404 Media

2026-05-28 16:18:52

Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.

Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager of Dayton, said at a city commission meeting last week that the “Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras” as a stop-gap measure until Flock cameras could be removed entirely. I spoke to multiple people in Dayton who said they had seen bagged cameras in the last few days. The Dayton Daily News first reported on the baggings.
Bagged Flock cameras in Dayton. Image: Melissa Bertolo
Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city. Cities around the country have been reconsidering their relationship with the surveillance company after reporting from 404 Media and local news outlets that showed data from the cameras was making its way to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national camera network.

Most cities that have reconsidered their contracts have done so via city council meetings and public debate that have played out over the course of months, and both Dayton and Evanston city officials told residents that they were not sure whether they could immediately deactivate or remove the cameras under the terms of their contracts. And so both cities decided to physically block them as a stop-gap measure, showing that cities feel that they do not have the ability to unilaterally decide when to stop using Flock surveillance cameras.
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The bagging came after Dayton city commissioner Darius Beckham said at a city commission meeting last week that the city has been “requesting that the Flock cameras be taken down. I think we are working through how soon we can do that. I think in the interim, we are trying to figure out what steps can be taken to mitigate the vulnerability and concerns that there are still recordings being taken.” Covering them with trash bags is the idea the city ultimately came up with.

Cities are not sure what their contracts state how to extricate themselves from those contracts, or whether the cameras are recording (and where that data is going). This uncertainty highlights the problems associated with using private, third-party surveillance infrastructure. Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”

Dayton has had Flock cameras in the city for several years, but in October the city learned that data from the cameras was being passed to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national network, which is a phenomenon we first reported in May of last year. The city claimed that it did not intend for this sharing to happen, and that a specific police officer “failed to implement the safeguards he helped develop” to prevent the sharing; essentially, a setting to prevent the sharing was not enabled. On May 1, the police department announced that it was “indefinitely suspending the use of our fixed-site automated license plate readers” because of this data sharing, and that the officer who failed to implement the privacy safeguards would be leaving the department.
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“It’s very disappointing, and disappointing would be a pretty mild word,” Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal said in a press conference earlier this month. “Disappointing would be a pretty mild word. My choice words I cannot say live on air or how I really feel, but it’s disappointing and disgusting would be another word I would use … absolutely it was user error. It’s nothing more than that because we shut things down right away as soon as we found out [about the sharing]. All they needed to do was hit a toggle button saying ‘nope, no sharing’ and then we were done.” On March 31, Afzal announced he would be resigning this summer to take another job in North Carolina.

For months, city residents have been calling for more accountability from the city of Dayton and for the resignation of Dayton’s city manager over the use of Flock cameras. Melissa Bertolo, who has been pushing against Flock cameras through an organization called DeFlock Dayton and the Coalition for Public Protection, told 404 Media that the work of residents to push for transparency about Flock data sharing practices in the city has brought the issue to the forefront.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Bertolo said of covering the cameras, adding that, ultimately the cameras need to come down. “Our coalition has made six demands—covering the cameras is not one of them. Removal of the cameras is one of them. It’s a step toward that. We have had all five city commissioners saying they agreed with taking down the cameras, but they say there’s a process to figuring that out … so even if the program is quote unquote ‘suspended’ data is still able to be captured. We can’t just say the program is suspended until we can actively know they’re down.”

One of the major questions is whether Dayton is actually going to end the Flock program, and how it will be able to do so. In August, Evanston terminated its contract with Flock, and the Flock cameras were removed. The city then claimed Flock “reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission,” and sent the company a cease-and-desist. Reporting by the Evanston Roundtable suggested that the cameras were possibly active after they had been reinstalled. The city then decided to cover the cameras with trash bags; the cameras were fully removed from the city earlier this year.

“All Flock cameras have been removed from Evanston,” a spokesperson for the city of Evanston told 404 Media. “The cameras are owned by Flock and had to be removed by Flock. While we awaited the removal, we covered them.”

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that “of course, any city can turn off its cameras if it no longer wants to use them. However, each contract is negotiated with the city attorney beforehand, and legal conditions may prevent a city from voiding the contract without grounds to do so.”

“Our goal is to ensure city leaders make that decision with open eyes, regardless of the contract,” the spokesperson added. “You're well aware of the volume of misinformation that has spread thru Reddit threads and on YouTube, and we always want to ensure that a city fully understands the impact of their decision before cameras are turned off. Like Richmond, CA claiming they saw a 33% spike in auto thefts during the time cameras were off, or multiple violent incidents in Austin, Texas that would have ended much earlier had they been using Flock.”

Notably, Flock said that it wants to keep working with the city of Dayton: “We're proud to work with the city of Dayton, OH and hope we can continue.”

The City of Dayton did not respond to a request for comment.

Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras - Evanston RoundTable

Private surveillance vendor Flock Safety reinstalled all of its stationary license plate cameras in Evanston that had previously been removed, apparently

^{Alex Harrison (Evanston RoundTable)}

404 Media

2026-05-28 15:28:47

The Sun Is Undergoing a Mysterious Change and Nobody Knows Why

The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday.

The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 years and is caused by variations in the star’s magnetic activity. This activity peaks at a solar maximum, producing more frequent sunspots and higher radio flux, which are known as surface “proxies” of intense magnetism, as well as dramatic eruptions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. At solar minimum, when magnetic activity winds down, the Sun enters a quieter phase. Throughout the cycle, sound waves known as p-modes oscillate near the surface of the Sun, providing clues about its internal structure.

All of the above is well known, but using new tools, astronomers have just discovered a weird mismatch in surface and p-mode signals that emerged more than a decade ago and has become especially pronounced in the current epoch, Cycle 25, which began in 2019.

“Essentially, we can use the p-modes as a proxy and a probe of activity underneath the surface of the Sun, because the frequencies change in response to the changing magnetic field,” said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“The sunspot number and the radio flux are basically proxies of the total amount of magnetic flux,” he continued. “What we're doing with the p-modes is saying: What is actually happening beneath the visible surface?”
Graphic illustrating the p-mode oscillations in recent solar cycles. Image: W.J. Chaplin
To answer that question, Chaplin and his colleagues examined four decades of observations from the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), a collection of six remote solar observatories located around the world that have tracked the Sun’s oscillations since 1976.

While astronomers have monitored sunspots for centuries, BiSON has enabled researchers to monitor long-term shifts in “helioseismology,” which measures the seismic activity inside the Sun, a dataset that has led to the recent discovery of so-called "glitches" and other previously undetectable solar phenomena.

“There's a tendency to think that because we've only had data on a few cycles, that all cycles look like that, and that they copy and repeat,” Chaplin said. “I think what's becoming clear is that that isn't the case. No cycle is the same as another.”

The new study revealed that Cycle 25 shows stronger high-frequency p-mode activity just below the surface compared to recent cycles, but that it also appears weaker in terms of surface proxies, meaning it is showing comparatively fewer sunspots and reduced radio flux. This discrepancy hints that magnetic activity has become increasingly confined to a region of several hundred miles under the surface with each successive cycle, though the underlying reason for this change is unclear.

“We saw this really clear signal in the high frequency modes,” said Chaplin. “You can see in the high frequency modes that the current cycle is as strong as Cycles 22 and 23 and that the picture looks very different in the proxies.”

The results suggest that surface proxies, while valuable as rough estimates of magnetic activity, don’t provide the full picture of the roiling dynamics playing out under the solar surface. Chaplin and his colleagues note that several other studies have presented evidence for long-term changes in near-surface solar phenomena, though it will take more research to understand what is driving these trends.

To that end, the team plans to continue observing Cycle 25, which just passed its maximum and is expected to close out with a minimum toward the end of the 2020s. The researchers speculated that the structural changes may be linked either to the longer Hale cycle, which is a period covering two solar cycles—roughly 22 years. Since the Sun’s magnetic poles flip after each solar cycle, the Hale cycle measures the time it takes for the Sun to return to its original magnetic state.

These long-term observations are slowly peeling back the enigmatic inner workings of the Sun, especially the solar dynamo—the process that generates its magnetic field—which remains poorly understood. These efforts could help refine forecasts of hazardous space weather near Earth, while also shedding light on the behavior of other stars.

“Getting more robust space weather predictions is important, but also, from the science point of view, there is [a need] for a better understanding of the dynamo, and how the dynamo changes on long timescales,” Chaplin said.

“Helioseismology is important because it enables you to see inside the Sun, which is something that you can't do by any other means,” he concluded.

404 Media

2026-05-28 14:40:07

‘Cracked Oura’ Is an App For Using the Oura Ring Without the Monthly Subscription

Rather than pay a monthly subscription for an app that plenty of people think kinda sucks, a developer has created Cracked Oura, an open source app that lets Oura ring wearers query and analyze their health data without the monthly fee.

On Thursday, Oura announced the new Ring 5, a lighter and smaller wearable with an allegedly better battery life. That ring will cost at least $399, and some models cost as much as $499. An Oura subscription, which is required to actually get usable insights on your sleep, stress, and exercise, costs nearly $70 a year or $6 a month.

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‘Cracked Oura’ Is an App For Using the Oura Ring Without the Monthly Subscription

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-28 13:53:25

Headway Therapy Patients Forced to Scan Their Faces to Keep Getting Care

Headway, a popular online therapy platform, says it will require clients and providers to undergo biometric scanning, and there’s no way to opt out other than leaving the platform.

On April 3, Headway sent an email to clients informing them of the upcoming requirement: “To make sure Headway stays a safe and reliable place to get care, you'll soon be asked to verify your identity by taking a picture of a valid government-issued photo ID in your portal,” the email said, which a user shared with 404 Media. “As part of this process, you'll also be asked to take a clear photo of your face to confirm your identity. The facial image is never used for anything but identity verification.” The facial scan involves using your devices’ camera and moving your head from side to side.

The email said that the platform was asking clients to verify their identity “proactively” so that they’d have “plenty of time to complete this,” but didn’t specify when identity verification would be required. “We're not asking you to verify because of any specific behaviors or concerns,” Headway said in the email. “It's a requirement for anyone seeking medication management on Headway.”

💡
Do you know anything else about biometric scanning in healthcare or therapy? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

Headway says identity verification for patients “is rolling out in waves over the coming weeks, starting with patients of prescribers,” but eventually all providers will be required to undergo facial scanning. Providers and clients I spoke to told me they haven’t yet needed to do this step, and the uncertainty of when they’ll be required to hand over their biometric data—and if they don’t, lose access to the platform and their clients or care—is adding to their concern about the process.

Many mental health providers or the practices they work for use Headway to help them get credentialed with insurance companies and process billing and other administrative tasks. Through Headway, providers can be in-network with a much wider variety of insurance plans.

Headway is telling clients in customer support chats and emails that it will use the third-party vendor Persona to verify identities, according to emails viewed by 404 Media. Persona is part of the portfolio of Founder's Fund, Peter Thiel’s investment firm, according to Founder’s Fund’s website. Earlier this year, Discord ended its extremely short-lived contract with Persona, but many other platforms use it, including Doordash, Uber, and Roblox.

In its biometric data policy, Headway states that when processing biometric data, it will “Inform each User in writing of the manner in which the User may opt out of the collection, processing, storage or usage of their Biometric Data.” But last month, 404 Media asked Headway if users can opt out. “No, identity verification is currently a required safety step for patients seeing prescribers as part of our commitment to safe, verified care,” a Headway spokesperson said. “We’ve let patients know they can contact Headway support for a manual review in extenuating circumstances.”

Users and providers haven’t been able to get a straight answer about when this requirement is starting or how opting out works other than not using Headway at all. A customer support person at Headway told one client that they can choose not to undergo identity verification, but if they do, they won’t be able to meet with a prescriber on Headway, according to copies of the chat viewed by 404 Media.

"Do I give up my privacy or do I burn all my progress and then just go to a different company and try and find somebody else, and start over?"

Headway said in an email to providers that sessions “may be auto-cancelled if verification is incomplete,” and “providers in your group will be unable to confirm sessions without completing their own identity verification.”

One client who’s used Headway for several years and sees providers for both medication management and talk therapy told me that “opting out” as Headway defines it isn’t as simple as switching platforms. “It's not just a consumer choice thing,” they said. “Healthcare is a totally different thing. I've talked to my providers, and they're not on any alternative [platforms]. It's possible that your provider is also on some alternative, but that's not the case for me.” Switching providers would mean starting over, finding new providers that could be a good fit and take their insurance, and hoping there’s no lapse in treatment in the meantime.

“It's just not a good situation,” they said. “It’s a rock and a hard place. Do I give up my privacy or do I burn all my progress and then just go to a different company and try and find somebody else, and start over?”

The client I spoke to said they were especially concerned in light of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s intentions to link databases of autism patients using federal health insurance programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Kennedy has also said the Center for Disease Control is “finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence,” and has recently targeted antidepressants, which psychiatrists say is a dangerous oversimplification of millions of Americans’ experiences with mental health and medications.

Headway is also informing providers—whether they prescribe medication or not—that facial scanning and identity verification is coming soon, and is coaching them on how to talk to clients who are wary of handing over their biometric data, to convince them to go through with it.

The platform is also telling providers who haven’t gone through identity verification themselves that their payments might be restricted. “We’re reaching out because our payment processor let us know that your account is missing information that will soon impact and restrict your payouts from Headway,” an email Headway sent to one provider said. It directed them to use a link to update their payment information to become verified, but the link in the email didn’t go to a verification process, the provider who received it told me. The platform hasn’t informed providers or patients about when identity verification or facial scans will start being required.

Headway did not respond to my questions about when specific groups would be required to undergo identity verification or if verification status will affect provider’s payments.

A spokesperson for Headway told 404 Media: “Confirming that Headway has recently started to enforce identity verification to our network. To clarify—today, we require identity verification for patients receiving prescriptions through Headway, as prescribers have a heightened obligation to confirm they are treating a verified patient before writing a prescription, and this process helps them meet that standard. It also protects patients by ensuring that prescriptions, medical records, and billing are tied to the right person.”

“Identity verification is currently a required safety step for patients seeing prescribers as part of our commitment to safe, verified care. We’ve let patients know they can contact Headway support for a manual review in extenuating circumstances,” the spokesperson added.

The Headway spokesperson said identity verification “is run through a HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2-certified platform,” and identity data “is stored in a centralized, encrypted, access-controlled record with detailed audit logs.”

Headway’s site says the new requirements are “similar to showing your ID at the front desk of a doctor's office.” But facial scanning and biometric data isn’t the same as presenting identification at the doctor or at a store. Privacy experts agree that online identity verification systems like those now required to access adult content and age-restricted material in many places around the world pose new and different risks, including the possibility of breaches, third-party sellers, and invasive tracking. Headway says it won’t use this data for marketing, and that it will protect it from hacks. Users are forced to take the platform’s word for it.

The Headway spokesperson claimed that the response from users to the new requirements has been “mostly positive.” But providers I spoke to said they’re concerned and considering leaving the platform because of it. One provider I spoke to, who is a psychotherapist and doesn’t prescribe medication but received emails from Headway informing them of the impending changes anyway, told me they feel “frankly afraid” because there’s no option to opt-out other than severing care, especially for patients. “When I initially got the email indicating that they would be rolling out biometric scanning, my stomach dropped,” they said. “The email indicated that they would start with prescribers and their clients and then move onto everyone else. My mind started racing, what are the ethics around this? Where is this data going? The only time I've had to do a biometric scan is to do something for the IRS. This is not common practice in my field.”

They said they’re not sure yet if they’ll stay on Headway. “It feels values-inconsistent to continue to work them for a variety of reasons, but this perhaps is the nail in the coffin for me,” they said. “In some ways I don't have a choice because I am not independently credentialed with all of the plans that I am credentialed with through Headway. Meaning, I cannot see those clients outside of Headway. I do not (and will not) want to abandon those clients.”

Another provider I spoke to said that although there’s a lot of conversation happening among providers about leaving the platform, it’s easier said than done. “So many of us need this for our income, so it's a real sacrifice” to stop using Headway at this point, they said. “That's kind of the dilemma people are in.”

Joseph Cox contributed reporting.

