404 Media

2025-11-05 14:00:13

Podcast: People Are Modding Meta Ray-Bans to Spy On You

We have something of a Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses bumper episode this week. We start with Joseph and Jason’s piece on a $60 mod that disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the smart glasses. After the break, Emanuel tells us how some people are abusing the glasses to film massage workers, and he explains the difference between a phone and a pair of smartglasses, if you need that spelled out for you. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us about the future of advertising: AI-generated ads personalized directly to you.
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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.

• A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light
• Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Users Film and Harass Massage Parlor Workers
• The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-10-29 13:01:32

Podcast: Grokipedia is Cringe

We start this week with Jason’s explanation of what Grokipedia is, and how it compares to the very much human-made Wikipedia. After the break, we talk all about the hell of updating Windows PCs and what that means specifically for Windows 10 users. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains what a16z is doing with a ‘speedrun’ to a wholly AI-generated world.
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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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• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever⁠
• First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens
• Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
• Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
• The End of Windows 10 Support Is an E-Waste Disaster in the Making
• Nathan Proctor interview
• a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service
• a16z Is Funding a 'Speedrun' to AI-Generated Hell on Earth

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-10-28 16:56:04

Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

I woke up restless and kind of hungover Sunday morning at 6 am and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL in 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a homicide, but it was later revealed that he had done it while lost in the underwater cave to avoid the pain of drowning.” The post linked to a Wikipedia page called “List of unusual deaths in the 21st century.” I spent the next two hours falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through all manner of horrifying and difficult-to-imagine ways to die.

A day later, I saw that Depths of Wikipedia, the incredible social media account run by Annie Rauwerda, had noted the entirely unsurprising fact that, behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean her death itself was unusual.” These are the types of edits and conversations that have collectively happened billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and which make it so human, so interesting, so useful.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

One needs only spend a few minutes clicking around the launch version of Grokipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. Besides often having a conservative slant and having the general hallmarks of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are overly long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, have no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is zero insight into how any of the articles were generated, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits that were made, no version history, etc. Grokipedia is, literally, simply a single black box LLM’s version of an encyclopedia. There is a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and it’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.” To use an example I noticed from simply clicking around: The list of “notable people” in the Grokipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a disordered list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping about a place that could be done.

On even the lowest of stakes Wikipedia pages, real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article, in what order it should be presented, and the specific language that should be used. They do this under a framework of byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, inscrutable listservs which themselves have been informed by Wikimedia’s “mission statement,” the “Wikimedia values,” its “founding principles” and policies and guidelines and tons of other stated and unstated rules, norms, processes and procedures. All of this behind-the-scenes legwork is essentially invisible to the user but is very serious business to the human editors building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects (the high cultural barrier to entry for editors is also why it is difficult to find new editors for Wikipedia, and is something that the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix without ruining the project). Any given Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans who are discussing, for example, whether it’s actually that unusual to get speared to death by a beach umbrella.

Grokipedia, meanwhile, looks like what you would get if you told an LLM to go make an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is essentially exactly what Elon Musk did.

As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leak part of its instructions. For example, a Grokipedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” notes “Wait, no, can’t cite Wiki,” indicating that Grokipedia has been programmed to not link to Wikipedia. That entry does cite Wikimedia pages anyway, but in the “sources,” those pages are not actually hyperlinked:

I have no doubt that Grokipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or build an “alternative” to Wikipedia, the likes of which no one has heard of because the attempts were all so laughable and poorly participated in that they died almost immediately. Grokipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it is everything that Wikipedia is not: It is not an encyclopedia, it is not transparent, it is not human, it is not a nonprofit, it is not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it is not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the proliferation of AI, and related structural changes to discoverability and linking on the internet like AI summaries and knowledge panels. But Wikipedia has proven itself to be incredibly resilient because it is a project that specifically leans into the shared wisdom and collaboration of humanity, our shared weirdness and ways of processing information. That is something that an LLM will never be able to compete with.

Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 13:24:21

Lawsuit Accuses a16z of Turning Roblox Into a School Shooter's Playground

The mother of a teenager who died by suicide is suing Roblox, accusing the company of worrying more about its investors than the children in its audience. The complaint, filed this month, claims Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, who’ve collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the gaming company, fostered a platform that monetizes children at the cost of their safety.
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Attorneys for Jaimee Seitz filed the lawsuit in the eastern district of Kentucky. Seitz is the mother of Audree Heine, a teen girl who committed suicide just after her 13th birthday in 2024. When detectives investigated Heine’s death they found she had a vast online social life that centered around groups in Discord and Roblox that idolized school shooters like Dylan Kleebold. Since Heine’s death, Seitz has been outspoken about the unique dangers of Roblox.

Heine’s family claims she would never have died had Roblox done a better job of moderating its platform. “Audree was pushed to suicide by an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct,” the complaint said.

Seitz’s lawyers filed the 89 page lawsuit on October 20 and in it attempted to make the case that Roblox’s problems all stem from cause: corporate greed. “The reason that Roblox is overrun with harmful content and predators is simple: Roblox prioritizes user growth, revenue, and eventual profits over child safety,” it said. “For years, Roblox has knowingly prioritized these numbers over the safety of children through the actions it has taken and decisions it has made to increase and monetize users regardless of the consequences.”

According to the lawsuit, Roblox’s earning potential attracted big investors which encouraged it to abandon safety for quick cash. “Roblox’s business model allowed the company to attract significant venture capital funding from big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, putting enormous pressure on the company to prioritize growing and monetizing its users.”

Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z is a venture capital firm whose previous investments include Civitai—a company that made money from noncensual AI porn—an “uncensored” AI project that offered users advice on how to commit suicide, and startup that’s selling access to thousands of “synthetic influencers” for use in manipulating public opinion.

In 2020, a16z led a round of funding that raised $150 million for Roblox. “Roblox is one of those rare platform companies with massive traction and an organic, high-growth business model that will advance the company, and push the industry forward for many years to come,” David George, a general partner at the investment firm, said in a press release at the time.

The lawsuit claims Roblox knows that kids are easy marks for low effort monetization efforts common in online video games. “Recognizing that children have more free time, underdeveloped cognitive functioning, and diminished impulse control, Roblox has exploited their vulnerability to lure them to its app,” it said.

The lawsuit notes that Roblox did not require age verification for years, nor did it restrict communication between children and adults and didn’t require an adult to set up an account for a child. Roblox rolled out age verification and age-based communications systems in July, a feature that uses AI to scan the faces of its users to check their age.

