404 Media

2026-01-08 15:44:35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Lora Kolodny (CNBC)}

404 Media

2026-01-08 14:49:12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Yana Kunichoff (AZ Luminaria)}

404 Media

2026-01-08 14:00:08

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

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

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

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

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

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 22:25:03

DHS Is Lying To You

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

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

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

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

DHS Is Lying To You About ICE Shooting a Woman

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 16:06:06

Inside the Telegram Channel Jailbreaking Grok Over and Over Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese AI Video Generators Unleash a Flood of New Nonconsensual Porn

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

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 14:28:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Github did not respond to my multiple requests for comment about why these accounts were banned. I sent Github’s press team links to several banned accounts, and they reinstated a few, but didn’t provide a reason or reply when I asked what caused the bans in the first place.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The situation is illustrative of a longstanding problem on almost every platform: the terms of use, especially when it comes to adult content, are applied confusingly and sporadically. The affected repositories represent tools used by potentially hundreds of thousands of gamers; the English Koikatsu modding Discord community alone has more than 350,000 members. A developer who goes by Sauceke, who Github suspended in mid-November without explanation, said their open-source adult toy mod users are now encountering broken links or simply can’t find any of their work.

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

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

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

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

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

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-07 14:00:13

Podcast: The People Tracking America's AI Data Centers

We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about how we bought ⁠404media.com⁠!
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA5…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/zT9lEyHnZIk?…
Timestamps:

1:38 - ⁠Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters⁠

25:58 - ⁠Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow⁠

Subscriber's Story: ⁠We Bought 404media.com

404 Media

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

^{404 Media}

404 Media

2026-01-05 15:08:06

The State of Anti-Surveillance Design

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

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

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

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

“I try to point that out in all of my texts, but it's often not as interesting as painting your face,” Harvey said. “So people paint their faces and then think that's the key to making it work, and it's fun. I don't want to tell people that they shouldn't have fun. So, you know, the project has really taken on a life of its own online, and I've taken a step back from trying to manage that.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
In the years since the Dazzle project made adversarial design mainstream, there have been lots of projects that attempt to confound, pollute, or elude the cameras that watch us move through the world every day. Harvey’s made several more, including heat obscuring ponchos meant to hide the wearer from drones, Faraday cage pockets for phones, and high-powered LED flash arrays for blinding paparazzi. But much of the wearables in this genre—from high-fashion streetwear shops to cheap listings by dropshippers—rely on 2D printed designs that don’t keep up with how quickly algorithms change and improve. The $600 hoodie with a cool pixel design on it might have worked yesterday, in perfect conditions, but the next time the cameras in the mall update their algorithms or datasets, it doesn’t work anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-06 20:28:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-06 15:03:31

HarperCollins Will Use AI to Translate Harlequin Romance Novels

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

Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone)—an anti-AI activist group of French translators—HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they’re being replaced with machines in 2026.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to “reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harlequin France to Test AI-Assisted Translation

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

^{PublishersWeekly.com}

404 Media

2026-01-06 14:00:35

Here is the Agreement Giving ICE Medicaid Patients' Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In June the Associated Press reported Medicaid officials unsuccessfully fought to block the transfer of data related to millions of Medicaid enrollees from California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington D.C. Emails showed two top advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the data transfer and CMS officials had 54 minutes to comply, the Associated Press added. At the time, the exact purpose of the data sharing was not known. Then the Associated Press reported on the agreement itself that said the sharing was for ICE to locate aliens in the country.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
CMS did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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

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

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

Court blocks IRS from sharing taxpayer addresses with ICE

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

^{Matt Bracken (FedScoop)}

404 Media

2026-01-05 23:13:18

Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals

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

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

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

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-05 21:04:00

Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maduro capture photo analysis: Evidence of AI manipulation

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

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

404 Media

2026-01-04 17:57:17

Scientists Discover One of the World’s Oldest Cremations

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

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

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

An ancient cremation comes to light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

The inexplicable Uranian chillout

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

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

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

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

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

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

When pigs sail…

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

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

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

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

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

A glimpse of a sunless Saturn

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-02 19:00:09

Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

404 Media

^{404 Media}

404 Media

2026-01-01 18:55:41

Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters

A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s datacenters. The team pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take that data and turn it into an interactive map that lists their costs, power output, and owners.