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

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

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-27 14:20:52

‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like

Users of the chatbot app Character.ai have been melting down on Reddit and begging the company to stop messing with the app after a series of changes that users say has completely ruined the app. The feedback is so negative that I have never seen a community or user base so uniformly upset and so consistently aligned in its view.

Character.ai is one of the most popular AI companion chatbot apps; it allows users to create virtual characters to chat with. Over the last few years, users have used the chatbots for companionship, to form romantic relationships, to entertain themselves, and to role-play. Like other popular chatbot apps, Character.ai has also been used for abuse and harassment, and the company is being sued both by the families of users who killed themselves after using Character.ai and by the state of Pennsylvania after AI characters on the platform claimed to be licensed medical professionals. In recent weeks, Character.ai, like other AI companies, has increased its usage restrictions for free users of the app, which highlights the fact that AI is very expensive to run. The app has also gotten rid of several AI models that users liked and has replaced them with a set called Pipsqueak 2; one user told me the new model feels “lobotomized” and generic and that it feels like the new model tends to narrate action but does not often participate in dialogue. The company has also put lots of ads in the app, is heavily promoting a new video feature that animates the AI character rather than traditional chatting, added new filters/content restrictions, and added invasive age verification.

Looking at what’s happened to Character.ai is useful insofar as it shows the type of enshittification that is increasingly coming to AI tools across the entire sector and the associated user backlash. This is happening because of a mix of the unworkable economics of many AI apps and increased regulation on AI apps as they are accused of playing a part in the death of their users or being used for abuse.

On the r/CharacterAI subreddit there are literally hundreds of posts about how useless Character.AI has become, and there are also separate subreddits called CharacterAIRevolution, CAIRevolution, Characterai_rebellion, characteraiventing,and CharacteraiResistance that are entirely dedicated to looking for alternatives to CharacterAI or pushing back against changes the company has made. Recent top posts on the CharacterAI subreddit, which is partially moderated by the creators of the app, include “Character ai is dead,” “CharacterAI, this is the single worst mistake you have EVER made,” “Anybody else quitting?,” “I’m no longer addicted, I guess,” “We did not enjoy the past updates AT ALL,” and “They finally shot themselves in the foot. RIP C.AI.” A “Feedback Megathread” on the PipSqueak 2 chat model, which was posted by Character.ai employees has 1,000 comments which are almost entirely negative; the top comment is “I HATE pipsqueak 2. It’s way over dramatic, I can’t stand it.” Other comments include “HOT. ASS. OH MY GOD THIS THING IS HOT ASSSS!!!,” “It honestly may be the worst chat style to exist on the platform,” “It’s the worst model yet,” “What I think about PipSqueak 2? IT FUCKING SUCKS, THAT’S WHAT,” and “Terrible compared to the models you got rid of. Thanks for nothing.”

Many users have also pointed to an interview that Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand gave to TIME, in which he said he lets his six-year-old daughter use the app and said “I’m willing to bet that we will build more compelling experiences, but if it means some users churn, then some users churn.”

In a blog post announcing Pipsqueak 2, Anand acknowledged that it is getting difficult to continue running Character.AI for free users.

"I want to address the changes we've shipped recently that I know have been frustrating. We rolled out age restrictions to more regions, introduced usage limits on some features, and added more ad placements for free users. These all landed close together, and we know your experience took a hit. We hear you," he wrote. "All of this comes back to one thing: keeping Character.ai free and available to as many people as possible. We're a small team serving millions of users every month with no outside investors. Running AI at this scale, and maintaining our high safety standards for everyone globally, is not cheap."

I messaged with six Character.AI users, all of whom have been using the app for several years and who said it has gotten noticeably worse in recent weeks. “PipSqueak 2 has been an absolute joke,” one user told me. “While I am someone who is desensitized to bad stories and writing, I can tell things are just off. If you swipe on a greetings message, you just get literal gibberish. And the fact that it’s the only model for non-paying users is also the ultimate disrespect.” Another user, who said they live in a war-torn area and use Character.AI to keep their mind off the “weight of endless nightmare, propaganda, and war,” told me that the old Character.AI models were “cheesy, teasy, and a bit weird from time to time. It understood jokes, irony, memes, media content,” they said. The changes “literally lobotomized Character.ai […] it became dull, and this was painful. All the soft kisses, messages, pats. My bots I wrote based on my own lore stopped responding. This hobby helped me a lot in total isolation, [and there are other users] stuck in a war, isolated by disability, vulnerable people […] but they ruined not just my hobby but my experience.”

There have been numerous AI chat apps that have changed their business models, changed the underlying AI models, or have tweaked their product in a way that has made users upset. Famously, when OpenAI retired the GPT-4o model and replaced it with GPT-5, there was an entire user base who felt like their companion was ripped away. What we’re seeing with Character.ai now is more of the same, but it also highlights the fact that the companies making AI tools haven’t figured out how to make the economics of their products work, and they also don’t know how to make tools that don’t lead to harm. We have seen various AI products implement usage limits, increase prices, and roll back features because of the booming price of AI compute. We have also seen companies correctly attempt to make their products less harmful. But, in doing so, they often limit functionality or annoy their users. What’s happening with Character.ai isn’t particularly novel, but it does raise questions about whether products like these have any real future at all.

OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’

Its human partners said the flirty, quirky GPT-4o was the perfect companion – on the eve of Valentine’s Day, it’s being turned off for good. How will users cope?

^{Alaina Demopoulos (the Guardian)}

404 Media

2026-05-27 13:02:37

Podcast: How Deepfakes Destroyed a High School

We start this week with Sam’s deeply reported story on how deepfakes rocked a high school, and how those kids were failed at each step. After the break, Joseph tells us about BusPatrol, a company that plans to turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why a councilmember crashed out over Flock.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA7…
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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• LA Made x 404 Media Presents: How AI is Threatening the Future of Media
• How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart
• ‘BusPatrol’ Put AI Cameras in Tens of Thousands of School Buses. Now They Want to Give Cops Access
• After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet and Phone Ban

How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the country grapple with how to response to deepfake crimes involvin…

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-26 15:41:49

Millions of People Are Installing Malware on Their Partners’ Phones (with Zack Whittaker)

This week Joseph speaks to Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch. Zack has been leading coverage into the spouseware or stalkerware industry. This is malware sold to ordinary people, which they then often install on their girlfriend’s or someone else’s phone. Zack talks about the crazy scope of this problem.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA8…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/BLb46310iLs?…

• Behind the stalkerware network spilling the private phone data of hundreds of thousands
• Spyzie stalkerware is spying on thousands of Android and iPhone users
• Stalkerware tag on TechCrunch

Spyzie stalkerware is spying on thousands of Android and iPhone users | TechCrunch

Another little-known phone monitoring outfit has quietly amassed half a million customers, whose email addresses are now in Have I Been Pwned.

^{Zack Whittaker (TechCrunch)}

404 Media

2026-05-26 13:49:22

‘BusPatrol’ Put AI Cameras in Tens of Thousands of School Buses. Now They Want to Give Cops Access

BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned. The plan will essentially transform school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles, taking a technology that was originally designed to issue tickets to people illegally passing stopped buses and using it for much wider and general law enforcement, likely without a warrant.

BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans. Internally, BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children.

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‘BusPatrol’ Put AI Cameras in Tens of Thousands of School Buses. Now They Want to Give Cops Access

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-25 13:00:30

An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation

Opposition to the massive data centers that power AI is bipartisan and growing across the country. From Maine to California, more states and local communities are passing moratoriums and bans on construction of the noisy, power and water hungry buildings. People are getting arrested for speaking too long at town halls, legislators are receiving death threats, and it’s clear that the fight against these computer warehouses will shape American politics for years to come.

In Ypsialanti Township, Michigan, the University of Michigan has partnered with America’s nuclear weapons scientists to build a massive $1.2 billion data center. Earlier this month, the Ypsilanti utility authority paused the delivery of water to new data center projects for six months, a move the University called “unlawfully discriminatory.”

On May 10, Colleton County South Carolina passed a six month moratorium on data center construction with an option to extend. The moratorium came ahead of the planned construction of an 800 acre data center in the ACE Basin Estuary that would build on 200 acres of untouched wetlands. Local landowners and the South Carolina Environmental Law Center were already suing to halt construction of the project. This is the second location for the particular project. The builders first tried to build the data center in Georgia last year but failed after local opposition grew too strong.

Logistics company Prologis eyed Washington Township, Michigan for a 312-acre data center project. Locals organized and voiced their opposition at planning meetings. “I have just learned that the petitioner for that project has just withdrawn their application,” Audrey Brown, a Washington Township Clerk said in a post on Facebook yesterday . “This means that as of today, there are no data center projects under consideration by the township. Therefore, I will be adding a temporary moratorium for all data center applications for consideration at tomorrow night’s board meeting. The moratorium will give our community time to put legal safeguards in place.”
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Microsoft cancelled a planned 244-acre data center in the Village of Caledonia, Wisconsin after 2,000 people in the area signed a petition that opposed rezoning the land. “I would’ve liked to been able to engage directly with Microsoft much earlier in the process. We were not allowed to do that. I think that became an obstacle for a lot of different points and reasons,” Nancy Pierce, a Village trustee, told local news outlet WTMJ.

Georgia is considering a bill that would prevent cities from issuing permits to data centers until 2027. Maryland has a bill referred to committee that would pause data centers in the state until the legislature figured out how to provide power to them. Oklahoma is considering a law that would pause data centers until 2029 while the state conducts research on water and utility rate impacts. Even Virginia—home to massive concentration of data centers—is considering a proposal to halt new construction until specific power needs are met.

But there are high profile failures in the fight too. Maine was set to pass a statewide moratorium on new data center construction, the first of its kind in the United States. But Governor Janet Mills vetoed the bill saying that she supported a ban in principle, but wanted a carve out for a data center already under construction in the southern part of the state.

For anti-data center activists there will be victories and losses but a coalition is taking shape, one that cuts across party lines and has people engaging with politics on a local level in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades.

Data center ordinance development continues in Washington Township: 'There is a limit to everything'

Washington Township planning commissioners vote to continue developing data center ordinance after Prologis proposed 312-acre campus.

^{Macomb Daily (Planet Detroit)}

404 Media

2026-05-23 13:00:55

‘Corpse Point’ In the Arctic Is Melting, Disturbing Centuries-Old Bodies

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that felt the heat, left their mark, survived a cataclysm, and watched cows watch TV.

First, the bones of long-dead whalers are spilling out their Arctic graves due to human-driven climate change. Then: a trip to “where the snakes lost life,” an ur-moon in the ashes, and the facial recognition abilities of cows.

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

The thaw at “Corpse Point”

Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese. “Skeletons in the permafrost: Exploring climate-driven heritage loss and occupational health at the early modern whaling burial site of Likneset, Svalbard.” PLOS One.

The battered bones of beleaguered whalers buried centuries ago in the Arctic are melting out of their permafrost graves due to human-driven climate change, according to a new study. The remains of these men, who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, reveal the physical toll of whaling on sailors, and highlight the urgent need to preserve cultural heritage as global temperatures rise.

Climate change is an obvious danger to future generations, but it also threatens our link to the past by accelerating the erosion and degradation of its material remains. This problem affects all kinds of different archaeological sites, from ancient artifacts preserved in vanishing Mongolian glaciers to the oldest rock art on record in Indonesia, which is rapidly decaying in the heat 45,000 years after it was painted.
Graves at “Corpse Point” showing some of the textiles have eroded in recent decades. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese
Nowhere is more affected by warming trends than the Arctic, where temperatures are rising nearly four times faster than the global average. Now, a pair of researchers has examined the remains of European whalers at the Likneset whaling burial site on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, also known as “Corpse Point.” The team discovered significant degradation of many burials since they were first documented in the 1970s, a loss that has been sped up by climate change.

“The site has been excavated repeatedly over more than three decades, providing a rare opportunity to examine both preservation change and human skeletal evidence through time and across contrasting burial environments within a single site,” said authors Lise Loktu of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Elin Therese Brødholt of Oslo University Hospital.

“In several cases, coffin lids had collapsed and sideboards were displaced, resulting in partial disturbance of skeletal remains and textiles,” the team said. “One grave (Grave 214) is classified as completely destroyed, with coffin elements and skeletal remains dispersed downslope.”
Textiles were in a better state of preservation in less exposed graves. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese
These whalers just can’t get any peace, even in death. Their lives were short and filled with physical hardships, according to the team’s re-examination of the bones. Many individuals endured physical trauma due to chronic strain, and 18 out of 19 of the studied sailors suffered from scurvy. Most of the bones belong to men who died in their 20s or early 30s.

“The predominance of healed injuries indicates survival after traumatic events and suggests that mortality within the assemblage was more closely related to cumulative physiological stress than to acute fatal trauma,” according to the study.

“The results from Likneset…call into question the long-term viability of in situ preservation and managed decay under warming permafrost conditions,” the team concluded. Future work to address this problem “should be guided by clearly defined knowledge priorities: which information must be documented and analysed before it is irretrievably lost?”

In other news…

The mystery of Ndalambiri

Mesfin, Isis et al. "A new archaeological chrono-cultural sequence for the rock art site of Ndalambiri, Cuanza Sul, Angola" Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

For at least 45,000 years, humans have gathered at Ndalambiri, a rockshelter in Angola thought to be named for an Umbundu phrase that means, “This is where snakes lost life.” Its interior wall is adorned with an immense fresco of roughly 1,200 figures painted in white, red, and black, including many anthropomorphic and geometric designs left over the past 2,000 years.

Now, researchers report the first comprehensive excavation of the site in partnership with local communities, an effort that unearthed thousands of artifacts, such as pottery shards, tools, and botanical and faunal remains.
Excavations under the fresco at Ndalambiri. Image: Mesfin, Isis et al.
“The archaeological content of this central rock art and heritage site in Angola has remained poorly documented until now,” said researchers led by Isis Mesfin of the French Museum of Natural History in Paris. “The diversity of archaeological materials discovered at the Ndalambiri shelter makes it a strategic site for raising awareness about heritage preservation and field archaeology training.”

The team discovered the earliest evidence of iron production in Angola in the layers, dating back to the 5th century CE, and speculated that Ndalambiri was often a crossroads of diverse cultural interactions. But despite the wealth of new finds from the excavation, the study noted that “the identity of Ndalambiri’s occupants and painters remains uncertain.”

Though it’s not clear yet who adorned its walls or sought refuge in its space, the rockshelter was clearly a storied gathering place that preserves eerie remnants of untold generations.

Last moon standing

Belyakov, Matthew et al. “Nereid as a regular satellite of Neptune.” Science Advances.

Let’s dispense with human timescales and wind the clock way back to the early solar system, some four billion years ago. There was Neptune, minding its own business, when a pair of Pluto-sized dwarf planets suddenly barged into its way, causing complete orbital chaos.

Neptune gravitationally captured one of the interlopers, which became the moon Triton. But in the fallout of the encounter, Neptune’s original moons were catapulted into deep space or torn into pieces and left to coalesce into a new set of irregular objects.

All, that is, except Nereid. Scientists have discovered that this Neptunian moon, which is about 200 miles in diameter, is likely the sole survivor of this ancient collision of worlds. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team found that Nereid doesn’t spectrally match the rest of Neptune’s moons.

“Our proposed regular satellite genesis story for the moon leaves Nereid as the singular intact original satellite of Neptune—Neptune’s innermost moons, such as Proteus, are reaccreted pieces of satellites destroyed by Triton’s capture,” said researchers led by Matthew Belyakov at Caltech. “Future spacecraft exploration of the Neptunian system should search for signs of an early geologic history on Nereid consistent with formation as a regular satellite.”

Talk about a lunar loner. Nereid may offer a rare glimpse of a fleeting era before Triton came crashing into its captured orbit, upending the Neptunian moon system forever.

Cows can tell people apart

Amichaud, Océane et al. “Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos.” PLOS One.

We’ll end, as all things should, with cows watching TV. To determine whether these animals can recognize human faces, or match voices to faces, scientists played a series of videos for 32 Prim’Holstein cows.