These kinds of basic safety features, however, have taken years to implement. According to the lawsuit, there’s a reason Roblox has been slow on safety. “In pursuit of growth, Roblox deprioritized safety measures even further so that it could report strong numbers to Wall Street,” it said. “For instance, Roblox executives rejected employee proposals for parental approval requirements that would protect children on the platform. Employees also reported feeling explicit pressure to avoid any changes that could reduce platform engagement, even when those changes would protect children from harmful interactions on the platform.”

Roblox is now the subject of multiple investigative reports that have exposed the safety problems on its platforms. It’s also the subject of multiple lawsuits, Seitz’s is the 12th such case filed by Anapol Weiss, the law firm representing her.

According to Seitz’s interviews with the press and the lawsuit, her daughter got caught up in a subculture on Roblox and Discord called The True Crime Community (TCC). “Through Roblox, Audree was exposed to emotional manipulation and social pressure by other users, including TCC members, who claimed to revere the Columbine shooters, depicted them as misunderstood outcasts who took revenge on their bullies, and encouraged violence against oneself and others,” the lawsuit said.

404 Media searched through Roblox’s game servers after the lawsuit was filed and found multiple instances of games named for the Columbine massacre. One server used pictures from Parkland, Florida and another was advertised using the CCTV picture of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris from the Columbine shooting.

Andreessen Horowitz Funds ‘Uncensored’ AI That Will Tell You How to Kill Yourself

a16z funds open source AI developers who are building alternatives to OpenAI’s closed systems, but we still have no idea what’s going to happen when anyone can access uncensored LLMs.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-24 15:31:52

DHS Tries To Unmask Ice Spotting Instagram Account by Claiming It Imports Merchandise

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to force Meta to unmask the identity of the people behind Facebook and Instagram accounts that post about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, arrests, and sightings by claiming the owners of the account are in violation of a law about the “importation of merchandise.” Lawyers fighting the case say the move is “wildly outside the scope of statutory authority,” and say that DHS has not even indicated what merchandise the accounts, called Montcowatch, are supposedly importing.

“There is no conceivable connection between the ‘MontCo Community Watch’ Facebook or Instagram accounts and the importation of any merchandise, nor is there any indicated on the face of the Summonses. DHS has no authority to issue these summonses,” lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in a court filing this month. There is no indication on either the Instagram or Facebook account that the accounts are selling any type of merchandise, according to 404 Media’s review of the accounts. “The Summonses include no substantiating allegations nor any mention of a specific crime or potential customs violation that might trigger an inquiry under the cited statute,” the lawyers add.

💡
Do you know anything else about this case or others like it? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or Jason at jason.404

A judge temporarily blocked DHS from unmasking the owners last week.

“The court now orders Meta [...] not to produce any documents or information in response to the summonses at issue here without further order of the Court,” the judge wrote in a filing. The move to demand data from Meta about the identities of the accounts while citing a customs statute shows the lengths to which DHS is willing to go to attempt to shut down and identify people who are posting about ICE’s activities.

Montcowatch is, as the name implies, focused on ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Its Instagram posts are usually titled “Montco ICE alert” and include details such as where suspected ICE agents and vehicles were spotted, where suspected agents made arrests, or information about people who were detained. “10/20/25 Eagleville,” one post starts. “Suspected dentention [sic] near Ollies on Ridge Pike sometime before 7:50 am. 3 Agents and 3 Vehicles were observed.”

The Instagram account has been posting since June, and also posts information about peoples’ legal rights to film law enforcement. It also tells people to not intervene or block ICE. None of the posts currently available on the Instagram account could reasonably be described as doxing or harassing ICE officials.

On September 11, DHS demanded Meta provide identifying details on the owners of the Montcowatch accounts, according to court records. That includes IP addresses used to access the account, phone numbers on file, and email addresses, the court records add. DHS cited a law “focused on customs investigations relating to merchandise,” according to a filing from the ACLU that pushed to have the demands thrown out.
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“The statute at issue here, 19 U.S.C. § 1509, confers limited authority to DHS in customs investigations to seek records related to the importation of merchandise, including the assessment of customs duties,” the ACLU wrote. “Identifying anonymous social media users critical of DHS is not a legitimate purpose, and it is not relevant to customs enforcement.” As the ACLU notes, a cursory look at the accounts shows they are “not engaged in commerce.” The court record points to an 2017 Office of the Inspector General report which says Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “regularly” tried much the same thing with its own legal demands, and specifically around the identity of an anonymous Twitter user.

“Movant now files this urgent motion to protect their identity from being exposed to a government agency that is apparently targeting their ‘community watch’ Facebook and Instagram accounts for doing nothing more than exercising their rights to free speech and association,” those lawyers and others wrote last week.

“Movant’s social media pages lawfully criticize and publicize DHS and the government agents who Movant views as wreaking havoc in the Montgomery County community by shining a light on that conduct to raise community members’ awareness,” they added.

The judge has not yet ruled on the ACLU’s motion to quash the demands altogether. This is a temporary blockage while that case continues.

The Montocowatch case follows other instances in which DHS has tried to compel Meta to identify the owners of similar accounts. Last month a judge temporarily blocked a subpoena that was aiming to unmask Instagram accounts that named a Border Patrol agent, The Intercept reported.

Earlier this month Meta took down a Facebook page that published ICE sightings in Chicago. The move came in direct response to pressure from the Department of Justice.

Both Apple and Google have removed apps that people use to warn others about ICE sightings. Those removals also included an app called Eyes Up that was focused more on preserving videos of ICE abuses. Apple’s moves also came after direct pressure from the Department of Justice.

Montcowatch directed a request for comment to the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which did not immediately respond.

Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds

For now, Meta cannot disclose to federal investigators the identities of Instagram users who named and shamed a Border Patrol agent.

^{Shawn Musgrave (The Intercept)}

404 Media

2025-10-22 13:00:50

Podcast: Hackers Dox ICE

We start this week with Joseph’s articles about a hacking group that doxed DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials. The group then sent us the personal data of officials from the NSA and a bunch of other government agencies. After the break, Emanuel revisits Wikipedia’s AI problem. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains OpenAI’s inevitable path to an AI sex bot.
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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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• How Artists Are Keeping 'the Lost Art' of Neon Signs Alive⁠
• ⁠Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials⁠
• Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials⁠
• Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors⁠
• OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-10-16 14:00:39

Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests.

Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face. The tools are invasive of anyone’s privacy, but present a significant risk to those who may need to avoid an abusive ex-partner or stalker. The sites mostly market these tools as a way to find out if their partner is cheating on them, or at minimum using dating apps like Tinder.

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Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creat…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 19:10:39

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshots of Eyes Up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The app is available on Google's Play Store.

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

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

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

^{Pablo Manríquez (Migrant Insider)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 11:53:19

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

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss characters in open source, that Saudi comedy festival, and asking ourselves if we're haters.

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

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

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

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

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-03 02:19:17

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-30 21:46:34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE says it’s stopped using commercial telemetry data

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

^{Rebecca Heilweil (FedScoop)}

404 Media

2025-09-24 13:56:05

‘Find My Parking Cops’ Tracks Officers Handing Out Tickets All Around San Francisco

With “Find My Parking Cops,” technologist Riley Walz reverse engineered San Francisco’s parking ticket system to place cops on a map seconds after they issue parking citations—in theory, helping people avoid spots where officers are handing out tickets.

“I can see every ticket seconds after it's written,” Walz wrote on X. So I made a website. Find My Friends? AVOID THE PARKING COPS.”

On the Find My Parking Cops site, visitors can see a map of San Francisco with pins locating parking cops, as well as lines tracking their shift routes, how much money they’ve fined people during their shifts, and for what violation the tickets are cited. Most are “street cleaning” violations, where someone didn’t move their car on designated days. Some are for “hill parking,” a citation I, a lifelong East Coast driver, had never heard of until today, that fines parkers for failing to curb the wheels of a vehicle on a hill in a way that would prevent it from rolling. A bunch of expired meter tickets and parking in tow-away areas also pop up on Wednesday morning.

I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it's written

So I made a website. Find My Friends? AVOID THE PARKING COPS. pic.twitter.com/67MOWVMleF
— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) September 23, 2025

The site also has a leaderboard showing the officers who fines the most each week: As of this morning, the top cop is Officer 0435, who has given out $17,877 in tickets since Monday.

Walz's site pulls public data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to make the site work. “I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation,” he wrote on his website. “But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don't have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently.” He figured out that ticket numbers follow a predictable pattern. “So if an officer just wrote a ticket, I know with certainty the ID after that one will be the next ticket the same officer writes. AND, immediately after a ticket is written, it becomes available to be viewed on the city's website.” He also learned that the city has about 300 parking cops, and that they are issuing tickets with numbers in batches of 100.

“All I have to do is check the first ticket in each batch I don't have in my database,” he wrote on his site. “This approach means I only have to make a request to the city's website every few seconds. Great!”

A few hours after Walz posted the project on X, he said the city changed the way it allows people to pull that public data, and the site went down. But he found a workaround, he wrote, and it went back up. As of Wednesday morning, it's spotty, with the service showing that it was up, then back down.

SFMTA told 404 Media in a statement Tuesday evening: “Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”

As the SF Chronicle noted, the city has recently ramped up parking citations in an effort to make up for a $322 million deficit.

Walz previously made Bop Spotter, a project where he hid a solar-powered Android phone in a box on a pole in San Francisco, set it to record audio, and had it send songs to Shazam’s API to identify what people are listening to in public. He called it “Shot Spotter for music,” referring to the gunshot detection technology.

Hidden ‘BopSpotter’ Microphone Is Constantly Surveilling San Francisco for Good Music

“This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-24 13:00:44

Podcast: We're Suing ICE. Here's Why

We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple of stories about AI ‘workslop’ and the engineers who fix peoples’ vibe coding. In the subscribers-only section, we start with a malicious game on Steam stealing cryptocurrency from a cancer patient, then we talk about Silk Song.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract
• AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable
• The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes
• Steam Hosted Malware Game that Stole $32,000 from a Cancer Patient Live on Stream
• Does Silksong Seem Unreasonably Hard? You Probably Took a Wrong Turn

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-09-17 13:00:13

Podcast: The (Hacked) Spy In Your Car

We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the Charlie Kirk assassination and our reporting around that.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA3…
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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• This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In
• Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
• Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk
• Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-09-16 13:32:20

$2,000 Shipping: International Sellers Charge Absurd Prices to Avoid Dealing With American Tariffs

Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs.

A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The shipping price from Japan to the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Costa Rica, Canada, and other countries I checked is $29, meanwhile. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. That price used to be the threshold for the de minimis tariff exemption, a rule that previously allowed people to buy things without paying tariffs on lower-priced goods. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by.

eBay does allow sellers to opt out of selling to the United States entirely, but some sellers have found it easier to modify existing listings to have absurd shipping prices for the United States only rather than deal with taking entire listings down and delisting them to restrict American buyers entirely.

I found numerous listings from a handful of different sellers who, rather than say they won't ship to the United States, have simply jacked up their shipping costs to absurd levels for the United States only. There are $575 cameras that the seller is now charging $500 to ship to the United States but will mail for free anywhere else in the world. Another Japanese seller is charging $640 to mail to the United States but will ship for free to other countries. A seller in Kazakhstan is charging $35 to mail a camera internationally but $999 to send to the United States. A German yarn seller is charging $10.50 to ship to Canada, but $500 to ship to the United States. On Reddit, users are reporting the same phenomenon occurring with some sellers on Etsy as well (it is harder to search Etsy by shipping prices, so I couldn’t find too many examples of this).

What is happening here, of course, is that some sellers in other countries don't want to have to deal with Trump's tariffs and the complicated logistics they have created for both buyers and sellers. Many international shipping companies have entirely stopped shipping to the United States, and many international sellers don't want to have to deal with the hassle of changing whatever shipping service they normally use to accommodate American buyers. eBay has also warned sellers that they may get negative feedback from American buyers who do not understand how tariffs work. eBay's feedback system is very important, and just a few negative reviews can impact a seller's standing on the platform and make it less likely that buyers will purchase something from them.

None of this is terribly surprising, but as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.

[Mint+] OLYMPUS M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 60mm f/2.8 Macro ED MSC AF Lens From Japan | eBay

Lens ABQA11389. Lens condition. Mark in the lens. 93-94% Mint Minimal sings of use, Still very clean. 97-98% Mint++ Never used, but pre-owned. 95-96% Mint+ Almost no signs of use. 80-85% For Parts As-is.

