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. We must act now to establish legal and ethical norms for the treatment of extraterrestrial ecosystems before irreversible harm occurs.”

The team models its proposed framework on the influential 1972 treatise “Should Trees Have Standing?” by Christopher Stone. Who knows if we’ll ever actually need a legal system for aliens, but at the very least I hope it inspires a procedural spinoff called CSI: E.T.

Psst…you have crocodile stuck in your teeth

Ibiricu, Lucio M. et al. “Latest Cretaceous megaraptorid theropod dinosaur sheds light on megaraptoran evolution and palaeobiology.” Nature Communications.

Scientists have discovered fossils of a megaraptor (a dinosaur as cool as it sounds) with the leg bone of a crocodilian right there in its jaws. Though it’s possible that this bone coincidentally slid into the predator’s mouth after it died, we may be looking at a 68-million-year-old version of The Last Supper.
Artist concept of the newly discovered dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali with an ancient crocodile relative’s front leg in its mouth. Image: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History via AP
“Here we report a previously unknown megaraptoran genus and species” called Joaquinraptor, which was found in central Patagonia and “is among the most completely represented and latest-surviving megaraptorans,” said researchers led by Lucio Ibiricu of the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology.

“A crocodyliform right humerus…was situated between the closely associated left and right dentaries of the Joaquinraptor holotype, with the apices of several tooth crowns of the megaraptorid in direct contact with the humeral shaft, which also shows potential tooth marks,” the team added. “As such, this discovery may constitute direct evidence regarding prey selection” of megaraptors.

Death is a bummer, but I bet it goes down a lot smoother with a mouthful of croc hot wings.

Dialect Analysis (Taylor’s Version)

Mohamed, Miski and Winn, Matthew B. “Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift's dialect changes across different eras of her career.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

I knew this study was trouble when it walked in. Researchers tracked Taylor Swift’s dialect shifts across the eras by logging and analyzing more than 1,400 vowel sounds in interviews and performances spanning her career.

“The results of this study show that Taylor Swift temporarily adopted distinct measurable features of Southern American dialect during her time in Nashville…and these features disappeared upon her relocation to Philadelphia and New York City,” said authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew B. Winn of the University of Minnesota.
Taylor Swift performing during her Eras tour (credit Maura Shapiro) with vocal frequency analysis overlaid (credit: Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn). Image: Maura Shapiro/Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn.
The team also discovered that Swift lowered her voice pitch during her NYC years, when she became more outspoken about “The Man” (sexism and creative property rights). They speculate that she may have “intentionally modulated her voice pitch to be lower to signal the seriousness of these themes, and to convey her competence to speak on them with authority.”

Or, they add, it could be a natural voice drop “associated with aging through her 20s,” an explanation supported by her own admission that she has this thing where she gets older but just never wiser. Whatever her current accent, let’s hope she shakes it off and leaves a blank space open for new dialects. Look what you made me do; it’s me, hi, I’m the Abstract, it’s me.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Sea-dumped munitions in the Baltic Sea support high epifauna abundance and diversity - Communications Earth & Environment

Sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War can provide a habitat for epifauna, according to an analysis of footage from a remotely operated vehicle in the Baltic Sea.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-09-26 15:25:00

Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

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 being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit.

JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about 404 Media at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum, an annual conference. Over the years, I haven’t been to too many conferences, because honestly it was always too disruptive to the day-to-day journalism and work of managing a team to be able to get away. We’re more than two years into this, but one of the nice things about having this company is that I can mostly get my work done whenever makes sense for me, whether that’s late at night in Los Angeles or early in the morning in Greece.

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Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}