In one experiment, the cows watched a series of muted videos of familiar and unfamiliar male faces. In a second session, the cows watched videos of familiar caretakers speaking in their own voice, or a dubbed version with a different voice. The heart rates of the cows were monitored throughout both experiments.
A graphic demonstrating the experimental setup. Image: Amichaud et al.
The results revealed that “cows looked significantly longer at the unfamiliar person, suggesting that they are able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals using only a video of their faces as a cue,” said researchers led by Océane Amichaud of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment in France. “Cows looked significantly longer at the face that matched the voice, indicating that they are able to associate familiar and unfamiliar voices with the corresponding face.”

While the cows were able to distinguish between individuals, there was no difference in their heart rates when presented with familiar caretakers and strangers. The researchers suggested that future work should explore whether any other bovine behaviors are dependent on their human companions. This has been “cows watching TV” news.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Indonesia: Climate change destroying world's oldest animal painting

Higher temperatures have accelerated build-up of salts, which causes the art to flake off the walls.

^{BBC News}

404 Media

2026-05-22 21:03:03

Here's the Bodycam Footage of the Cybertruck That Drove Into a Lake

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

On Monday a man in Grapevine, Texas drove his Tesla Cybertruck into a lake to test the vehicle’s “wade mode.” Police arrested the Cybertruck’s owner, Jimmy Jack McDaniel, after he and his passengers fled the vehicle.

At one point, the owner tried to get back into the vehicle, and law enforcement responded by deploying jet skis and calling a tow truck to pull the Cybertruck from the water, according to hours of related footage 404 Media obtained. The passengers were German tourists, according to a conversation included in the bodycam footage.

“The charge port is underwater and it [the Cybertruck] thinks it’s plugged in to the charging unit and it won’t let the wheels turn because it thinks it’s charging. And as soon as I can get it a little bit closer to the ground I can drive it out,” McDaniel said during a conversation with a police officer.

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Here's the Bodycam Footage of the Cybertruck That Drove Into a Lake

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-22 15:45:16

Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

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 Spencer Pratt, bricking phones, and the FTC.

JASON: I have watched mostly in horror as Spencer Pratt has taken over the internet and, it feels, the physical space around me as he attempts to run for mayor of Los Angeles on what is basically a MAGA platform. For those unaware, Pratt is a former reality show star from The Hills who I was vaguely aware of at the time and then never thought about again until a few months ago. Pratt’s political origin story is that his Pacific Palisades mansion burnt down during last year’s fire; he has since railed against the government response to the fire and announced he is running for mayor as a Republican in a city that is extremely democratic.

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Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-21 13:08:47

This Archivist Has Saved 175,000 Articles from 30 Years of Writing about Magic: The Gathering

I have been playing Magic: The Gathering on and off since I was a child and in that time I’ve read countless articles and websites about the game. Much of it is lost to time and internet churn. Sites are deleted and even the strongest hobby writing vanishes if it isn’t preserved. The Library of Leng is a website that’s attempting to do that preservation work.

Named after a Magic card, the Library of Leng is a new searchable database of writing about the card game. It pulled old usenet articles, hobbyist posts from old websites saved in the Internet Archive, and updates from publisher Wizards of the Coast that are routinely scrubbed from existence. The Library is hosting links to some of the first strategic writing about the game from 1994, just a year after it started, as well as announcements about tournament rules from just a few years ago.
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The Library is the work of Gregor Stocks, a software engineer in Seattle. “I learned to play in elementary school with a couple of Fifth Edition boosters shuffled together, but I didn't really get into it until Mercadian Masques. I've played on and off since then,” Stocks told 404 Media.

“I'm interested in the strategic history of the game, and I've been frustrated a bunch of times over the years by not being able to find old articles that people mention were influential on their thinking,” Stocks said. “More broadly, I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s, and I worry that a lot of my big influences will disappear by default. The Internet Archive is great, but I worry about them being the only place where a lot of this stuff is saved.”

The Library doesn’t reprint articles in full without the express consent of the author. Instead it gives readers the headline, a small snippet, and a linkback to an archived version of the story on the Wayback Machine or Internet Archive.

Stocks said the hardest part of the whole project was parsing old data from the early days of the internet. “Nowadays when you write about Magic you've probably got a content management system that stops you from making typos on the card names, formats your decklists nicely, keeps your HTML in the same format, etc,” he said. “Back in the 90s and early 2000s they didn't have that stuff, they were pretty much writing every webpage from scratch, so it takes a lot of spaghetti code to handle all the different cases and typos and parse authors/dates/links/etc correctly. There's still a lot of room for improvement there.”

According to Stocks, the response to the opening of the Library has been positive. Readers shared old articles they half-remembered but could not find and authors reached to have their work added. “Nobody's asked me to remove their writing from the index (though I'll happily do that if anybody asks), and it's been really gratifying to see big-time Magic pros tweeting about my project,” he said “I reached out to [Wizards of the Coast] to ask permission to host their old stuff, but they haven't responded yet. I'd be happily surprised if they said yes.”

Along the way, Stocks has also taken the time to enjoy some of the writing he’s worked to preserve. “It's hard to pick a favorite—I've been so zoomed-in on ‘am I extracting the metadata correctly?’ that it's been hard to zoom back out on ‘is this a good article?’ But I'd probably say ‘Who's The Beatdown’ (it's the standard answer for a reason), ‘Drafting the Hard Way,’ and then for a goofier example ‘What if the 4-Card Limit Was Abolished in Modern?’”

Despite all this good works, some of the written history of Magic remains absent in the Library of Leng. Though I’m referenced in a few places, my own contributions to the field of Magic: The Gathering journalism aren’t present.

Last week I was talking to a friend about “banding,” an obscure and little-used Magic ability. I recalled an ancient article from a magazine in the 1990s titled, I thought, something like “The Three Bitch Sisters of Magic” that discussed banding but I struggled to find it in the Internet Archive. Stuck in a hotel room for a work trip on a weekday night, I trawled through old issues of InQuest magazine hoping to find it. After some searching there it was: “The Three Bastard Sisters of Magic.”I’d misremembered “bastard” as “bitch.”

It was a scan of the old magazine uploaded to the Internet Archive. I asked Stocks if these old magazine articles would end up in the Library some day. “I didn't realize those were in the Internet Archive—that moves them from ‘probably never’ up to ‘maybe someday,’” he said. “Dealing with OCR is a lot hairier than parsing HTML, though.”

The article was written by a woman named Beth Moursund and, on a whim, I searched for her in the Library of Leng. I got 52 results, some of them written by Moursund but more referencing her. I learned from a 2011 article that as well as a feature writer, Moursund had worked for Wizards and been instrumental in the history of the development of Magic.

Learning about Moursund’s legacy after vaguely recollecting one of her features the 1990s was a bit like falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole late at night. It would have never happened if not for the Library of Leng and Stocks’ efforts to preserve the written history of Magic: the Gathering.

In Quest 012 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

InQuest Magazine Issue #012

^{Internet Archive}

404 Media

2026-05-21 13:00:28

The Oldest Evidence of Animal Sex Has Been Found, and It’s Mind-Boggling

Scientists have discovered the oldest fossilized evidence of sexual reproduction and locomotion in animals at a remote site in Canada’s Northwest Territories that dates back 567 million years to the Ediacaran period, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. According to researchers, the finding pushes the origins of animal sex back by 5-10 million years.

The newly unearthed fossils were deposited in a fossil layer known as the White Sea assemblage that is preserved in parts of Russia, Asia, and Australia, but has never been found in North America before.

The discovery offers a snapshot of otherworldly species such as Aspidella, an animal that looked like a flying saucer with concentric ring patterns; Dickinsonia, a mouthless pancake of a creature that absorbed food through its bottom surface, clusters of tubular Funisia animals that offer the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in animals; and an unidentified anchor-shaped lifeform that may represent a new species. These animals lived in offshore waters at about 600 feet of depth, far from coastal shelves.

“We know, mostly from rocks in Australia, as well as some famous rock units in Russia, that taxa like Dickinsonia could move, and that taxa like Funisia probably reproduce sexually,” said Scott Evans, a curator and professor at the American Museum of Natural History who led the new research, in a call with 404 Media.

“The cool thing about this study is that we're finding those same fossils in rocks that are at least seven million years older than the oldest previously known,” he added. “It's exciting to be able to say that they weren't just around for a blip of time. They were around for a really long period of time in our history.”
Reconstruction of Ediacaran fossil community from the lower Blueflower Formation near Sekwi Brook, Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada. Image: Illustration by Alex Boersma
The Ediacaran era, which elapsed between 635 to 541 million years ago, marked the transition from microscopic organisms to much larger lifeforms, setting the stage for the Cambrian “explosion” of animal life that directly followed it. But though the Ediacaran was the dawn of truly complex and visible life on Earth, fossils from this time are rare in part because organisms were soft-bodied, lacking bones or shells that are more conducive to preservation.

That said, some Ediacaran ecosystems have been fortuitously entombed in stone molds in assemblages around the world, offering a glimpse of this bizarre lost world. For decades, paleontologists have explored these ancient ecosystems at the Blueflower Formation in the Sekwi Brook area of the Northwest Territories.

In 2024, Evans and study co-author Justin Strauss of Dartmouth College discovered a new site that exposed the first known White Sea fossils in North America, opening a new window into these early ecosystems. For Evans, it was especially thrilling to find the remains of Dickinsonia, an organism he has spent years studying and had never been found in North America before.

“We'd always joke, ‘wouldn't it be crazy if we found Dickinsonia?’” Evans recalled, referring to his past fieldwork in the region. “So, on day one to find it out there was almost comical, but it's because Justin knows the rocks and knew they were right to look for them. That’s the key.”

Sexual reproduction initially evolved in simple microbes some two billion years ago, but Funisia is the oldest example of animal sex that is known from the fossil record (though there were no doubt earlier sexual pioneers that are not preserved). These worm-shaped animals are often found in dense clusters that imply they reproduced through mass spawning events in which they released sperm and egg into the water column, a strategy still used by corals and other marine animals today.

The team’s discovery of Dickinsonia, along with another strange bottom crawler called Kimberella, also offer the earliest fossil evidence of movement in animals.
Fossil locality near Sekwi Brook, Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada, with co-author Kim Lau. Image: Scott Evans
One of the most evocative finds is a tiny organism that likely represents a new species and genus, though the remains are too indistinct to clearly identify it. It resembles a known organism called Parvancorina, which looks like an anchor came to life, but it will take more specimens to pin down its lineage.

“We don't know what it is,” Evans said. “It's hard because these fossils are soft-bodied things that were buried under sand and compressed. They can be distorted, stretched, and so when you find just one, it's really hard to know that the shape you're seeing is how it's typically preserved, or maybe this is just a weird specimen that got stretched in a certain way.”

“It is very tantalizing to think this is a new species, but we are not ready to name it yet,” he added. “But that's why we'll go back and spend a lot more time crawling over these rocks.”
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Indeed, the team only spent five days at this site last year, so there is plenty of ground left to cover. In addition to looking for new specimens, the researchers hope to understand the broader context of this assemblage.

For example, the fact that these thriving ecosystems emerged in deep offshore waters suggests that these environments may have provided stability for nascent animal life, compared with shallow coastal regions.

Later in the fossil record, it is more common to find organisms that emerge first in shallow waters near the shoreline, and then follow the opposite trajectory by colonizing the deeper ocean. Future fieldwork could reveal more insights into this early flourishing of complex life, and how it laid the groundwork for everything that has happened since.

“This is one of the few places on Earth where we have over a kilometer of rocks that cover this period where we think animals first appear and diversify,” Evans concluded. “The hope is that by continuing to go back to these sites, we'll get a lot more information on patterns of change through that interval.”

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{404 Media (Megaphone)}

404 Media

2026-05-20 13:56:27

Township Leader Resigns in Tears Over OpenAI Data Center Death Threats

The treasurer of Saline Township, Michigan, publicly resigned last week citing death threats she’d received related to the construction of an Oracle and OpenAI datacenter.

“I’m submitting my resignation effective May 29th. I can’t take it anymore. The threats. The ‘I’m gonna tar and feather you.’ I hope you get bit by ah […] it’s so disgusting,” treasurer Jennifer Zink said between sobs at the end of a two hour township meeting on May 13.
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“The last one was, they hope we step on, I don’t know, some tick nest and ticks get on us and we get Lyme disease and die. Or something to that effect,” township clerk Kelly Marion, who did not resign but described some of the threats, said.

“It’s horrible. I can’t do it anymore,” Zink continued. “I have two boys. I don’t need to deal with this. I have my personal stuff at home to deal with. I don’t need […] my life threatened or to be told ‘I hope you die a premature death.’ What the hell’s wrong with people?”

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Saline Township Treasurer resigning after death threats. Full video on YouTube.

Saline Township is a rural farming community in southern Michigan with a population of around 2,300 people. Last year, construction company Related Digital pinpointed the township as a location for the construction of a $16 billion dollar data center related to Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate initiative. It didn’t sit well with some town residents and the board voted to deny zoning changes that would, they thought, stop the data center from proceeding.

Instead of looking elsewhere, Related Digital sued Saline Township. The Township board looked at its options, decided it couldn't fight the massive corporation, and settled the lawsuit. In response, Saline Township’s residents pushed to recall three members of the board.

Emotions ran high on the night of May 13 as residents and the Township board spoke at length about the proposed data center. Some still opposed it and blamed the board for allowing it to happen while others claimed the construction was inevitable.

“I have two words that I’d like to offer up to everyone tonight and those words are grace and revenge,” said Kathy, a woman who said she’d lived in the Township for more than 30 years. “My voice is shaking because I’m angry at the narrow-mindedness that’s being represented in this room tonight.”

Kathy defended the board and painted the grim reality of the farming community. “I understand what’s happening to our farming community: their children don’t want to farm anymore. So what do they do? They sell the property for you [sic] for $50,000 an acre when they could sell it for $100,000 an acre? Ain’t gonna happen,” she said. “Are the taxpayers going to pay to keep the farmers from selling out? They’re not.”

“[Governor Gretchen Whitmer] probably knew that the freight train was coming down the track,” Kathy said. “How much money does our Township have? A million dollars? Tax collection, et cetera. What’s the price of this data center? $16 billion. How many millions does it take to create $16 billion dollars? A lot.”

When Kathy finished she moved back to the audience and another woman at the meeting leaned over and said “screw you” as she passed.

At the end of the night, before Zink’s resignation, clerk Marion said she didn’t fault anyone but was tired of misinformation and hateful comments directed at her and other board members. “It’s very clear: no one wanted the data center,” she said. “I don’t fault anybody. I’m the one that voted ‘no’ against the board, but I did not see Related going away.”

“I’m sick and tired of hearing about ‘we’ve signed NDAs, we’ve taken money.’ Those are defamatory remarks and I’m to the point: if I see one that I can hire a lawyer for and pursue that, I will,” she said. “I’m sick of it […] I’m tired of the comments. If you have proof that we’ve done such a thing, put it out there, make it factual. But you’ve created a monster.”

Marion also said that the Township’s lawyers gave them a rough estimate of what losing the lawsuit would have cost and it was grim. “It was gonna be about $29,000 per household per resident, approximately, in additional taxes,” Marion said. The board said that the tax burden would have fallen on each township resident every year for the next decade if they had fought and lost.

A Michigan farm town voted down plans for a giant OpenAI-Oracle data center. Weeks later, construction began | Fortune

The AI boom is coming for rural America. Inside one town's effort to fight back

^{Sharon Goldman (Fortune)}

404 Media

2026-05-20 13:44:08

After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet and Phone Ban

After months of discussion and outrage from residents, the city council of the tiny town of Bandera, Texas voted 3-2 to immediately end its contract with the surveillance company Flock. In the aftermath of the vote, one of the dissenting council members crashed out and said he would be introducing measures to ban cell phones, the internet, cameras, and nearly all technology in the town of roughly 900 people.

Bandera had a state grant to install eight Flock Safety AI license plate reader cameras in the tiny town. The technology proved to be incredibly controversial, with residents repeatedly turning out to city council meetings to say that they did not want government surveillance in the town; the poles that the cameras were installed on were repeatedly destroyed by vandals in protest, leading the town to have to replace them at their own expense. Last week, the town formally decided to abandon its contract with Flock entirely.