^eBay

404 Media

2025-09-15 13:18:05

AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook

A software engineer in Austin has hooked up Animal Crossing to an AI and breathed new and disturbing life into its villagers. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on Animal Crossing scripts and an RSS reader, the anthropomorphic folk of the Nintendo classic spouted new dialogue, talked about current events, and actively plotted against Tom Nook’s predatory bell prices.

The Animal Crossing LLM is the work of Josh Fonseca, a software engineer in Austin, Texas who works at a small startup. Ars Technica first reported on the mod. His personal blog is full of small software projects like a task manager for the text editor VIM, a mobile app that helps rock climbers find partners, and the Animal Crossing AI. He also documented the project in a YouTube video.
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Fonseca started playing around with AI in college and told 404 Media that he’d always wanted to work in the video game industry. “Turns out it’s a pretty hard industry to break into,” he said. He also graduated in 2020. “I’m sure you’ve heard, something big happened that year.” He took the first job he could find, but kept playing around with video games and AI and had previously injected an LLM into Stardew Valley.

Fonseca used a Dolphin emulatorrunning the original Gamecube Animal Crossing on a MacBook to get the project working. According to his blog, an early challenge was just getting the AI and the game to communicate. “The solution came from a classic technique in game modding: Inter-Process Communication (IPC) via shared memory. The idea is to allocate a specific chunk of the GameCube's RAM to act as a ‘mailbox.’ My external Python script can write data directly into that memory address, and the game can read from it,” he said in the blog.

He told 404 Media that this was the most tedious part of the whole project. “The process of finding the memory address the dialogue actually lives at and getting it to scan to my MacBook, which has all these security features that really don’t want me to do that, and ending up writing to the memory took me forever,” he said. “The communication between the game and an external source was the biggest challenge for me.”

Once he got his code and the game talking, he ran into another problem. “Animal Crossing doesn't speak plain text. It speaks its own encoded language filled with control codes,” he said in his blog. “Think of it like HTML. Your browser doesn't just display words; it interprets tags like <b> to make text bold. Animal Crossing does the same. A special prefix byte, CHAR_CONTROL_CODE, tells the game engine, ‘The next byte isn't a character, it's a command!’”

But this was a solved problem. The Animal Crossing modding community long ago learned the secrets of the villager’s language, and Fonseca was able to build on their work. Once he understood the game’s dialogue systems, he built the AI brain. It took two LLM models, one to write the dialogue and another he called “The Director” that would add in pauses, emphasize words with color, and choose the facial animations for the characters. He used a fine-tuned version of Google’s Gemini for this and said it was the most consistent model he’d used.

To make it work, he fine-tuned the model, meaning he reduced its input training data to make it better at specific outputs. “You probably need a minimum of 50 to 100 really good examples in order to make it better,” he said.

Results for the experiment were mixed. Cookie, Scoot, and Cheri did indeed utter new phrases in keeping with their personality. Things got weird when Fonseca hooked up the game to an RSS reader so the villagers could talk about real world news. “If you watch the video, all the sources are heavily, politically, leaning in one direction,” he said. “I did use a Fox news feed, not for any other reason than I looked up ‘news RSS feeds’ and they were the first link and I didn’t really think it through. And then I started getting those results…I thought they would just present the news, not have leanings or opinions.”

“Trump’s gonna fight like heck to get rid of mail-in voting and machines!” Fitness obsessed duck Scoot said in the video. “I bet he’s got some serious stamina, like, all the way in to the finish line—zip, zoom!”

The pink dog Cookie was up on her Middle East news. “Oh my gosh, Josh 😀! Did you see the news?! Gal Gadot is in Israel supporting the families! Arfer,” she said, uttering her trademark catchphrase after sharing the latest about Israel.

In the final part of the experiment, Fonseca enabled the villagers to gossip. “I gave them a tiny shared memory for gossip, who said what, to whom, and how they felt,” he said in the blog.The villagers almost instantly turned on Tom Nook, the Tanuki who runs the local stores and holds most of Animal Crossing's inhabitants in debt. “Everything’s going great in town, but sometimes I feel like Tom Nook is, like, taking all the bells!” Cookie said.

“Those of us with big dreams are being squashed by Tom Nook! We gotta take our town back!” Cheri the bear cub said.

“This place is starting to feel more like Nook’s prison, y’know?” Said Scoot.
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Why do this to Animal Crossing? Why make Scoot and Cheri learn about Gal Gadot, Israel, and Trump?

“I’ve always liked nostalgic content,” Fonscesca said. His TikTok and YouTube algorithm is filled with liminal spaces and music from his childhood that’s detuned. He’s gotten into Hauntology, a philosophical idea that studies—among other things—promised futures that did not come to pass.

He sees projects like this as a way of linking the past and the future. “When I was a child I was like, ‘Games are gonna get better and better every year,’’ he said. “But after 20 years of playing games I’ve become a little jaded and I’m like, ‘oh there hasn’t really been that much innovation.’ So I really like the idea of mixing those old games with all the future technologies that I’m interested in. And I feel like I’m fulfilling those promised futures in a way.”

He knows that not everyone is a fan of AI. “A lot of people say that dialogue with AI just cannot be because of how much it sounds like AI,” he said. “And to some extent I think people are right. Most people can detect ChatGPT or Gemini language from a mile away. But I really think, if you fine tune it, I was surprised at just how good the results were.”

Animal Crossing’s dialogue is simple and that simplicity makes it a decent test case for AI video game marks, but Fonseca thinks he can do similar things with more complicated games. “There’s been a lot of discussion around how what I’m doing isn’t possible when there’s like, tasks or quests, because LLMs can’t properly guide you to that task without hallucinating. I think it might be more possible than people think,” he said. “So I would like to either try out my own very small game or take a game that has these kinds of quests and put together a demo of how that might be possible.”

He knows people balk at using AI to make video games, and art in general, but believes it’ll be a net benefit. “There will always be human writers and I absolutely want there to be human writers handling the core,” he said. “I would hope that AI is going to be a tool that doesn’t take away any of the best writers, but maybe helps them add more to their game that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I would hope that this just helps create more art in the world. I think I see the total art in the world increasing as a good thing…now I know some people would say that using AI ceases to make it art, but I’m also very deep in the programming aspect of it. What it takes to make these things is so incredible that it still feels like magic to me. Maybe on some level I’m still hypnotized by that.”