After the vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, a staunch Flock supporter, said that if people in the town wanted privacy then the city council should basically ban all technology, essentially calling people who did not want government surveillance hypocrites. Flowers said he would propose a series of new regulations at an upcoming city council meeting, which he is calling the “Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence.” In a letter posted by the local newspaper, the Bandera Bulletin, Flowers said that in the name of preserving privacy he would suggest the city go back to the days of 1880 .

“For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric,’ the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism,” Flowers wrote. “Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.”

Flowers said that at the next city council meeting he will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.” He will also propose “a total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.”
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Like in many other communities around the country, the use of Flock’s AI cameras has become a major topic of discussion in Bandera. In February, Bandera held a town hall meeting exclusively about Flock that Flowers moderated. Kerry McCormack, a former Cleveland city council member who is now on the public affairs team for Flock, came to that meeting to discuss the technology, demonstrating that the company is sending representatives even to tiny towns in order to promote its use. Bandera paid for its Flock cameras using a public safety grant from the state of Texas; in his letter, Flowers said that the city “didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money), they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal.”

In an earlier February city council meeting, Flowers said, “I believe personally that guilty people act defensively. If you don’t have anything to hide, then it shouldn’t be a problem. I also believe when you are in a public space, your privacy kind of goes out the window because you are in essence in a public place.”

Bandera had eight Flock cameras installed. At the meeting last week where the town voted to end the Flock contract, residents noted that Bandera has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Other residents noted that people in the town kept cutting down the poles the Flock cameras are installed on, leading the town to continually spend money and time to replace them. Residents said they felt like they made it clear that they do not want the cameras in the town, but that the town had dragged its feet on actually ending the contract.
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“This is the fifth meeting [about Flock]. How many more meetings are we going to have to have before we get to the idea that we don’t need the Flock system?” one resident said in the meeting last week. “How many more meetings is it going to take before we understand the community didn’t vote for this? They don’t want it. How many more times are the cameras going to have to get cut down before somebody realizes it’s not worth the money? It’s coming to a point where we’re going to have to have meetings until we’re all dead […] By putting the cameras back up [after they’ve been cut down], you’re basically baiting someone else to come cut them down or shoot them down, you’re basically causing an issue because we didn’t vote for it.”

Another resident said Flock “doesn’t pass the vibe check. Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world. We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”
youtube.com/embed/1Z4k_vDovbY?…
At the meeting last week, city council members discussed how it was clear residents didn’t want Flock cameras, and that the town had stopped installing new ones, but that it never formally ended the contract. “Call for a vote please,” one council member eventually said. “It’s a waste of time,” to keep discussing a technology that residents didn’t want, they added. At that point, the council proposed to “deactivate and remove any Flock cameras that are city owned,” and voted to end the contract.

The discussion that happened in Bandera is essentially the same one that has played out throughout the country in small towns and large cities across the political spectrum. Time and time again, local politicians advocate for more surveillance even when it is clear their constituents don’t want it. In Troy, New York, the city council voted to end its Flock contract, for example, but the mayor declared a state of emergency to continue using the cameras, The Washington Post reported. In Dunwoody, Georgia, residents have been fighting against Flock after they learned the company was using cameras in the city in sales demos. The city council there elected to slightly tweak its contract with Flock but not end it entirely. Later this week, Flock is throwing a training for police officers about “how to speak with city councils: meeting the moment with confidence.”

In his letter to residents, Flowers said that they should stop being hypocrites by using technology.

“Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy,” Flowers wrote. “If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans [...] just remember to leave your phones at home.”

Earlier this year, after the February town hall meeting, Flowers told the Bandera Bulletin that he believed town residents’ privacy concerns “deserve to be addressed directly and respectfully.” Flowers did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media.

Councilman Flowers defends license plate reader program following town hall criticism

^{Veronica Rector (Bandera Bulletin)}

404 Media

2026-05-20 13:00:14

Podcast: Elites Just Don't Get AI

We start this week with Sam telling us all about the commencement speeches where speakers have been praising AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That did not go down well! After the break, Jason tells us how he was offered the chance to buy a bunch of images of poop to train AI (really). In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how researchers planned to stick cameras onto preschool teachers to train AI.
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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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• ⁠Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’⁠
• ⁠Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops⁠
• ⁠Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI⁠

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 …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-05-19 17:48:18

Streamer Realtime Deepfakes Himself into Mr. Beast, Says He Loves 'Touching Little Boys'

An app that allows users to deepfake their appearance in realtime has predictably resulted in a streamer making nonconsensual and potentially defamatory content. Specifically, the streamer made himself look like Mr. Beast and said “I love touching little boys’ pee pees.”

Sam Pepper, a British internet personality known for videos and streams in which he harasses people with so-called pranks, and who has been banned from multiple platforms, used the realtime deepfake app on Kick, a streaming platform and Twitch competitor known for its loose moderation policies.

Initially, Pepper made himself look like a seemingly random woman, but then switched his appearance to look like real people including Mr. Beast, Jeffrey Epstein, Amouranth, and Sydney Sweeney. When he appeared as one of the women, Pepper showed the AI-generated body to the camera, pulled up the dress, and played with the AI-generated breasts.

The app Pepper used, called Delulu, offers users the ability to appear as any of these celebrities out of a menu of likenesses the app calls “skins,” many of which are created by Delulu users. Delulu users can make themselves look like animals, cartoons, and fictional characters, but also real people like George Floyd, politicians like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Eminem. The site also includes skins for a number of adult performers. All users have to do to change their appearance is give the app access to their camera and click on one of these skins. Much like Civitai and other platforms and communities for sharing custom AI models, Delulu allows users to create and share their own models. All the skins Pepper showed on Stream appear to be user-generated.
Some of the skins on Delulu
The result is not as convincing as some other pieces of software that allow people to deepfake their appearance in real time, but is free and easy to use. For example, we recently wrote about Haotian AI, a Chinese-language realtime deepfake software that’s marketed to scammers. Haotian AI costs thousands of dollars, is difficult to install, and requires a powerful video card.

Delulu is just one of several AI video products from Decart, a company that has raised more than $450 million in several rounds of funding from established Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Sequoia and Benchmark. Decart also makes an AI video generator called MirageLSD, and a realtime video AI model called Lucy 2 similar to Delulu. One of the main differences between Lucy 2 and Delulu is that Delulu caters to streamers.

Delulu’s terms of use don’t say anything about people using the platform to take on the likeness of other real people, but does say its policy is “to respect the legitimate rights of copyright and other intellectual property owners, and we will respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement.”

Kick and Decart did not respond to requests for comment about whether Pepper’s behavior was allowed on their platform.

Decart presented realtime AI video tech, but not Delulu, at TwitchCon last year.

"The creator in question has been suspended from Twitch since 2018," Twitch told me in an email. "We have numerous policies in place to protect against impersonation and harassment, as well as youth safety policies – the content described is a clear violation of those rules."

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Twitch.

Decart Raises $300M: Tech Leaders Back the Company as Both Customers and Investors | Decart AI

With funding led by Radical Ventures, Decart is building the infrastructure layer for the next generation of low-latency AI systems, through three product lines: DOS, an ultra-optimized inference and training stack that enables agents and reasoning m…

^{Decart AI}

404 Media

2026-05-19 13:23:47

Lawyer for Guy Who Sued Women Who Called Him ‘Psycho’ Caught Using AI

The guy who sued 27 women, one man, and several platforms after users in a Facebook group called him “clingy” and “psycho” had his case against Meta dismissed after a judge suggested that his attorney filed AI-generated errors and non-existent citations.

In Nikko D’Ambrosio’s complaint, he claimed Facebook profited off of disparaging posts about him in a Chicago-based Are We Dating the Same Guy (AWDTSG) group. Judge David Hamilton wrote: “The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted... These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.”

The detail was spotted by attorney Rob Freund on X:

The Chicago man who brought a defamation case over FB comments in "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" group appealed the dismissal of his case.

He loses again, and this time the court calls out his lawyers' AI misuse, noting some irony around it.

The appellate brief included several… t.co/vjT8FYcmvf pic.twitter.com/bbFeOwrFD4
— Rob Freund (@RobertFreundLaw) May 18, 2026

According to D’Ambrosio’s complaint, a woman posted in the group that she’d blocked his number. “Very clingy [and] very fast,” she wrote in the Facebook group. “Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side.“ She blocked his number and he texted her from another one, she wrote. His response, included as an exhibit in the case—which he didn’t dispute until very late in the trial—was as follows, with redactions by the court: “Speak for yourself you ugly vial [sic] fake whore. Your ego matches that fake f****** face where you can’t even smile in pictures because your teeth are so f*****. The truth hurts b**** and my message will stay with you forever c***.”

D’Ambrosio’s initial attempts at suing the moderators of the groups, specific women who posted in the group about allegedly being harassed by him, and GoFundMe and Meta floundered under multiple revised complaints and finally, a dismissal in May 2025. He and his attorneys appealed two months later.

In 2024, in the middle of these case proceedings, including a failed class-action lawsuit that attempted to bring together men who felt wronged by Are We Dating the Same Guy groups, D’Ambrosio was sentenced to a year in prison for tax fraud. D’Ambrosio’s attorney at the time insinuated to the jury his client was too dumb to do his own taxes and therefore was innocent: “I don’t mean this to disparage Nikko in any way, but as you can see from his educational records, he is not the most sophisticated human being,” attorney Christopher Grohman said. “Somebody with his skill set is not doing his own taxes, and nor should he be, frankly. You go to a professional. And the professional he relied upon was his cousin.”

Are We Dating the Same Guy groups allow members to crowdsource “red flags or tea” about men they’re dating.

D’Ambrosio didn’t argue his “reportedly obnoxious behavior on dates and after a breakup” as listed in the AWDTSG group, the judge wrote, until it came time for oral arguments to appeal a dismissal of the case, “meaning any potential claim based on that statement was doomed as well.”

Judge Hamilton lists many reasons why D’Ambrosio doesn’t have a case strong enough to maintain that Meta violated any right-to-publicity laws or profited off his likeness through the AWDTSG group. Among them: his attorney Aaron Walner’s “sloppy” use of AI.

“We see such sloppy work in briefs fairly often, and almost always let it pass without comment as we try to focus on the merits of appeals,” Hamilton wrote. “But the next sentence in attorney Walner’s opening brief for D’Ambrosio said. Not only did Walner cite cases that didn’t support his argument, the only place judges could find one of the citations was in a decision that supported the opposite of the point he was apparently trying to make.

Aaron Walner is an attorney at Marc Trent’s law firm. Trent’s website, as the judge points out, brags extensively about Trent’s use of AI. In a blog post titled "How Marc Trent Uses AI to Deliver Cutting-Edge Legal Solutions," he lists “AI-Powered Case Management” and “Smarter Legal Strategies" as ways he practices law using LLMs: “Gone are the days of sifting through mountains of paperwork. Our AI tools automate document review, flagging key information and identifying relevant case law in seconds,” the site says.

The court demanded Walner, Trent and D’Ambrosio answer for their AI-generated filings or face sanctions. Lawyers getting caught and sanctioned for using AI and wasting the court’s time and clients’ resources happens so often now it barely makes the news anymore. This phenomenon started in the last year, and has since exploded into a legal-world epidemic, with judges’ patiences wearing thin and more people choosing to represent themselves in court, with the “help” of an LLM like ChatGPT. Lawyers, meanwhile, blame everything from family emergencies to technical difficulties when they get caught, and often throw their own paralegals under the bus.

Trent Law Firm did not respond to a request for comment.

“We don’t just use AI for the sake of it. Every tool and strategy is aimed at one thing: winning your case,” Trent’s site says. In D’Ambrosio’s case, it helped lose it.

18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It

Lawyers blame IT, family emergencies, their own poor judgment, their assistants, illness, and more.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-18 18:19:45

The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

The FBI wants to buy access to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) nationwide, which would likely allow the agency to track the movements of vehicles—and by extension people—across the country without a warrant, according to FBI procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents show that ALPRs continue to be a sought-after tool for law enforcement, not just for local police and individual communities, but federal agencies too. The news also comes as protests and pushback against ALPRs have spread around the country.

💡
Do you work at Flock or Motorola? 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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The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-18 13:19:15

Podcast: The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris

As you scroll around the web, how often to you think about the physical infrastructure—the miles of cables, acres of land—that makes up the internet? This is where real power lies, and there are ways to imagine it differently, as serving the people who use these utilities instead of big tech execs.

This week, I’m delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University’s School of Communication & Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She’s also a fellow with AI Now. Her book Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up just came out in February.
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Britt tells us about how her great-great-great uncle started a telecommunications cooperative in rural Missouri before the city even had connection, how examples like NEMR show us an alternative to monopolies that provide internet access and let people decide how they want their internet to work for them, and what’s giving her hope as she helps bargain for educators’ rights at Rutgers.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up

The American Association of University Professors on AI

University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop

Community Votes to Deny Water to Nuclear Weapons Data Center

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 …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-05-18 13:17:44

Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

University of Washington researchers planned to have preschool teachers wear cameras that would record everything they saw from a first-person perspective, including the children they were teaching, then use that footage to develop AI models. One parent who spoke to 404 Media understood the program as opt-out, rather than opt-in. The university said classroom participation was contingent upon receiving parental permission for all of the children.

“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” a document given to parents and later shared with 404 Media reads. “These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities. Recordings occur during morning program hours up to 150 minutes, up to 4 visits in one month. Your child will not be asked to do anything new or different. Their daily routine will stay exactly the same.”

💡
Do you know anything else about how researchers are using AI? 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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Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” a document given to parents and later …

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-16 13:00:34

Scientists Discover Strange New Crystal Formed by Nuclear Blast

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were long in the tooth, trapped in the lattice, unearthed in Thailand, and entombed in post-apocalyptic waters.

First, scientists discover that even Neanderthals had to go to the dentist. Then: a nuke-born crystal, a 60,000-pound herbivore, and life after the death of most species on the planet.

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

A trip to the Neanderthal dentist

Zubova, Alisa V. et al. “Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals.” PLOS One.

Neanderthals performed dental interventions at least 59,000 years ago, pushing the timeline of dentistry back by tens of thousands of years, according to a study about a molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in southwestern Siberia.

Early humans used rudimentary dental tools, like toothpicks, for well over a million years. But scientists have now identified evidence that Neanderthals used drills to treat cavities at the Siberian site, performing an Ice Age version of a root canal. Previously, the oldest tooth that showed signs of a dental checkupt belonged to “Villabruna,” a prehistoric human male who lived in Italy 14,000 years ago.

The remnants of the Neanderthal tooth adds to a growing body of research that has overturned the stereotype of Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to Homo sapiens and hints at “cognitive convergence” between the two species, according to the study.
The Chagyrskaya Cave molar. Image: Zubova et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0
The Chagyrskaya Cave tooth shows “evidence of two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements,” said researchers led by Alisa Zubova from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera).

The study suggests that Neanderthals at this site “possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention,” the team added. “The technical proficiency required for this procedure…reflects a capacity for causal reasoning, anticipatory planning, and volitional endurance, contradicting earlier assumptions regarding Neanderthal behavioral limitations.”

It's not clear if this Neanderthal patient got a complimentary toothpick at the end of the visit, but at the very least, they received some temporary relief from a bad toothache.

In other news…

Now I have become Death, maker of crystals

Bindi, Luca et al. “Extreme nonequilibrium synthesis of a Ca–Cu–Si clathrate during the Trinity nuclear test.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have discovered a weird new type of crystal in the ashes of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, which took place in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in New Mexico.

Trinity’s “gadget” unleashed a powerful fireball that vaporized its test tower and transformed the desert sand into a glassy residue called trinitite. For decades, researchers have found novel and bizarre compounds in the fallout. A new study now reports the first known instance of a clathrate structure—a crystal lattice that can trap “guest” molecules inside its cagelike scaffolding—in red trinitite.
The sample of red trinitite that contained the clathrate. Image: Bindi, Luca et al.
“The discovery of this phase represents the first crystallographically confirmed identification of a clathrate structure among the solid-state products of a nuclear explosion,” said researchers led by Luca Bindi of the University of Florence.

“This work underscores how rare, high-energy events—such as nuclear detonations, lightning strikes, and hypervelocity impacts—serve as natural laboratories for producing unexpected crystalline matter,” the team added.

In addition to being one of the most pivotal split-seconds in history, the Trinity test spun sand into exotic materials that are still generating discoveries more than 80 years later.

A huge new Thai-nosaur

Sethapanichsakul, Thitiwoot and Khansubha, Sasa-On et al. “The first sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Khok Kruat Formation of Thailand enriches the diversity of somphospondylan titanosauriforms in southeast Asia.” Scientific Reports.

Meet the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia: Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, a hulking sauropod that lived more than 100 million years ago in what is now Thailand.

Weighing in at an estimated 60,000 pounds and measuring nearly 90 feet from head to tail-tip, this massive herbivore belonged to the titanosaur family, the largest animals ever to walk on land.
Schematic representation of the skeleton of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis with preserved bones highlighted in yellow. The bar is one meter. Image: Sethapanichsakul, Thitiwoot and Khansubha, Sasa-On et al.
“We estimate a body mass of 25–28 tonnes for Nagatitan, and suggest it was part of a broader middle Cretaceous body size increase in Asian titanosauriforms, facilitated by rising temperatures and expanded suitable habitat,” said researchers co-led by Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul of University College London and Sasa-On Khansubha of Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand.

“The discovery of Nagatitan expands the known diversity of Southeast Asian sauropods and improves our understanding of titanosauriform biogeography within the region,” the team added.

While it’s mind-boggling to imagine a 90-foot-long, 25-tonne animal casually ambling around, Nagatitan is only mid-sized for a titanosaur. The biggest behemoths in this family may have exceeded 120 feet in length and boasted 130,000 pounds of fully plant-powered body mass.

With that said, the all-time heavyweight champion of the animal kingdom is our own contemporary, the blue whale, which tips the scales at an astonishing 400,000 pounds. Have you ever felt so puny in your life?

Life goes on, re-gar-dless

Wilson, Jacob D. et al. “The skull and pectoral girdle of a large gar that lived ∼2000 years after the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction event.” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The last titanosaurs were wiped out by the asteroid that brought the age of dinosaurs to a sudden and brutal end 66 million years ago, killing off about two-thirds of all species on Earth. But though the space rock eradicated the land giants, some animals managed to pull through, including a large fish that lived within 2,000 years of the impact.

Scientists led by Jacob Wilson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science described the anatomy of a gar and weighed in on its possible taxonomy, building on the initial 2022 study that first reported the specimen. Measuring about five feet in length, this gar inhabited a post-apocalyptic world that is preserved within the Fort Union Formation of North Dakota.
Diagram of fossils, with scale model. Image: Brownstein, Chase Doran et al., 2022
The specimen “is notable both for its size (more than 1 meter) and its precise stratigraphic placement 18 centimeters above the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary clay,” the team said. “Our conclusions support the inference that gars were prominent members of freshwater ecosystems and, in turn, freshwater ecosystems were capable of supporting large-bodied predators within ∼2000 years after the K/Pg extinction.”

This gar hatched into an eerily empty ecosphere, mere centuries after a planetary nightmare, yet it still grew into a fisherman’s dream catch. It’s a testament to the resilience of life on Earth, which could not be fully stomped out even by a direct cosmic punch to the face.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-05-15 21:17:09

Tech Companies to Discuss Iran's Future During 'Private Conference' at Uber HQ

A who’s who of the Iranian diaspora will meet at Uber HQ on Saturday to discuss tech and the future of Iran, according to an email about the event viewed by 404 Media. The guest list includes venture capitalists, angel investors, tech CEOs, and the son of Iran’s former leader who was deposed almost 50 years ago.

On Friday afternoon, people representing the group of Iranian business leaders cold-emailed invitations for the event to journalists. “This Saturday, a private conference on the future of Iran will take place at Uber Headquarters in San Francisco, bringing together leaders in technology, finance, and geopolitics for an off-the-record discussion on Iran’s future and regional developments,” the email said. “Featured speakers include Reza Pahlavi, Dara Khosrowshahni, Shervin Pishevar, and Hamid Moghadam. The event waitlist has already surpassed 2,000 applicants.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber; Moghadam is the CEO of San Francisco based investment trust Prologis; Pishevar is the former CEO of HyperLoop and an angel investor who put money into Uber, Airbnb, Slack, and Robinhood; and Pahlvani is the former Crown Prince of Iran, the son of the Shah deposed during Islamic Revolution in 1979. Also in attendance will be a SpaceX engineer, a Tesla engineer, and the senior global commodity manager at Nvidia, according to the invite.

It’s unclear what, exactly, these elite members of the Iranian diaspora will discuss on Saturday morning. The schedule calls for a 9:30 reception followed by 30 minutes for “strategic rebuild,” 30 minutes for “future tech,” and 30 minutes for “internet” followed by “open dialogue.”

The meeting is called the “Tech X Future of Iran” and the flyer with the guests and schedule included a pre-Islamic Republic version of the Iranian flag. Pahlavi is a complicated and controversial figure who has lived most of his life outside of Iran. He has said, repeatedly, that if he returned to lead he would only do so as a bridge to democratic rule.

“Millions of Iranians inside Iran and outside of Iran are calling my name,” he told 60 Minutes earlier this year. “They recognize in me the person uniquely placed to play a role of transitional leadership. Not running for office, because that's not what I'm doing, but to be a bridge to that destiny.”

But for Pahlavi to enter Iran or any of these tech moguls to see their ambitions fulfilled, a lot has to happen. Iran would have to lose the war and the Islamic Republic and its military would need to fall. Neither seem like a possibility at the moment.

The war isn’t over and it’s unclear when it will be. Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz and has been hitting US allies and military bases in the region. Reports from U.S. intelligence agencies indicate that Tehran still has 70 percent of its missile launchers and pre-war missile inventory meaning it can fight the US for months. It also still has all its nuclear material and recovering it without a peace deal would be a deadly and costly operation.

A representative for “Tech X Future of Iran” did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

Neutralizing Iran’s Nuclear Material During a War Is ‘Nearly Mission Impossible’

America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable.

^{Matthew Gault (Angry Planet)}

404 Media

2026-05-15 15:52:12

ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper.”

Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote.

Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule—meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned—but that decisions will be open to appeal. “I want to emphasize that we only apply this to cases of incontrovertible evidence,” he said. “I should also add that our internal process requires first a moderator to document the problem and then for the Section Chair to confirm before imposing the penalty.”

In November 2025, arXiv announced it would no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers because it was being “flooded” with AI slop. “Generative AI/large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write. While categories across arXiv have all seen a major increase in submissions, it’s particularly pronounced in arXiv’s CS category,” arXiv wrote in a press release about the change at the time.

And in January, it announced first-time submitters would need an endorsement from an established author due to a rise in fraudulent submissions.

AI-generated, fabricated citations are a huge problem in research. A recent study by Columbia University researchers examined 2.5 million biomedical papers across three years, and found that one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 contained fabricated references; In 2023, it was one in 2,828, and in 2025, one in 458. AI-generated citations and papers are already straining the peer-review process, and more and more papers are making it through the pipeline with those meta-comments and hallucinated data intact.

ArXiv is managed by Cornell Tech, but this July, it will become an independent nonprofit corporation. Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, told Science.org that this change will help arXiv raise more money from a wider range of donors, which Morrisett said is needed to deal with the emergence of “AI slop.”

Scientific Journals Are Publishing Papers With AI-Generated Text

The ChatGPT phrase “As of my last knowledge update” appears in several papers published by academic journals.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-15 15:19:07

Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

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 developers' AI woes, how the magic happens, and the Beach Boys.

JOSEPH: Earlier in the week we published ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir. This took a little while because I spoke to four people who attended the conference. I spoke to one, I asked if they knew anyone else there. Got another name and phone number, and so on.

I included this line in the copy: “The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster.”

I think that was important to include because these are comments and figures coming from senior ICE officials, and one in particular, Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE. As we all know, DHS lies.

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Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-15 13:00:08

Mayo Clinic is Using AI to Listen to Emergency Room Visits

Mayo Clinic, the massive U.S. hospital network, is using what it describes as “Ambient Listening” to record patient interactions with nurses, including in emergency rooms, then using AI to process that collected data. The recording is opt-out, rather than opt-in, and at least some patients are likely not aware the recording is happening.

The recording brings up questions of informed consent and whether the generated notes may be accurate enough. A study last month found that AI-powered scribe tools sometimes produce much less accurate notes than humans depending on the situation.

💡
Do you know anything else about AI use in healthcare? 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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Mayo Clinic is Using AI to Listen to Emergency Room Visits

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-14 18:00:56

DOGE Cuts Unleashed a Deadly Wave of Violence Across Africa, Study Finds

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The sudden shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by DOGE in 2025 is associated with a rise in violent conflicts across Africa, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Days into Donald Trump’s second term, his administration began rapidly dismantling USAID, which had, up until that point, been the world’s largest national humanitarian donor. Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency, announced that his team had fed the agency “into the woodchipper” in February 2025. Tracking models suggest the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, of which 500,000 are children, and the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026.

Now, a team reports “the earliest evidence of the impact of cuts to USAID on the incidence of violent events” which suggests that “the radical cuts…led to an increase in conflict in the regions that received the most aid from the United States,” according to the new study.

“What we find is that with the USAID shutdown, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of violence, and the lethality of violence across nearly one thousand subnational administrative units across Africa,” said Austin L. Wright, study co-author and associate professor and director of strategic initiatives at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media.

In regions that received the most support from USAID, the cuts were associated with a 6.5 percent probability of any conflict event, compared to regions that received no aid. To get a sense of the devastating impact of that statistic, here’s what the study reports:

“The probability of protests and riots was 10% greater, the number of conflict events increased by 10.6%, battle counts increased by 6.9%, and battle-related fatalities increased by 9.3%. Event-study analysis confirmed no preexisting differences in conflict trends between high- and low-exposure regions before the shutdown. Effects are of similar size, with a 12.3% relative increase in the number of conflict events.“

Between 2021 and 2024, USAID is estimated to have saved 91 million lives, about a third of which are children under 5 years old. The agency was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and, in the years preceding Trump’s shutdown of the agency, accounted for less than 1 percent of total U.S. federal spending.

The impact of aid on communities is complex and context-dependent. Aid may reduce conflicts in cases where the opportunity costs of violence are mitigated by an influx of resources, known as the “opportunity cost effect.” But aid can also fuel conflicts over the handling and distribution of those resources, known as the “rapacity effect.”

The collapse of USAID, which is unprecedented in its scale and speed, has produced the worst of both worlds, according to the new study.
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“When those funds rapidly go away, it's a shock to the opportunity cost, and now it becomes more and more attractive to participate in what we might call the unproductive part of the economy, which is participating in violence, engaging in crime, and other activities,” Wright said. “But because the shutdown was so rapid, it didn't really have an opportunity to bind on the rapacity effect, because it's not as if the bridges, roads, or full-on infrastructure went away. The things that individuals or groups might fight over were still present.”

“It’s a bit of a ticking time bomb, because you're both removing the conflict-reducing side of aid, while leaving behind the conflict-enhancing part of aid,” he added.

To quantify the impact of the cuts on violence, Wright and his colleagues examined the Geocoded Official Development Assistance Dataset (GODAD), which monitors geolocated information regarding foreign aid disbursements, alongside the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), which tracks violent events.

The overlapping datasets revealed macro-level patterns between aid distribution and violence in the wake of the cuts, including significant upticks of violence in areas that had previously received large amounts of aid, or where the population had less control over their government due to weaker executive constraints.

Moreover, this increase in conflict has persisted over the course of months and may continue in areas that fall into “conflict traps” defined by self-perpetuating cycles of violence.

These impacts are catastrophic for people who had relied on USAID, as evidenced by the estimated death tolls, and the increased risk of violent conflicts and upheavals. They also present new vulnerabilities for the United States and its allies. Though USAID had an altruistic mission, the agency also served as a vector of soft power and an early-warning system for tracking public health risks, like pandemics. The loss of the agency has already caused national security issues for the U.S., such as the seizure of discarded USAID supplies by Iran-backed Houthi groups in Yemen.

“Those insecurities don't stay where they're created; they travel,” Wright said. “That unfortunately means that the vulnerabilities that are being created at the moment will likely have long-run consequences of creating insecurity that directly impacts the safety of Americans.”

Moreover, Trump’s demolition of USAID prompted many allies in Europe to pull back on their own foreign aid, exacerbating the effects. Though other humanitarian organizations are struggling to mitigate the consequences, the loss of trust caused by the shutdown of USAID is likely permanent, with ominous long-term consequences.

“Even if you reactivated USAID and pretended as if it never went away, you can't reverse these effects because you've already communicated your bad faith behavior,” Wright said. “There is nothing quite like the reputational bomb of simply shutting down an agency, and what that does to the reputation that the U.S. might have if it ever wanted to reinitiate its interventions.”

“From the soft power lens, and a global lens, the reputational effects, I think, are tremendous and will create a bunch of wedges and inefficiencies,” he concluded. “If one simply wanted to restart USAID, it's going to cost much more to rebuild than simply the same budget all over again.”

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ACLED

ACLED is an independent, impartial conflict monitor providing realtime data and analysis for all violent conflict and protests in all countries and territories across the world.

^ACLED

404 Media

2026-05-14 13:30:52

AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Access to Its Users' Poops

A few weeks ago, I came across a wild post on Reddit’s r/DHExchange, a subreddit for trading large datasets: “I hoarded a large database of something valuable, just not what’s [sic] you expect…150k stools images.”

The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: “I’ve got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there’s a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I’m sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can’t find who wants them.” The poster added that “the images are extremely rare,” and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.

The comments were from people who were mostly horrified: “When I was 5 the teacher taught me how to read. I now regret that happened,” one read. “What in the fuck,” another read. “How to delete someone else’s post,” a third said.

I messaged the poster and told him I was interested in obtaining the database. Thus began my journey into the Internet of Shit and, by extension, the unpleasant world of the underground sale of highly sensitive, app-collected user data for AI training.

The poop database comes from an app called PoopCheck, an app made by a company called Soft All Things that purports to use AI to analyze images of one’s stool in order to give you a “daily gut health score.”

“Our AI analyzes your poop using the Bristol Stool Scale and advanced pattern recognition. Get insights on consistency, color, shape, and what they mean for your digestive health,” the app advertises. The Bristol Stool Scale classifies stools into one of seven types ranging from “separate hard lumps, like little pebbles” to “watery with no solid pieces.”

The app also features a “community,” of 151,317 “shared stools” at the time of this writing and a “leaderboard,” where people can share images of their poop for commentary from other users and earn points for participating. I found the posts in the community a bit hard to stomach, with titles “like play dough,” “Concerned,” and “Dealing with this on and off for the past 3 weeks.” Pictures are not automatically shared to the community; when you take a photo it asks if you want to share it.

“Popular” posts on the app include people speculating as to whether their fellow community members have parasites or colon cancer; in the comments section of a few posts I saw people recommending ivermectin to the original poster.

Though users have the option to share their poops with other users, the app provides mixed messages about the fact that the data uploaded to the app will be analyzed, annotated, and packaged with other poops into a commercial database to be sold to AI companies.

On the App Store page for PoopCheck, it says “The developer does not collect any data from this app.” The link to the privacy policy from within the App Store download page does not mention anything about selling or sharing the data and says “your health data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Photos are processed securely. We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data.”

The PoopCheck website’s About page states “Privacy First.” And “Health data is sensitive. That’s why privacy isn’t a feature, it’s our foundation. Your photos are encrypted. You can delete everything at any time. We built PoopCheck the way we’d want our own health apps built.” The FAQ also notes “your privacy is our priority.”

This is completely different from the “Service Agreement” and “Terms and Conditions” people agree to when they actually open the app and make an account. The Service Agreement states that “by uploading stool images or any health-related data to the App, you grant Soft All Things LLC a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, unconditional, royalty-free, fully-paid, transferable, sub licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute, sell, license, and create derivative works from such content for any lawful purpose, including but not limited to research, commercial exploitation, product development, and third party licensing. You acknowledge that your images and data may be used to create, train, improve, and commercialize AI technologies and machine learning models, and that such models and any outputs derived from your data may be licensed or sold to third parties, including medical organizations, research institutions, and commercial partners.”