Modder injects AI dialogue into 2002’s Animal Crossing using memory hack

Unofficial mod lets classic Nintendo GameCube title use AI chatbots with amusing results.

^{Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)}

404 Media

2025-09-14 18:25:10

Podcast: AI Slop Is Drowning Out Human YouTubers

This week, we talk about how 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the 'AI Darwin Awards,' which is, uhh, celebrating the dumbest uses of AI.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA1…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/jCak5De0oaw?…

• AI Generated Boring History Videos Are Flooding YouTube And Drowning Out Real History
• Instagram Account Promotes Holocaust Denial T-Shirts To 400,000 Followers
• AI Darwin Awards Shows AI's Biggest Problem Is Human

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-09-12 17:00:59

Behind the Blog: 'Free Speech' and Open Dialogue

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 "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.

JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech.

“We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.”

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Behind the Blog: 'Free Speech' and Open Dialogue

This week, we discuss "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 18:51:23

Ahead of Sentencing, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader Michael Pratt Attempts to Seem Reformed

Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison.

GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as a porn studio that Pratt ran from 2009 to 2020. By lying to the women they recruited, telling them that they were being hired for “modeling” gigs and adult video shoots that would never be distributed outside offline private collections, GirlsDoPorn’s operators coerced young, inexperienced women into shooting rough, hours-long sex scenes in San Diego hotel rooms. The videos were distributed on massive porn sites including Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was a content partner for years. Women who have come forward for the civil and federal trials against GirlsDoPorn have said their lives were upended by Pratt’s criminal enterprise.

💡
Were you a victim of GirlsDoPorn, or do you have knowledge of how it operated? 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.

Pratt has been in custody since he was arrested in Spain on December 21, 2022 and extradited to the US. Prior to that, he’d been in hiding since fleeing the US in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019, where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million (a case they won). Right after his disappearance, Pratt was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for years. He initially pleaded not guilty to these charges in 2024, but changed his plea to guilty in June.

Exhibits filed by Pratt’s lawyer Brian White on Sept. 1 include letters, mostly anonymous, from people who knew him when he was younger asking the judge for leniency, including his sister and mother. “Mike's father, Steve Pratt, was not a good role model. He was a drinker and had a controlling personality. I caught Steve smacking Michael uncontrollably on a couple of occasions. I stopped it immediately,” his mother wrote.

“Three years of prison has given me enough time to think about this entire situation,” Pratt wrote in a letter to the court submitted on Monday. “Trying to understand things from other points of view has given me insight into how some victims were really affected by these videos. I put myself in the shoes of the women who participated, trying to see what they have gone through. I myself have been a victim of bullying and know how rough that is on the psyche. I cannot imagine the trauma experienced by a video being published where friends and family could come across it.”

We know, in fact, from years of testimonies and interviews—many while it was still unsafe for them to come forward, when the consequences of speaking up about this abuse risked compounding trauma and continued, violent harassment—how Pratt’s victims were impacted by his actions.

Several of the women who’ve testified in the civil and federal trials, and came forward to speak on the record to journalists, reported violent assault to the point of bleeding or injury, being trapped inside the hotel rooms with no clothing, and being lied to by Pratt and his co-conspirators about who would be able to see the videos. As one of the women targeted by GirlsDoPorn told me in 2021: “There were a few points where I was just like please, I need to stop, I need to stop, because it was just so much pain. I said, I can’t go on anymore… At that point I could have said nothing. I could have been mute. My voice was just not heard at all.” Another woman said while testifying during the civil trial: “They put furniture in front of the door, so what was I going to do—jump over the balcony?” GirlsDoPorn’s attorney at the time, Aaron Sadock, asked that woman on the stand if she had fun. “No, I did not have fun!” she said, crying.

Kristy Althaus, who sued Pornhub in 2023 for disseminating the videos, claimed that Pratt’s conspirators held her captive in a hotel room and filmed her being raped for nine to 10 hours, barricading the doors, ignoring her bleeding and cries, forcing her to consume alcohol, marijuana, and Xanax, and spiking her drink with oxycodone. According to that complaint, when she refused to return for another “shoot,” Pratt threatened her and her family, texting, “You have it coming for u,” “I will cut and kill you bitch,” and “You better be here by noon shoot 2tomorrow or your graveyard,” according to screenshots of texts from Althaus’s complaint.

For many of these women, the trauma and harassment didn’t stop once they left the hotel rooms. In some cases, they were disowned by their families and friends, harassed endlessly, struggled to find jobs in previously-prestigious careers and found it difficult to date or trust anyone intimately again.

In the defendant’s sentencing memorandum, White blames Pratt’s alcoholic, abusive father and his own ADHD; throws his co-conspirators under the bus; accuses the entire pornography industry of being “exploitative and dehumanizing;” and asserts again that the women lied in their testimonies.

The memo paints a picture of Pratt as a precocious child with a difficult upbringing in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he taught himself how to use computers and eventually learned about websites and affiliate marketing. “Mr. Pratt began looking for better ways to generate income, and through the associations he made in the affiliate marketing business, he learned that making videos to direct internet traffic to pornography sites could be financially successful,” the memo says. But when he tried to make a pornography business himself, he wasn’t very good at it, blaming the banning of Craigslist’s erotic ads in 2009 for his difficulties in finding models. He claims he posted ads seeking “models” as a way around the ban.

Pratt's lawyer asserts in the memorandum that his employee, Andre Reuben “Dre” Garcia, the main “actor” in most of the GirlsDoPorn videos, stopped when the women told him to stop. “She said, ‘stop, it’s not going to work.’ Garcia stopped,” the memo says. “The model offered to try a second time and again told Garcia to stop because it wasn’t going to work. Again, Garcia stopped. That was the end of it. Forcing a model to do something against her will was not Mr. Pratt’s intention.” He also claims that when Pratt heard complaints about Garcia from models, Pratt “instituted certain safety measures” like locking the hotel room refrigerators and putting more cameras in the room. Those “safety measures” didn’t include firing Garcia, however.

When he’s arguing that he should have a lower sentence than Garcia’s 20 years, Pratt acknowledges that Garcia sexually assaulted many of these women. “Garcia physically raped a number of the models before and after the video shoots, and multiple women were forced to continue having sex with him on video despite their pleas to stop due to pain or because the sex went beyond the scope of what they had agreed to do,” the memorandum states.

The exhibits filed as part of the memo also attempt to show how productive and busy Pratt has been in prison. His attorney submitted nearly 100 “certificates of completion” issued by the learning platform Edovo, which offers classes for incarcerated people. The classes Pratt passed include “Embracing Unexpected Change,” “Doing Time With Jesus,” several anger management courses, “Media Relations Foundations,” marketing classes for LinkedIn and Facebook, “Augmented Reality Marketing,” “Human Trafficking in the United States: The Truth and What You Can Do About It,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and multiple cooking classes, including “Soups” and “Sauces.”

Federal prosecutors seek a 22-year prison sentence, while Pratt’s defense countered with around 17 years; Judge Janis L. Sammartino will hand Pratt his sentence on Monday in San Diego.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

Prosecutors want to send GirlsDoPorn ringleader to prison for 22 years

Michael James Pratt pleaded guilty in June to charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking in the GirlsDoPorn case.

^{City News Service (Times of San Diego)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 13:45:40

This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In

A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media capture people clearly unaware that a third party may be watching or listening in. A parent in a car soothing a baby. A man whistling along to the radio. Another person on a Facetime call. One appears to show a driver heading towards the entrance of the CIA’s headquarters. Other images, which are publicly available in a map that Nexar publishes online, show drivers around sensitive Department of Defense locations.

The hacker also found a list of companies and agencies that may have interacted with Nexar’s data business, which sells access to blurred images captured by the cameras and other related data. This can include monitoring the same location captured by Nexar’s cameras over time, and lets clients “explore the physical world and gain insights like never before,” and use its virtual CCTV cameras “to monitor specific points of interest,” according to Nexar’s website.

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This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In

A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoples' cars into "virtual CCTV cameras" that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 13:02:22

Congress Pushes DHS for Details on ICE’s New Facial Recognition App

Members of a congressional committee have demanded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for more information about Mobile Fortify, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) new facial recognition app, which taps into an unprecedented array of government databases and uses a system ordinarily reserved for when people enter or exit the U.S. 404 Media first revealed the app in June.

The Democratic lawmakers, Bennie G. Thompson, J. Luis Correa, and Shri Thanedar, are asking Noem a host of questions about the app, including what databases Mobile Fortify searches, the tool’s accuracy, and ICE’s legal basis for using the app to identify people outside of ports of entry, including U.S. citizens.

“Congress has long had concerns with the Federal government’s use of facial recognition technology and has regularly conducted oversight of how DHS utilizes this technology. The Mobile Fortify application has been deployed to the field while still in beta testing, which raises concerns about its accuracy,” the letter from the Committee on Homeland Security and addressed to Noem reads.

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

404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence through leaked emails. Those emails showed that ICE officers could use the app to identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by just pointing a smartphone camera at them. The underlying Customs and Border Protection (CBP) system for the facial recognition part of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or leave the U.S. With Mobile Fortify, ICE then turned that capability inwards to identify people away from ports of entry.

In the footnotes of the letter, the lawmakers indicate they have a copy of a similar email, and the letter specifically cites 404 Media’s reporting.

In July 404 Media published a second report based on a Mobile Fortify user manual which explained the app’s capabilities and data sources in more detail. It said that Mobile Fortify uses a bank of 200 million images, and can pull up a subject’s name, nationality, date of birth, “alien” number, and whether a judge has marked them for deportation. It also showed that Mobile Fortify links databases from the State Department, CBP, the FBI, and states into a single tool. A “super query” feature lets ICE officers query multiple databases at once regarding “individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers and firearms.”

“Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country. Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster. Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way, and the agency should shut this dangerous experiment down,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, previously told 404 Media.

In their letter the lawmakers ask Noem questions about the app’s legality, including ICE’s legal basis to use the app to conduct biometric searches on people outside ports of entry; the databases Mobile Fortify has access to; any agreements between CBP and ICE about the app; information about the usage of the app, such as the frequency of ICE searches using the tool and what procedures ICE officials follow with the app; the app’s accuracy; and any policies or training to ICE agents on how to use the app.

“To ensure ICE is equipped with technology that is accurate and in compliance with constitutional and legal requirements, the Committee on Homeland Security is conducting oversight of ICE’s deployment of the Mobile Fortify application,” the letter says.

CBP acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

You can find a copy of the letter here.

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

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

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 16:03:08

Pornhub Will Pay $5 Million Over Allegations of Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Material

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Pornhub and its parent company Aylo settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah.

The FTC and Utah’s attorney general claimed that Pornhub and its affiliates “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual material (NCM) despite claiming that this content was ‘strictly prohibited,’” the FTC wrote in a press release.

“As part of a proposed order settling the allegations, Pornhub’s operators, Aylo and its affiliated companies (collectively Aylo), will be required to establish a program to prevent the distribution of CSAM and NCM on its websites and pay a $5 million penalty to the state of Utah,” it said.

“This settlement reaffirms and enhances Aylo’s efforts to prevent the publication of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual material (NCM) on its platforms,” a spokesperson for Aylo told 404 Media said in a statement. “Aylo is committed to maintaining the highest standards of safety and compliance on its platforms. While the FTC and Utah DCP [Division of Consumer Protection] have raised serious concerns and allege that some of Aylo’s user generated content websites made available videos and photos containing CSAM and NCM, this agreement strengthens the comprehensive safeguards that have been in place for years on Aylo platforms. These measures reflect Aylo’s ongoing commitment to constantly evolving compliance efforts. Importantly, this settlement resolves the matter with no admission of wrongdoing while reaffirming Aylo’s commitment to the highest standards of platform safety and compliance.”

In addition to the penalty fee, according to the proposed settlement, Aylo would have to “implement a program” to prevent CSAM and non-consensual imagery from being disseminated on its sites, establish a system “to verify that people who appear in videos or photos on its websites are adults and have provided consent to the sexual conduct as well as its production and publication,” remove content uploaded before those programs until Aylo “verifies that the individuals participating in those videos were at least 18 at the time the content was created and consented to the sexual conduct and its production and publication,” post a notice on its website about the FTC and Utah’s allegations, and implement “a comprehensive privacy and information security program to address the privacy and security issues detailed in the complaint.”

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South
As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can’t access Pornhub because of age verification laws.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Aylo already does much of this. Pornhub overhauled its content and moderation practices starting in 2020, after Visa, Mastercard and Discover stopped servicing the site and its network following allegations of CSAM and sex trafficking. It purged hundreds of thousands of videos from its sites in early 2020 and registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

In 2024, Pornhub started requiring proof of consent from every single person who appeared in content on the platform.