It adds that “your data may be irreversibly incorporated into AI models and aggregated datasets. Deletion of your account will remove your personal profile data but does not require the removal of anonymized, aggregated, or derivative data already processed or incorporated into AI models.” Under a section called “Sharing of Information,” it adds that the company reserves the right to share or sell the data “for any business purpose,” including “AI and Data Licensing.”

On Reddit, I messaged Ill_Car_7351 and said “Hi - am interested in this database you posted about. Can you share any more info about what you're looking for / details about the app where it was collected? also any chance there's like, a sample of what the data looks like etc?” They responded quickly and said “Hey! The db was gathered by real users, we had 25k users over the last couple years, since we launched the app. It’s called PoopCheck btw if you wanna see it. Let’s maybe talk via email? I’ll be happy to share a sample of the data if that interests you.”

I sent an email to someone named “Marco” at Soft All Things, who identified himself as one of the founders of PoopCheck. I said I had reached out on Reddit and was interested in a sample of the data. I used my real email address and real name.

“We can surely send you a sampling of the dataset, would a Google Drive link containing an image folder and JSON data work? We can also figure out other ways if you prefer,” Marco said. “In terms of the actual dataset you need, what would be the size of it for your needs? And what would you be using it for? Just so we can make sure it’s actually a good fit for your use case.”

I told Marco that I wanted 10,000 pieces of data and said I would use it for AI training. I asked him for pricing and what type of data was included.

Marco responded:

“You'll find a folder with images and JSON metadata covering the key fields we capture per entry. Let us know if you have any questions about it.

To give you a better idea of the dataset and pricing options: we currently have over 150,000 images validated by AI. Around 5,000 of these have also been manually reviewed by a member of our team, who verified the AI output and labeling, making this portion more valuable and priced accordingly. It's also worth noting that certain types on the Bristol Stool Scale are rarer than others, so availability may vary depending on your specific needs.

With that in mind, here there is an estimation of pricing options:

• 10,000 unreviewed images (AI-validated) — $3,000

• 5,000 fully human-reviewed & annotated (on top of AI validation) — $4,000

• 5,000 reviewed + 5,000 unreviewed — $5,000

It would be great to have a quick call to take this further as there are a few things about the dataset's structure and coverage that are easier to walk through live.”

The sample dataset Marco sent me included 20 images of poop from four specific users (five poops each). Each image was tied to a series of user-reported data points as well as AI analyses of each image. AI-analyzed datapoints included the time the poop was taken, the Bristol Type of each poop, whether it was “healthy” or “unhealthy,” the “shape” and “consistency,” whether there was blood or mucus in the poop, and the quantity (“large,” “normal,” or “small”), and whether it was “floating” or not. Each of these data points also had a “confidence” score for how confident the AI was in its analysis. Each image also had user-reported information, which included the answers to a series of questions including “when did you have your last meal,” “any discomfort while pooping? (“Hard to pass;” “burning”; “sharp pain” etc); “How long did it take?” “Did it smell stronger than usual?” “Coffee or alcohol in the last 12 hours?” The data also included demographic information, which includes age ranges, sex, height, weight, and sensitivities such as “lactose intolerance” or “irritable bowel syndrome.” Each image is tied to a specific user through a field called “externalIndividualID.”

Soft All Things is not exactly quiet about the database that it has created. On the Poop Check website, it has a page called “For Business,” which advertises its database. It sells access to both the “Stool Analysis API,” which “turns a stool photo into a structured health report,” as well as the “Annotated Dataset,” of 140,000+ images to “train your own models.” It advertises this as the “largest consumer stool image dataset we know of.”

It maybe should not be terribly surprising that a free app in which you upload images of your poop to a random company would have a business model focused on packaging and selling that data. But this type of data collection—of our literal poop—highlights how almost anything we do on our phones can ultimately end up for sale. The fact that it is advertising this for sale at all indicates that there is an AI goldrush for any and all types of data, even our literal waste.

Research has shown, over and over again, that de-identified “anonymous” data doesn’t necessarily remain anonymous when combined with other datasets. Toward the end of last year, the appliance giant Kohler endured a security shitshow when a researcher showed that its stool-analyzing smart toilet camera was not actually properly encrypting the images that it sent to Kohler. The concern there was that your poop data would be somehow accessed by bad actors. In the case of PoopCheck, anyone can simply buy access.

After I told Marco I was writing an article about PoopCheck and its database, he stopped responding to me and did not answer any of my questions.

Kohler's Smart Toilet Camera Not Actually End-to-End Encrypted

Gives new meaning to the 'internet of shit.'

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-13 17:02:59

At Least We Know the Washington Post Isn't Buying Views

An eon ago, in the year 2012, an editor at my first job at U.S. News and World Report had the idea that we should have a YouTube channel. It wasn’t a pivot to video, exactly, but it would be a bet on an emerging platform where some creators were beginning to go viral with news content. The idea was to put the journalists in front of the camera and have them talk about their articles and the news of the day. It did not go well.

I was nervous, unconfident, had a bad haircut, and, like everyone in Washington, D.C. then and now, was very unfashionable. I had no media training, had never been on TV or video of any sort. I did not have a smartphone. I was socially awkward and spoke in monotone. I blinked endlessly while I talked and fidgeted like crazy with my hands. I constantly said um, tripped over my words, and generally had no idea what I was doing. We made a series of videos with titles like “Head Injury Studies Continue to Cause Alarm in NFL,” “Are the Politics of Climate Change Shifting?,” and “Which Party Will Get the ‘Internet Vote’?” The videos were poorly edited, sounded weird, and got zero traction.
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I did not want to make these videos but it was a newsroom-wide initiative and so I did it anyway. Thankfully and mercifully, almost no one watched any of these videos, because they were bad. Then and now, they are the opposite of what anyone watches on the internet. And yet, these videos were roughly about as good as a series of podcast videos being released by the Washington Post’s new and drastically worsened Opinion section, apparently at great expense to the outlet. They were also about as popular, with many of my videos garnering upwards of several dozen views.
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On Sunday, the very good media newsletter Status reported that the Washington Post recently invested $80,000 on new audio and video gear for its new Make It Make Sense podcast, which features the Washington Post Editorial Board. It has also remodeled a studio in its office, which seems apparent in a very bad trailer for the show titled “A News Show You Can Trust, Finally,” but not in any of its previously recorded videos (some of which were released this week). All of this has happened at the behest of opinion editor Adam O’Neal and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos as part of the section’s shift rightward to focus on billionaire- and free market-friendly content.

The podcast is not going well. Watching a few minutes of several of the videos immediately gave me flashbacks to the videos I was in at U.S. News, and served as a stark reminder that the executives running these media companies have zero clue what they’re doing. The videos posted by the Washington Post so far feel extremely dated, as though they were made either with zero resources in 2012 or by someone who has never watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast in their lives. Everyone is wearing the same business casual and looks like they have been suddenly airdropped from a Pret a Manger on K Street into a nondescript glass cube. The podcasts follow zero of the best practices of YouTube or podcasting; the only indication that anyone involved has been on YouTube ever in their life are the podcast’s thumbnails, which are bad and weird in a different way entirely but at least attempt YouTube’s signature clickbait style, albeit with a weird yellow wash and a serif font. Some of the videos start mid-sentence with no introduction or grabby hook whatsoever. One video begins: “The president of the United States is going to head to the Supreme Court to listen to some of the experts, uh, I think this might be the first time a sitting president is going to hear arguments at the Supreme Court…” the host trails off. Another host says “I think so. I think,” and stops speaking. “This is, uhh, we’ll confirm that. We’ll fact check that.” This is the first 19 seconds of the video.

Recent episodes of the podcast feature tired and milquetoast, recycled right-wing takes one could pull out of a hat, such as “What the Media Got Wrong During Covid,” “Weed Isn’t As Harmless As You Think,” and what-to-do-with-racist-statues. Other takes include college is too easy, billionaires actually do pay enough taxes, people who hate AI are unhinged, and—in a moment of actually trying to capture the zeitgeist—Hasan Piker is bad. None of the videos are popular. Some of them have fewer than 30 views, while others have ticked up into the triple digits primarily based on hate watches from people clowning on the podcast in recent days. The new studio has not helped, though it does at least look better. A video posted yesterday has 160 views at the time of this writing.

On audio-only platforms, the podcast is faring no better. Googling “Make It Make Sense podcast” brings up many other podcasts called Make It Make Sense, but not Jeff Bezos’s new flagship show. I was able to find the podcast in the Apple Podcast app, where it has four ratings and 2.3 stars out of 5, and the most glowing review is “This is bad and the people making it should feel bad.” On Spotify, it has a 2.8 out of 5 rating.

I do feel for the people who are in these videos. It is not easy to be on camera and it is not easy to make engaging YouTube content (growing our own YouTube channel has been a slog, and has been far more difficult than growing an audience on any other platform). Over time, with lots of practice and following many mean YouTube comments, I now feel slightly more comfortable being on camera than I did in the U.S. News days. And yet media executives keep trying to make people who are not good at presenting video do it anyway.

The best thing that can be said about this project is that at least we know Jeff Bezos is not buying views on YouTube, which is a common practice for vanity venture capitalist podcasts that no one wants to watch or listen to. So, why write about this at all?

Well, the show is the type of thing that we have seen time and time again from big media companies, and specifically, their airheaded executives who think that they have any idea how to make content that resonates with anyone at all. As Status pointed out, the Washington Post had a large and highly competent video team that made very good and successful video content. It laid the vast majority of them off, and this is what we’re left with. The Washington Post was known for having one of the most innovative, quirky, and successful TikTok channels, built in part by the journalist Dave Jorgenson.

Jorgenson left the Post in July of last year to start his own channel and company. “Dear Jeff Bezos, if you’re reading this, you already know. I’m leaving the Washington Post and starting my own company,” Jorgenson said in a video announcing the channel. “My boss, and my boss’s boss are coming with me, so viewers can continue to expect the same high quality, fact-checked videos.” Jorgenson now has 328,000 subscribers on YouTube and 317,000 TikTok followers. The Washington Post’s TikTok now largely posts repurposed stock footage from news wires. We have seen similar at VICE (which just “relaunched” VICE News as Adobe sponcon), Deadspin, etc.

Talented journalists—especially video journalists and podcasters—lose their jobs but the channels and feeds they created and built are zombified and repurposed for an executive’s passion project, staffed by people who have no idea what they’re doing. These projects inevitably also cost lots of money but with the added bonus that no one watches them. The project inevitably fails and is ignored into the oblivion. It’s fine to just ignore these stupid projects but maybe also we should mention sometimes that this is all part of the systematic hollowing out of news institutions that once did very good work that people cared about.

Turns out anyone can make a podcast. That doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen.

Vice News Is Being Resuscitated With Fresh Ambitions

Shane Smith's hard-hitting news brand, which covered global current affairs for a Millennial audience, is back, now equal parts creator-driven news outlet and brand partnership vehicle.

^{Kevin Dolak (The Hollywood Reporter)}

404 Media

2026-05-13 14:24:03

War and Data Centers Are Driving Up the Cost of Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way for militaries to beat their opponents' electronic warfare, but demand for cable from data centers and war is raising the cost of every flight.

War is a cat and mouse game. One side deploys a devastating tactic and the other side figures out a way to defeat it. When small and cheap quadcopter drones began to dominate the skies, first by Islamic State and then in Russia’s war on Ukraine, fighters quickly learned it was easier to knock them out of the sky with electronic warfare than it was to shoot them down.
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Then, in 2023, Russia began to deploy FPV drones controlled via lengths of fiber-optic cable. The cable sits spooled in a tube below the drone that unwinds as it flies. The fiber-optic cable provides a fast and clear connection between a drone and its operator and no signal is flying through the air which makes it immune to jamming.

Ukraine took heavy vehicle losses when Moscow began using fiber-optic drones but Kyiv quickly adopted the tactic and now wheat fields in the country are covered in discarded cable. Three years ago, this was a cheap and effective means of slipping past enemy defenses. In 2026 it’s not nearly as cost effective.

“Fiber-optics is still happening at the battlefield, although not as much as it used to be. It's extremely pricey now. We used to buy 50km spool for $300, now it's easily $2500. Just so you know,” Dimko Zhluktenko, a Ukrainian soldier, said in a post on X on May 10.

The price of fiber-optic cable has been steadily rising since about 2023 and has almost doubled in just the past few months. In January, Shanghai based fiber-optic company Sun Telecom declared there would be a “fiber famine” in 2026. Last year, a kilometer of its G.652D fiber cable cost $2.20. By December of 2025 the same length of cable cost $3. A month later, Sun Telecom had increased the price again to $4.1.

One of the big market shifts driving up the cost of fiber is an increased demand for data centers as companies rush to build out the compute infrastructure they believe they’ll need for AI. “Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more? I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” Wendell Weeks, the CEO of fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning, told CNBC after his company signed a deal with Meta for $6 billion in cable.

In a January LinkedIn post, North Carolina telecom company Brightspeed warned of “fiber-supply shortages.” Two other American ISPs told trade publication Broadband Breakfast said they’d seen orders for fiber unexpectedly cancelled. “We have heard concerns in recent weeks of timeframes slipping, and concerns about the ability to obtain supplies at all, as circumstances change,” Mike Romano, the CEO of NTCA, a rural broadband tradegroup, told Broadband Breakfast.

Data center driven demand is only part of the story. Wars in Ukraine, Iran, and the Sahel region of Africa are hungry for fiber-optic cable and manufacturers can barely keep up. Combined, Russia and Ukraine consume 50-60 million kilometers of fiber-optic cable every year, according to Kyiv Post. Most of this comes from China because both countries lack the domestic manufacturing base to produce that much cable. The demand has caused the price of a kilometer of Chinese fiber-optic to go from $2.33 in 2025 to $5.83 in 2026.

The core component of fiber-optic cables is a long piece of flexible and manufactured glass or plastic called an optical fiber. The delicate strands are about the width of a human hair. Ukraine doesn’t manufacture optical fibers. Russia had one factory in the city of Saransk but Ukraine destroyed it with drones in the spring of 2025. Now both countries rely on China to keep drones in the air. Exports on fiber-optic cable to Russia spiked after Ukraine destroyed the factory, hitting a height of 717.5 million meters in November of 2025.

“Ukraine has recently expanded its use of Starlink communications for attack drones, which are impractical for Russia to jam. The cost of a Starlink antenna—which is expended in an attack—is now lower than the cost of the longest-range FPV fiber-optic spools,” Roy Gardiner, an OSINT analyst at Defense Tech for Ukrainetold 404 Media. “The drive toward the development and deploying at least partial autonomous control for drones to defeat electronic warfare jamming will accelerate as fiber optic FPVs become less available.”

During war humans become great innovators. The game of cat and mouse continues and fighters are developing strategies to combat fiber-optic drones. In September of 2025, Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers began to report a new technique for countering the wire driven drones: a 150-meter-long fence made of spinning barbed wire. The theory is that the fiber-optic cable, dragged along the ground, will get caught in the fence and severed.
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Despite rising costs and the dangers posed by barbed wire, the drones keep flying. In March, Iran used fiber-optic controlled drones to strike American targets in the gulf, including the destruction of a Black Hawk helicopter parked in Iraq. The known fiber-optic FPV drones top out at about 50 kilometers of cable, a distance that will clear the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point.

Drone Attack On Parked U.S. Army Black Hawk In Iraq A Harbinger Of What's To Come

The ballooning threat from FPV drones pose a major risk to American aircraft parked on ramps in war zones and in the United States.

^{Thomas Newdick (The War Zone)}

404 Media

2026-05-13 13:10:19

Podcast: The Chinese Deepfake Software Powering Scams

We start this week with Joseph’s story about how we obtained Haotian AI, a sought-after piece of realtime video deepfake software that lets you turn into anyone else during Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or Zoom calls. After the break, Matthew tells us about some insane Yu-Gi-Oh trading card drama. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how the hard drive shortage is impacting those archiving the internet.
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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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• ⁠‘HELLO BOSS’: Inside the Chinese Realtime Deepfake Software Powering Scams Around the World⁠
• ⁠Man Finds $1 Million Worth of Yu-Gi-Oh Cards in a Dumpster⁠
• ⁠The AI Hard Drive Shortage Is Making It More Expensive and Harder to Archive the Internet⁠

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 …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-05-13 13:00:48

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed.