“The resolution reached involved enhancements to existing measures but did not introduce any new substantive requirements that were not either already in place or in progress,” Aylo’s spokesperson said. “This settlement resolves the investigation and underscores Aylo's commitment to robust safety protocols that should be applied broadly across all websites publishing user generated content. Aylo supports vigorous enforcement against CSAM and NCM, and encourages the FTC and Utah DCP to extend their initiative to protect the public across the broader internet, adult and mainstream, fostering a safer online environment for everyone. Throughout the investigation, Aylo worked to cooperatively resolve the concerns raised by the FTC and Utah DCP.”

The complaint from Utah and the FTC focuses largely on content that appeared on Pornhub prior to 2020, and includes allegations against several of the 100 different websites owned by Alyo—then Mindgeek, prior to the company’s 2023 acquisition by Ethical Capital Partners—and its affiliates. For example, the complaint claims the website operators identified CSAM on the sites KeezMovies, SpankWire, and ExtremeTube with titles such as “Brunette Girl was Raped,” “Drunken passed out young niece gets a creampie,” “Amateur teen after party and fun passed out sex realty [sic] submissive,” “Girl getting gangraped,” and “Giving her a mouthful while she’s passed out drunk.”

“Rather than remove the videos, Defendants merely edited their titles to remove any suggestion that they contained CSAM or NCM. As a result, consumers continued to view and download these videos,” the complaint states. The FTC and Utah don’t specify in the complaint whether the people performing in those videos, or any of the videos mentioned, were actually adults participating in consensual roleplay scenarios or if the titles and tags were literal.

The discussions between then-Mindgeek compliance staff outlined in the complaint show some of the conversations moderators were allegedly having around 2020 about how to purge the site of unverified content. “A senior member of Defendants’ Compliance team stated in an internal email that ‘none of it is enough,’ ‘this is just a start,’ and ‘we need to block millions more’ because ‘the site is FULL of non-compliant content,’” the complaint states. “Another senior employee responded: ‘it’s over’ and ‘we’re fucked.’”

The complaint also mentions the Girls Do Porn sex-trafficking ring, which Pornhub hosted content for and acted as a Pornhub Premium partner until the ring was indicted on federal trafficking charges in 2019. In 2023, Pornhub reached a settlement with the US Attorney General’s office after an FBI investigation, and said it “deeply regrets” hosting that content.

Pornhub ‘Deeply Regrets’ Hosting Girls Do Porn Content

Pornhub’s parent company has reached an agreement with the US Attorney’s office after an FBI investigation.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 13:00:20

Podcast: Trump Take LEGO

We start this week with our articles about Trump’s tariffs, and how they’re impacting everything from LEGO to cameras to sex toys. After the break, Emanuel explains how misfired DMCA complaints designed to help adult creators are targeting other sites, including ours. In the subscribers-only section, we do a wrap-up of a bunch of recent ChatGPT stories about suicide and murder. A content warning for suicide and self-harm for that section.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/srdUOWq_hfg?…

• Trump Take LEGO
• Trump Tariffs Cause Chaos on Ebay as Every Hobby Becomes Logistical Minefield
• How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone
• ChatGPT Encouraged Suicidal Teen Not To Seek Help, Lawsuit Claims
• ChatGPT Answered 'High Risk' Questions About Suicide, New Study Finds

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-08-22 15:56:28

404 Media at Two Years: How We've Grown, and What's Next

Last week, we were talking to each other about the fact that we were about to hit the second anniversary of 404 Media. The conversation was about what we should say in this blog post, which obviously led us to try to remember everything that has happened in the last year. “I haven’t considered a thing beyond what’s been five seconds behind or in front of me for the last year,” Sam said.

The last year has been a whirlwind not just for us but for, uhh, the country and the world. And we’ve been trying our absolute best to bring you stories you can’t find anywhere else about the wildest shit happening right now, which includes the Silicon Valley-led dismantling of the federal government, the deployment of powerful surveillance against immigrants and people seeking abortions, the algorithmic, AI-led zombification of “social” media, the end of anonymity on the internet, and all sorts of weird stuff that we see on our travels through the internet. As Sam noted, we have largely had our heads down trying to bring you the best tech journalism on the internet, which hasn’t left us a ton of time to think about long-term projects, blue-sky ideas, or what the best business strategies for growing this company would be.

Our guiding principle is something we said we would do on day one of starting this company: “We believe it is possible to create a sustainable, profitable media company simply by doing good work, making common-sense decisions about costs, and asking our readers to support us.” What we have learned in two years of building this company is that there is no secret to building a media company, and that there are also no shortcuts. When we work hard to publish an important article, more people discover us and more people subscribe to us, which helps solidify our business and allows us to do more and better articles. As our stories reach a larger audience, the articles often have more impact, more potential sources see them, and we get more tips, which leads to more and better articles, and so on.

In our second year as a media outlet, we’ve done too much impactful reporting to list out in this post. But to summarize some of the big ones:

• We revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock, a nationwide AI-enabled camera network, thanks to local cops. Since then, a police department shut off external access to its cameras after learning they were being searched for immigration related offenses and Austin banned Flock in its city and specifically cited our reporting. The company now says it has severed access to Illinois data for 47 agencies. In response to our story about a Texas cop who searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion, the Illinois Secretary of State is investigating the respective suburban Chicago police department because this data sharing violates state law. Congress opened a formal investigation into Flock because of our reporting.
• Meta sued a nudify app that 404 Media reported bought thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook.
• We broke the news that TeleMessage, a Signal-clone used by the Trump administration, was hacked. Lawmakers demanded answers from the DOJ, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which used TeleMessage, paused its use of the tool. TeleMessage itself suspended operations too.
• Civitai, a site 404 Media has repeatedly shown was used to generate nonconsensual adult content, banned all AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people.
• After we found Meta's AI Studio chatbots were posing as therapists with fake license numbers and credentials, four senators demanded answers from Meta and a digital rights organizations filed a complaint with the FTC.
• We uncovered that 100,000 people were using a Telegram bot that made non-consensual AI sex videos of anyone. After we covered it, Telegram shutdown the bot.
• We found that Coca Cola was running an AI-powered ad that got basic facts wrong and fabricated quotes from authors. Coca Cola pulled down the ad in response.
• A public library ebook service said it was going to cull AI slop after we found low quality books were flooding libraries.
• Nvidia was sued after we revealed the company scraped YouTube and other sites en masse to build its own AI systems.
• Congress repeatedly grilled Apple and Meta over their association with nonconsensual nudify and deepfake apps after we exposed the connections.