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

“We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same,” a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. “We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...).”

The actual quality of output doesn't matter as much as our willingness to participate.

Tech company executives love to brag about how much of the code at their company is AI-generated. In April, Google said that three quarters of new code at the company was generated by AI. Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said up to 30 percent of the company’s code was generated by AI. Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott said he expects 95 percent of all code at the company to be AI-generated by 2030. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said last year he expects AI to write most of the code improving AI within 12-18 months. Anthropic says 90 percent of the code written by most if its team is AI generated. Tech companies have also been bragging about their “tokenmaxxing,” or how much money they’re spending on AI tools instead of human employees.

💡
Are you a developer at Google, Microsoft, or another tech being pressured to use AI? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at ‪(609) 678-3204‬. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn’t resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences. Mostly, AI implementation in tech companies has been used to justify multiple massive rounds of layoffs. To name just a few examples where tech companies said they reduced headcount because of AI use, more recently, Meta said it would cut 10 percent of its workforce (around 8,000 people), Microsoft said it would offer voluntary retirement to 7 percent of its American workforce (around 125,000 people). Snapchat said it would lay off 16 percent of its full-time staffers (about 1,000 people).

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Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

“It's making me dumber for sure.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-12 13:00:38

ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.

While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

💡
Do you work for Palantir or ICE? Did you used to? 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 officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster. Although the Trump administration has attempted to step back from its mass deportation rhetoric and city wide raids, especially in the wake of killing multiple people, ICE continues to violently and wrongfully detain people. Data from April showed that 70.8 percent, or 42,722, of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction.

The four people who attended the Border Security Expo saw Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, and other DHS officials speak.

At one point, Elliston made the comment about ICE agents having 20 million targets, or potential people to detain, on their iPhones. This list can lead ICE agents to an individual and a house; they can then see if another target might be next door. This target may be a lower priority, but ICE can now use that information to arrest more people.
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At another point, Elliston said that Palantir’s technology has increased ICE’s rate of successfully locating a target from around 27 percent to just under 80 percent.

Two of the attendees were Kenny Morris, a campaigns strategist within the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Action Center for Corporate Accountability, and Dov Baum, director of AFSC’s Action Center for Corporate Accountability. 404 Media is not naming the other two attendees to protect them from professional repercussions.

Investigative work that used to take hours now takes 10 to 15 minutes, Elliston said. Elliston added Palantir gives the agency access to between 30 and 40 datasets.

Palantir generally doesn’t generate its own datasets; instead, its tools are broadly used to bring usually disparate datasets together and let them be queried as one.

In January, 404 Media revealed Palantir was working on a tool for ICE called ELITE, or Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. This tool populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person including their personal information, and provides a “confidence score” on that person’s current address. Those addresses came from various sources including the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) and Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR product, according to an ELITE user guide 404 Media obtained.

Palantir has worked with DHS, and specifically Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), for years. This work was previously focused on the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, which HSI used. In the second Trump administration, Palantir became a “more mature partner to ICE,” the company said in a leaked Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media.

Palantir’s closer work with ICE has triggered some protests around the country, including one in April outside Palantir’s offices in New York City.

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment for this article. The company previously wrote a blog post after 404 Media first revealed the existence of ELITE, writing, “The ELITE tool is used for prioritized enforcement to surface the likely addresses of specific individuals, such as those with final orders of removal or with high severity criminal charges.”

A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in an email: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is committed to achieving the nation’s mandate to clear the backlog of illegal aliens who pose a threat to the security of our communities. Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests.”

Elliston also discussed Mobile Fortify, ICE and CBP’s facial recognition app. Elliston claimed the app has been used 200,000 times with a 0 percent mismatch rate. 404 Media reported in January that Mobile Fortify misidentified a woman, twice.

At one point, Elliston said that the agency has a lot of money and he’s open for business. If you want to show me something, send me a LinkedIn message, he said. After the session, one attendee said they watched as a huge line of people waited for their chance to speak to Elliston.

Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People

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

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-11 15:09:42

How the World Became a Casino

How did we get to a point where it’s legal for anyone to bet on anything? Be it the results of a baseball game or a land war in Europe, if you have access to a credit card and a computer you can try to predict the outcome of anything that’s happening in the world and win a little bit of money if you’re right. If we know that gambling can lead to high rates gambling addiction and financial ruin, why does it seem like our culture has suddenly embraced it?

For years, anyone who has reported on our increasing addiction to technology has found their way to Natasha Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The book is an ethnography of slot machines. It is based on many interviews with the people who make them and play them, a deep investigation of how they work, and how they fit into the larger context of casinos, Las Vegas, and gambling more broadly.

Since it was published more than a decade ago, the logic of slot machines has extended far beyond Las Vegas. Every notification on our phone, trading platforms like Robinhood, the crypto craze, and now prediction markets, can be understood through the lens of slot machine design and Schüll work. That’s why I was incredibly happy she agreed to come on the podcast this week to discuss our current gambling-obsessed culture.
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404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

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

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

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 …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-05-11 13:57:35

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

A few years ago, while I was covering the rise of AI slop on Facebook, I asked my friends and family if they were getting AI spam fed into their timelines and if they could send me examples. A handful of them responded, sending me obviously AI-generated science fiction scenescapes, shrimp Jesus, and forlorn, starving children begging for sympathy. But a few of my friends sent me images that they thought were AI but were not. Their mental guard was up to the point where they were looking at human-made art and photos and thought it safer to dismiss them as AI rather than be fooled by it.

To browse the internet today, to consume any sort of content at all, is to be bombarded with AI of all sorts. People think things that are fake are real, things that are real are fake. Much has been written about “AI psychosis,” the nonspecific, nonscientific diagnosis given to people who have lost themselves to AI. Less has been said about the cognitive load of what other people’s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?

I see AI content where I’m conditioned to expect and ignore it: In Google’s “AI Overviews” that famously told us to eat glue pizza, in engagement-bait LinkedIn posts, and throughout our Facebook and Instagram feeds. But increasingly I have the feeling that it’s everywhere, coming from all directions, completely unavoidable. It’s not exactly that I have a revulsion to AI-assisted content or don’t want to get fooled by it. It’s that something is happening where my brain has become the AI police because everything feels incredibly uncanny. I will be going about my day reading, watching, or listening to something and, suddenly, I notice that something is wildly off. Quite simply, I feel like I’m going nuts.

An example: Last week, in a desperate attempt to avoid yet another take on the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting, I was listening to an episode of Everyone’s Talkin’ Money, a podcast I’ve been listening to off-and-on for years about taxes (yikes). This podcast has been going on for years, has a human host named Shari Rash, and hundreds of episodes. Rash started reading the intro script: “The shift I want you to make today—and this is the shift that changes everything—is starting to see your tax return as information—not a bill, not a badge of shame, but information.” The script went on and on and on like this, with AI writing trope after AI writing trope. My brain shut down and stopped paying attention to the script and started wondering if Rash was using AI just for the intro script? What about for the research? Did she edit the script at all? I turned the podcast off.

Later that day, I was scrolling the Orioles Hangout forums, a small community of diehards obsessed with the Baltimore Orioles that I have been lurking on for decades. Until recently, it had been one of the few places on the internet that I could safely assume was not full of AI. Except now, it is. The site’s administrator has started using AI to analyze player performance and to help him write some of his posts. To his credit, he explains how he’s using AI and prefaces these posts by noting they are AI-assisted analysis. Some of them are interesting. But now, most days I’m browsing the forums, I will see arguments between posters who have been there for years that seem overly generic or don’t really make sense. One recent post arguing about the timetable for an injured player’s return suggested a ludicrously long recovery. One poster pointed this out: “You said 10-18 months and I said it won’t take that long for a position player.” The poster responded: “You’re right I did. The 10-18 months was an AI generated answer … consider it a small cautionary tale about trusting AI and another on the benefits of seeking out actual medical research on questions like this.” Every day I now scroll the forum and see people noting that they plugged something into ChatGPT or Gemini and have copy pasted the answers for other people to see. In this 30-year-old community of human beings discussing sports, AI is unavoidable.

It is, of course, not just me. Friends send me screenshots of texts they’ve gotten from people they’ve started dating, wondering if they’re using ChatGPT to flirt. I’ve gotten obviously AI-generated apologies or excuses from people trying to bail on a social engagement. I’ve been to weddings where the speeches felt—and were—partially AI-generated.

A recent PEW poll showed that people believe it is important to be able to tell whether an image, video, or piece of writing was AI-generated, AI-assisted, or written by a human. And it showed that a majority of people do not believe that they are able to tell the difference between AI-generated works and human made works. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans judge AI-generated art and writing more harshly than human works, and a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when people know or perceive a piece of writing to be AI-generated, it is “stubbornly difficult to mitigate” and “remarkably persistent, holding across the time period of our study; across different evaluation metrics, contexts, and different types of written content.” Put simply, it is not just me who hates AI writing or finds it annoying. Even if AI writing can be “fine,” it very often feels bland, weird, formulaic. The writer Eve Fairbanks wrote a thread the other day that I thought more or less nailed it: “The tell for AI isn’t rhythm, wording, or fact errors. It’s that problems with *all these elements* exist equally & at once.”

“With AI writing, everything is off: the tone grates, individual word choices baffle, the structure lacks sense, key pieces of argument are missing…the key is that they all exist simultaneously to the same degree,” she added. “Superficially, AI text can read smoothly—“cleaner” than a human’s draft … but it’s almost impossible to make sensible. And it’s driving me crazy.”

Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted about swastikas being painted on synagogues in Queens: “This is not just vandalism—it is a deliberate act of antisemitic hatred meant to instill fear,” he wrote. Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, an AI detection firm, highlighted this passage and tweeted “Mamdani nooo ,” the implication being that this passage was written by AI, or at least seemed like it was. Spero’s tweet had more than 4 million views at the time I talked to him. (Disclosure: Pangram Labs previously advertised on 404 Media).

Spero’s company uses AI to detect AI writing, meaning it is not perfect. But as far as these tools go, Pangram is considered quite good, and has been widely used in research about AI content on the internet. Spero told me when I called him that immersing himself in the internet has his brain in AI-detection mode pretty much all the time. “I’m totally on guard, and I have been for a while,” he said. Spero said he first began to notice it on restaurant reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews a few years ago. “I started seeing them everywhere. There’s people who are Yelp Elite and all they do is post one or two AI-generated reviews a day. Fast forward to today, and I think we’ve seen the mainstream growth of AI everywhere, but I think some people can tell, and some people have no intuition for it.”

I have always aspired to write like I talk. I don’t really concern myself so much with the craft of writing or turning a beautiful sentence, I usually try to just convey information in a straightforward, personable way. I want my articles to feel like slightly more polished, more researched versions of my text messages, like the things I would say on a podcast or at the bar to a friend. Often my writing process involves me thinking about sentences or ideas I want to convey while I’m walking my dog or in the shower or surfing, and I hope that when I actually sit down to write, the words flow from my brain through the keyboard in a way that pretty much makes sense.

When I sat down to write this article, in which, to be clear, I did not use AI, I found myself writing the following sentence: “It’s not just in places we’re conditioned to see AI—Google AI overviews, LinkedIn influencer posts, and Facebook feeds—I’ve started seeing AI…” I stopped typing, freaked out, and deleted the sentence. Have I always written this way? I honestly don’t know.

This negative parallelism—“it’s not just x, it’s y” is maybe the most infamous AI writing-ism there is. It is something that is regularly called out as being obviously AI, and is the formation in the sentence Mamdani wrote that Spero called out. But I didn’t use AI. Did I use that construction because I’ve been immersed on an internet full of generic AI writing on every platform all day everyday for years? Or did I just happen to think that was the best way to phrase it at the time?

The idea that humans may be subconsciously mimicking or learning from the AI writing that they’re reading is not some isolated thought I had. It’s kind of the business model of any number of AI-for-education startups, and it’s an idea that has been raised in lots of articles about AI in schools. Last month, the New York Times quoted a teacher who said “They are using generative A.I. to write before they learn how to write.” Teachers I spoke to last year lamented that they are spending their very real human hours and considerable brain power trying to determine whether they are grading essays that are written by humans or robots, and know that they are often giving writing notes on papers that were likely written by AI.

The thing is, human writers do sometimes write like AI, and this will probably become more common. “If you showed me the Mamdani tweet in a vacuum I’d be like, almost certainly it’s AI,” Spero said. “But with Mamdani I’m less sure because his history is almost everything else seems to be human written. With my own writing, I don’t want to sound like AI even a little bit. I have some concerns about, like, the students who have grown up with ChatGPT and their entire school career has been ChatGPT assisted so now they actually do write like this.”

Fairbanks had the same thought, and she told me that the person she originally wrote her thread about claims that he actually didn’t use AI to write it.

“It’s possible it was written by him!,” she told me in an email. “In which case it appears his writing was shaped by the AI voice. I feel self-conscious now that I’m picking up habits not directly from AI but from people who may have used AI, or that AI is somehow exposing, like a fluorescent light on our naked body in the doctor's office, the defects in my writing style insofar as they turn out to overlap with what everybody now believes is a totally shit style. I always used em dashes!”

“Somebody on my thread made the observation that somehow it’s more likely that we’ll all start to sound more like AI than that AI will sound more human to us,” she added. “That felt right to me, although I couldn’t technically say why. But I was listening to a New York Times podcast and noticed the presenter used the ‘it’s not x, it’s y’ formula. I really assume she didn’t generate the sentence with AI because she was speaking out loud, in conversation. But it now stood out as formula to me.”

I emailed Rash, the host of the podcast who originally made me think “this is an AI script,” and asked her if it was an AI script. She said “I use AI to help brainstorm, organize ideas, outline, and refine language. The line you referenced reflects a point I often make with clients and listeners … I review and edit all of my content and I am responsible for everything that goes out under my name.”

Earlier this year I read an article by the writer Marcus Olang called “I’m Kenyan. I don’t write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT writes like me.” Olang’s article highlighted a phenomenon he and other Kenyans have experienced, where they are constantly accused of using AI to write, and have lost out on opportunities because of it. Olang notes that the Kenyan education system tended to teach a formal, structured, rules-focused type of English that was largely a product of colonialism.

“The bedrock of my writing style was not programmed in Silicon Valley. It was forged in the high-pressure crucible of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education…The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen's English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster,” he wrote. “It was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam. It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things.”

As we’ve noted before, many AI tools have been trained, tested, and moderated on thousands of hours of labor from low-paid workers around the world, including many Kenyans. So not only did Olang learn a type of English writing that tends to be generated by AI tools, a lot of the moderation and testing of those tools was judged by people who went through that same education system. “If humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm, then where does that leave the rest of us?,” Olang wrote.

Olang makes important points in his article, but one of the great things about writing and the internet in general is that there are all sorts of different dialects and styles and things that can work online. And so maybe what I have been noticing is a sameness, a homogenizing of large parts of the internet, including places I often felt were very human. This is objectively happening, researchers believe. A study published last month by researchers at Imperial College London, Stanford, and the Internet Archive called “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet,” found that roughly 35 percent of new websites are AI-generated. It confirmed the researchers’ hypotheses that “As AI content becomes more common on the internet, online writing feels increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful,” and “as AI text becomes more common on the internet, the range of unique ideas and diverse viewpoints shrinks.”

Besides people copy pasting things from ChatGPT or other AI tools, AI writing “assistance” has been shoved directly into word processors like Google Docs, email clients like Gmail, and social media networks like LinkedIn. The process of “writing” is being automated and filtered through these tools. It is everywhere.

Last month, a Harvard MBA grad named Ben Horwitz launched Sinceerly, an “AI to undo your AI writing.” The Chrome extension has three modes: “Subtle,” “Human,” and “CEO,” which takes AI-generated text and gets rid of em dashes, adds typos, slang, acronyms, puts words all in lowercase, etc. Horwitz wrote on the website that he built Sinceerly because “I got sick of everyone in my inbox sounding like AI.” I used Sinceerly to email Horwitz and ask for an interview. When I called him and told him this, he said he didn’t notice, so, mission accomplished.

“To be clear, this is mainly a satirical project meant to hold a mirror up to people who use AI as an alternative to thinking, but it is legit in that I built this tool and it does work,” Horwitz said. “But I do feel like everything is starting to sound the same and I’m experiencing the same thing as you—the homogeneity I find incredibly frustrating and boring, and it makes me less apt to use social media because everything sounds the same.”

He said that since he’s launched Sinceerely, he’s gotten emails from actual users who have used it to de-AIify their writing and who are frustrated that they are sometimes not getting responses. “Many people have DMed me and been like ‘Hey, can you help me make this email sound more human?,” he said. “Think about how much work all of this actually is. In theory you’re written something as a prompt into the AI and so you have actually written something. And then you’re copy pasting it into an email and using this tool on it. I hope it gets people to think about what they’re actually doing.”

The irony is that in making his satirical project, Horwitz has actually replicated, albeit in a funnier way, an already existing type of AI tool called “humanizers,” which are designed to defeat AI detection software like Spero’s Pangram. Spero said he “thought Sincerely was a very funny project. It’s like a first impression, someone sees a typo and they give a sigh of relief that a real human is behind that, but we’ve actually been seeing this more and more. AI-generated marketing emails over the last year with intentional typos.”

Humanizers add typos, randomly replaces words, removes “AI tells,” and sometimes inserts random characters. Spero said Pangram has been collecting as much data as they can to try to detect “humanized” AI, but that “it’s pretty adversarial” and that there is likely to be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between humanizer AI and AI detecting AI.

“It’s kind of looking grim for the future of the internet,” he said.

In my many, many hours of browsing AI slop on Facebook, I spent an absurd amount of time scrolling through the comments on AI-generated images. One exchange has stuck in my mind years later. It was an AI-generated image of a wood deck outside a house. In the comments, obviously real people were arguing back and forth as to whether the nonexistent deck would pass code inspection. I remember thinking something uncharitable and cancelable at the time, something that I think I wrote in a draft of one of my articles but that got edited out because it was mean. I remember thinking, basically, that Facebook had become a virtual nursing home for delusional and quite possibly stupid old people, a place where people argue back and forth about things that don’t exist, forever, until they die.

I ended up calling this the “Zombie Internet,” which is something I considered to be worse than the “Dead Internet,” the popular but too simplistic idea that large portions of the internet are bots interacting with each other. I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It’s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck “Moltbook” is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It’s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that’s actually being run by a marketing firm. It’s fake Yelp reviews for real restaurants and real Yelp reviews for fake restaurants using AI-generated food images being run out of ghost kitchens. It’s armies of AI-assisted clippers who used to steal people’s content to make money on social media but now get paid to do so. It’s the boring history YouTube videos I use to fall asleep that used to be quirky and weird but are now AI channels. It’s my email inbox, in which I used to occasionally get poorly-formatted, poorly written, extremely long emails from delusional people who were positive the CIA had imprisoned them in a virtual torture chamber using undisclosed secret technology but where I now get well-formatted, passably written, extremely long emails from delusional people who are positive they have proven AI sentience and have the AI transcripts to prove it. It's the New York Times having to issue corrections multiple times in the last few weeks because its writers have included AI-generated hallucinations in the newspaper. It’s the pitches I get that start “Hi Jason, I’m Hatoshi. I’m an AI agent. I run Clanker Records — An AI-operated label with AI artists,” and the pitches I get that are probably written by AI agents or someone who has automated the process but hasn’t bothered to tell me.

What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write.

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet

Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-11 13:03:56

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the “next industrial revolution,” and was met with thousands of booing graduates.

“And let’s face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. “Oh, what happened?” Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. “Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?” Someone in the crowd yelled, “AI SUCKS!”

Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. According to her bio on the Tavistock Group’s website, Caulfield “oversees the health and medical partnerships as well as business development for Tavistock’s visionary Lake Nona community.” Lake Nona is a planned community in Florida. Caulfield is “instrumental in managing corporate partnerships and identifying strategic intersections with stakeholders in the Lake Nona community,” her bio says.
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Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a “stepping stone” to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd’s reaction, she continued her speech: “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.” The crowd cheered. “Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see,” Caulfield said. “And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands.” The crowd booed again. “I love it, passion, let's go,” she said.

“AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use,” she continued. “Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet.”

She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. “At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen.”

Caulfield is saying this to humanities and communications graduates, who are entering a workforce that AI has been gutting with increasing intensity for years. Not even the people and companies she valorizes in her speech believe that these graduates are headed for an easy time in the workforce: In April, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said AI will “destroy” humanities jobs, and last week, a report found that AI is blamed for one in four lost jobs, amounting to 21,490 AI-related cuts last month, or 26 percent of the 88,387 total, “marking the second straight month the technology has been the top driver of layoffs,” CBS reported.

At the companies Caulfield referenced as existing because of advances in technology, CEOs blame AI for massive job cuts; Meta announced last month that it would cut 10 percent of its workforce later this month due to focusing more on AI, with more cuts to come. People who keep their jobs at these companies are often made miserable by the ways they’re forced to do AI busywork.

Within the humanities, the field these graduates have spent the last several years of their lives studying for careers in, AI is adding stress and dysfunction to library work and academia. A recent study by Microsoft ranked historians and interpreters and translators as the most likely professionals to have AI disrupt their work. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he believed AI could wipe out half of all white collar entry-level jobs. This is not the crowd to tell they should embrace the “change” that AI brings.

UCF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AI could make half of all entry-level white-collar jobs vanish, Anthropic CEO warns | Fortune

And he's not the first.

^{Chris Morris (Fortune)}

404 Media

2026-05-09 13:00:26

Scientists Studied 906 Mafia Marriages and Found Something Surprising

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got ID’d, caught on camera, internally probed, and married off.

First, scientists have confirmed the identities of four sailors who died in a grisly Victorian voyage. Then: the sights and sounds of an Arctic seafloor, a glimpse into the guts of ice giants, and a wedding kiss of death.

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

Putting a face, and names, to lost Arctic sailors

Stenton, Douglas R. et al. “DNA identifications of three 1845 Franklin expedition sailors from HMS Erebus.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Stenton, Douglas R. et al “‘Some very hard ground to heave’: DNA identification of Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, HMS Terror.” Polar Record.

Scientists have identified four men who died in Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition of 1845, a British mission to chart a passage through the Arctic that ended in misery, starvation, and cannibalism, leaving no survivors.

“Since the late nineteenth century the coast of Erebus Bay on King William Island, Nunavut, has been a focal point for historical and archaeological investigations of the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition,” said researchers led by Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo. “Its significance comes from the nature and volume of materials derived from an extraordinary and ultimately tragic event: the fatal attempt by 105 surviving sailors to escape their icebound ships in the spring of 1848 by walking hundreds of kilometres south to the mainland of North America.”
Graves at Franklin Camp on Beechey Island, Nunavut, Canada that memorialize Franklin expedition crew members. Image: Gordon Leggett
Using DNA extracted from skeletal remains, a study has confirmed that the 180-year-old bones belong to the able seaman William Orren, the ship's boy David Young, the officers' steward John Bridgens, and captain of the foretop Harry Peglar. Orren, Young, and Bridgens served on HMS Erebus, the expedition’s flagship, and their remains ended up in Erebus Bay on Canada’s King William Island.

The remains of Peglar, who served on the secondary vessel HMS Terror, were found nearly 80 miles away from the others and are reported in a separate study led by Stenton. Stenton’s team has previously identified the Erebus engineer John Gregory as well as the Captain of Erebus, James Fitzjames, whose remains were subject to cannibalism.

The researchers matched the DNA of these sailors to samples provided by living descendants or relatives to conclusively confirm their identities. In addition to solving a scientific mystery, this process literally puts a face to one man as the team included a reconstructed portrait of David Young, who was around 20 when he died.
David Young, Boy 1st Class from the HMS Erebus, in a 2D Forensic Facial Reconstruction. Image: Diana Trepkov, Investigative Forensic Artist
The results also help to piece together key details of the nightmarish fates that befell these sailors as they endured starvation, exposure, disease, and despair.

“For their descendants, the identifications of John Bridgens, David Young, and William Orren reveal that, like John Gregory, they had survived the first three years of the expedition,” the researchers said. “They also unveil the locations where their deaths occurred, and the fact that none of the men were alone when they died.”

Peglar did die alone, however, and he remains the only member of the Terror crew who has been identified. In the study about his farflung remains, the team concludes with a passage Peglar wrote a few days before the survivors abandoned their stuck vessels and embarked on the retreat that would ultimately kill them all.

Peglar noted the need to procure new boots as “we have got some very hard ground to heave.”

In other news…

Scenes from an Arctic seafloor

Podolskiy, Evgeny A. et al. “Seafloor video-acoustic monitoring in a Greenlandic glacial fjord records hyperbenthos, backward-swimming fish, and narwhals.” PLOS One.

Though the Arctic has many deadly perils, this region is also home to some of the most amazing lifeforms found anywhere on the planet. Scientists have now captured rare footage and recordings of “a highly turbulent environment” on the seafloor of a glacial fjord in northwest Greenland, according to a study.

Here, at depths of about 850 feet, the songs of narwhals reverberate along the seafloor, crustaceans called copepods move in sudden hops, and “marine snow” made of particulate matter falls in blizzardlike bursts. A snailfish was also caught on tape making a particularly memorable exit.
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“One snailfish showed peculiar backward swimming, passively drifting backward with the current,” said researchers led by Evgeny A. Podolskiy of Hokkaido University. “It curled its tail and remained motionless for at least 16 seconds before disappearing from view.”

You’ve heard of the Irish Goodbye and the Minnesota Goodbye, but I’m not sure anything can top the Greenlandic Glacial Fjord Snailfish Goodbye.

The flavorful fillings of ice giants

Ramirez, Vanesa et al. “Reassessing planetary composition: Evidence of rock-dominated envelopes in Uranus and Neptune.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

What’s inside Uranus? Or Neptune, for that matter? Nobody really knows, and we have to rely on models until someone can figure out how to get a direct look inside the guts of these ice giants.

To that end, researchers ran simulations of the possible evolution and composition of the two planets’ interiors based in part on observations of their atmospheres. The results suggest that “the deep interiors of the two planets exhibit distinct compositions” with Neptune having “relatively rock-rich mantles…whereas Uranus is inferred to have more ice-rich mantles,” according to researchers led by Vanesa Ramirez of Leiden University.

“Our results indicate fundamental differences in the internal architectures of Uranus and Neptune, challenging the traditional view of these planets as compositional twins,” the team added.

To put in confectionary terms, Neptune appears to be more of a rocky road, while Uranus may be a refreshing ice slushy. Either way, the study underscores how much there is left to learn about these solar system worlds.

Mob Wives, but it’s science

Catino, Maurizio et al. “Marrying for power: Gendered alliances in mafias.” PLOS One.

In a genuinely gangster new study, scientists took a whack at unraveling the marital power dynamics at work within the 'Ndrangheta mafia syndicate, an infamous crime ring built around familial ties.

“Interfamily marriages have long been recognized as a strategic resource in mafia organizations,” said researchers led by Maurizio Catino of the University of Milano-Bicocca. “Drawing on judicial records documenting…906 marriages among 623 ’Ndrangheta clans, we analyze how matrimonial ties relate to power and cohesion within the organization.”

While nuptials between the most powerful clans are important for group cohesion, the team found that the marriages among less influential families were the real “load-bearing” relationships in the network. In part, this is because boss families tended to be “associated with redundant, overlapping unions” whereas there is more elasticity in the outer circles.
Say hello to my little chart. Image: Catino, Maurizio et al.
The study is packed with wild and often disturbing anecdotes—and some that seem directly lifted from a Scorsese flick.

For instance, take the case of Emanuele Mancuso, whose aunt tried to dissuade him from cooperating with law enforcement with this pitch-perfect guilt trip: “How is your mother doing? She’s not well! She knows she no longer has a son, how do you think she feels?”

It’s stressful enough to plan a wedding without the additional pressure of figuring out how you will fit into an international criminal syndicate. You can only hope the union will end in holy (not holey) matrimony.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

An Update on the End of the World

Cannibalism, the cheese mummy, and a star-broiled Earth.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-08 16:57:36

University Claims Withholding Water From Nuclear Weapons Data Center Is 'Unlawfully Discriminatory' to Data Centers

The University of Michigan has sent a legal threat over a yearlong pause that would prevent water hookup to a proposed nuclear weapons research and AI data center. Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Michigan are looking to build a $1.2 billion, 220,000 square foot data center in Ypsitlanti Township. On April 22, the Ypsilanti Community Utility Authority (YCUA) passed a 365-day moratorium on the delivery of water to hyperscale data centers in the area while it conducted environmental sustainability and long-term water use studies.

As first reported by MLive, the University hand delivered and emailed a legal threat to the YCUA on April 21, the day before it was to vote on the proposed water moratorium. According to a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media, the university feels the moratorium is “unlawfully discriminatory” against data centers and it promised to pursue “all rights and claims for relief” if its demands weren’t met.
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Luther Blackburn, YCUA’s executive director, told 404 Media that the organization had no comment on potential or pending litigation, but did confirm that he’d received a legal communication from the university. “YCUA staff are working on a Request for Proposal to complete the investigations and studies outlined in the moratorium,” he said. “I believe YCUA has acted lawfully and in accordance with industry best practices by issuing the moratorium.”

The university disagreed. “The University objects to any such sector-specific moratorium which would be legally invalid because, among other defects, it would be unrelated to any documented utility or public health needs,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained by 404 Media. “As a threshold matter, a moratorium on utility service is permissible only when linked to legitimate utility considerations such as documented capacity constraints, public health issues, or genuine financing challenges.”
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The University argued, citing various legal precedents, that the courts will not be on Ypsilanti’s side and claimed that the area has plenty of water. “The record contains no evidence supporting any such YCUA capacity constraint,” the letter said. “To the contrary, YCUA’s leadership has publicly stated that serving the University’s proposed facility would not affect the authority’s ability to provide or treat water.”

The letter quoted Blackburn as saying he had confirmed in 2025 that the data center’s proposed use of 200,000 gallons a day were within YCUA’s 8-10 million gallon per day capacity. “In addition, YCUA leadership has stated that serving the University's project would likely help mitigate overall utility costs by improving efficiency and cost distribution,” the letter said.

Sean Knapp, the YCUA’s director of service operations, told Planet Detroit last year that the YCUA is operating below capacity at the moment. “Adding the data center as a customer would help mitigate overall costs by improving efficiency and cost distribution,” he said at the time.

After saying it was illegal for the Ypsilanti community to not give it water, the University claimed the moratorium discriminated against data centers. “Beyond the above legal deficiencies, the proposed moratorium is pretextual and unlawfully discriminatory because it singles out ‘data centers’ by label rather than by utility impact,” the letter said. “It is discriminatory to permit other users to connect and consume currently available capacity while the utility conducts undefined studies to determine whether there is sufficient capacity for the University’s proposed facility.”

The University then asked the YCUA not to pass a moratorium and promised to “pursue” the matter. “The University respectfully requests that YCUA refuse to issue any sector-specific moratorium, instead basing any service decisions on documented utility factors, applied evenhandedly through existing permitting and technical review processes,” the letter said. “If these legal requirements are not followed by YCUA, the University reserves the right to pursue all rights and claims for necessary relief.”

The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

Ypsilanti Township has been fighting the proposed datacenter for more than a year now. Data centers are wildly unpopular in the United States. They often cause noise pollution, affect water quality, and drive up utility bills for their neighbors. Local opposition to the Ypsilanti Township data center has been compounded by its connection to America’s nuclear weapons industry.

Ypsilanti Township residents speak out against University of Michigan's ‘biggest, baddest’ data center

The $1.2 billion data center project by the University of Michigan in Ypsilanti Township sparks worries about water consumption, surveillance, and noise.

^{Brian Allnutt (Planet Detroit)}