On top of all of these, we’ve published some of the most moment-defining stories that, as Jason has said many times, are the types of things people talk about at the bar after work. Those include:

• Discovering that anyone could push updates to the DOGE website
• Establishing and defining “AI Slop” as a genre (Shrimp Jesus anyone?) and uncovering the economics that make slop popular and profitable
• Following the creep of age verification and censorship across the U.S.
• The leaked plans from Palantir that outline how the company helps deport people
• The “total chaos” at Meta after Trump took office and Zuck went anti-DEI
• Breaking the news of the Tea hacks and continuing to publish new scoops on that saga

It has been a relief that this business strategy of “publish good articles and ask people to pay for journalism” still works, despite the fracturing of social media, the slopification of every major platform, AI being shoved into everything, and the rich and powerful trying to destroy journalism at every turn. That it is working is a testament to the support of our subscribers. We have no real way of knowing exactly where new subscribers come from or what ultimately led them to subscribe, but time and time again we have learned that the most important discovery mechanism we have is word of mouth. We have lost count of the number of times a new subscriber has said that they were told about 404 Media by a friend or a family member at a party or in a group text, so if you have told anyone about us, we sincerely thank you.

Photos by Sharon Attia

It wasn’t obvious when we started this company that it would actually work, though we hoped that it would.

In our post last year, we wrote, “We don’t have any major second-year plans to announce just yet in part because we have been heads down working on some of the investigations and scoops you’ve seen in recent days. The next year holds more scoops, more investigations, more silly blogs, more experiments, more impact, and more articles that hold powerful companies and people to account. We remain ambitious and are thinking about how to best cover more topics and to give you more 404 Media without spreading ourselves too thin.”

But we did take a moment to think about what has changed in the last year, and it turns out that quite a lot is different now than it was a year ago.

For one, we have cautiously begun to expand what we do. In the last year, we launched The Abstract, which is Becky Ferreira’s Saturday newsletter about science, which many of you have said you love and which helps us provide a sense of wonder and discovery when so much of what we report on is pretty bleak. We have been getting part-time (but very critical) help from Case Harts who is running and growing our social media accounts, which is helping us put our stories more natively on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms that we do not control but which nonetheless remain important for us to be on. Matthew Gault has started covering the military industrial complex, AI, weird internet, and dad internet beat for us, and has done a remarkable job at it. Rosie Thomas is our current intern who has published critical reporting about the sale of GPS trackers on TikTok, protests at the Tesla Diner, and the difficult decisions voice actors need to make about whether they should let AI train on their voices.

All of this has changed what 404 Media looks like, a little bit. We have spent a lot of time thinking about what it would look like to expand beyond this, why people subscribe to us, what it would mean to go further, and what the four of us are actually capable of handling outside of the journalism. Because of your support we are in a place where we’re able to ask questions beyond “Can we survive?” We’re able to ask questions like: “Should we try to make this bigger, and what does that look like?”

We feel incredibly lucky that we are now able to ask ourselves these questions, because there was no guarantee that 404 Media would ever work, and we are forever grateful to everyone who has supported us. You have helped us prove that this model can work, and every day we are delighted to see that other journalists are striking out on their own to create their own publications.

Tip Jar

We are still DIYing lots of things. Emanuel is still doing customer support. Jason is still ordering, packing, and mailing merch. Sam is putting together events and parties. Joseph is doing an insane number of things behind the scenes, managing the podcast, working closely with one of our ad partners, and fixing technical issues. As we have grown, these tasks have started to take more and more time, which raises all sorts of questions about when and if we should get help with them. Should we do more events? Should we get someone to help us with them? What does that look like logistically and financially? These are the things that we’re working out all the time. It becomes a question of how much can we juggle while still having some semblance of work/life balance, and while making sure that we’re still putting the journalism first.

Other things that have happened:

• We began a republication partnership with WIRED that recently evolved to include a few coreported collaborations that have allowed us to team up on investigations we may not have been able to do by ourselves.
• We were subpoenaed for our sources on an article by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. We successfully fought off this subpoena with the help of our lawyer, which was expensive but which we were able to do because of your support. We are very proud of this.
• We have been invited to talk about 404 Media and our journalism at conferences and events around the world. Emanuel gave a journalism training in Costa Rica, Jason taught a group of Norwegian journalists how to file FOIA requests and gave a presentation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Joseph spoke at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, Sam went to Perugia, Italy to join a panel at the International Journalism Conference, and Sam and Jason talked about indie media at the last XOXO in Portland.
• We threw a party and live panel at SXSW (with the help of our friends at Flipboard), a DIY party at RIP.SPACE in Los Angeles, and we threw an anniversary party and podcast recording last night in Brooklyn.
• After the Trump administration took office, we got to work documenting all of the ways the internet and broader policy started shifting and how tech, surveillance, and immigration intersected, and continued years of holding power accountable through our journalism.
• We had much of our ICE and immigration coverage professionally translated into Spanish and republished without a paywall, which helps communities that benefit the most from our reporting on those topics get it as easily and accurately as possible.
• We took our first-ever break!
• We have moved to Ghost 6.0, which is not something we really did, but it’s important to point out that the new version of our CMS is built with native ActivityPub support, meaning our articles are automatically going into the Fediverse and are being mirrored directly onto Bluesky. We are very excited about the possibilities here as we continue to believe that the healthiest future of journalism and the internet is one where we create direct relationships with our readers that have as little algorithmic friction as possible. Ghost is an open-source nonprofit whose mission is very similar to 404 Media’s.

Like last year, we don’t have anything crazy to announce for year three. But we hope that you will continue to support us (or, if you’re finding us through this post, will consider subscribing). We discussed some of our hopes and dreams for year three in our latest bonus podcast that went out to supporters this week. We are all trying our very best to bring you important, impactful work as often as possible, and we are trying to be as clear as possible about what’s working, what’s not, and how we’re trying to build this company. So far, that strategy has worked really well, and so we don’t intend to change it now.

Gone Fishin': 404 Media Summer Break 2025

404 Media is closed this week. School's out.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}