Massive datacenter construction projects are a growing and controversial industry in America. Silicon Valley and the Trump administration are betting the entire American economy on the continued growth of AI, a mission that’ll require spending billions of dollars on datacenters and new energy infrastructure. Epoch AI’s maps act as a central repository of information about the noisy and water hungry buildings growing in our communities.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
On Epoch’s map there’s a green circle over New Albany, Ohio. Click the circle and it’ll take you to a satellite view of the business complex where Meta is constructing its "Prometheus" datacenter. According to Epoch, the total cost of construction for the datacenter so far is $18 billion and it uses 691 megawatts of power.

“A combination of weatherproof tents, colocation facilities and Meta’s traditional datacenter buildings, this datacenter shows Meta’s pivot towards AI,” Epoch said in the notes for the datacenter. “Reflecting that patchwork, our analysis uses a combination of land use maps, natural gas turbine permitting, and satellite/aerial imagery of cooling equipment to estimate compute capacity.” Users can even click through a timeline of the construction and watch the satellite imagery change as the datacenter grows.

“There’s a lot of public discourse and discourse with researchers about the future of AI,” Jean-Stanislas Denain, a senior researcher at Epoch AI, told 404 Media. “Insiders have access to a lot of proprietary data, but many people do not. So it just seems very good for there to be this online resource.”

Zoom back out to a wider view of the country and click a circle in Memphis, Tennessee to learn about xAI’s Colossus 2. “To start powering the data center, xAI made the unusual choice to install natural gas turbines across the border in Mississippi, possibly to get faster approval for their operation,” Epoch AI noted. “Battery facility looks complete (though more might be added). Turbines look connected up, minimal construction around them. Based on this, and on earlier tweets from Elon Musk, 110,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs are operational.”
youtube.com/embed/v-1X0nEcxH8?…
Information about the datacenters is incomplete. It’s impossible to know exactly how much everything costs and how it will run. State and local laws are variable so not all construction information is public and satellite imagery can only tell a person so much about what’s happening on the ground. Epoch AI’s map is likely only watching a fraction of the world’s datacenters. “As of November 2025, this subset is an estimated 15% of AI compute that has been delivered by chip manufacturers globally,” Epoch AI explained on its website. “We are expanding our search to find the largest data centers worldwide, using satellite imagery and other data sources.”

The methodology section of the site explains how Epoch AI does the work and includes timelapse photography of the monstrous datacenters growing. One of the big visual tells it looks for in satellite imagery is cooling equipment. “Modern AI data centers generate so much heat that the cooling equipment extends outside the buildings, usually around them or on the roof. Satellite imagery lets us identify the type of cooling, the number of cooling units, and (if applicable) the number of fans on each unit,” it said.

“We focus on cooling because it’s a very useful clue for figuring out the power consumption,” Denain said. “We first want to estimate power, but often we don’t have much information about that…and then we can relate power to the amount of compute and also the cost of building it. If you want to estimate power, cooling is pretty useful.”

After counting the fans, the Epoch team plugs the information into a model it’s designed that can help it figure out how much energy a datacenter uses. “This model is based on the type of cooling and physical features like the number of fans, the diameter of the fans, and how much floorspace the full cooling unit takes up,” Epoch AI explained on its website. “The cooling model still has significant uncertainty. Specification data suggests that the actual cooling capacity can be as much as 2× higher or lower than our model estimates, depending on the chosen fan speed.”

Charting America’s datacenters with open source intelligence isn’t a perfect practice. “In the discovery phase, some data centers will be so obscure that we won’t find news, rumors, or existing databases mentioning them. While larger data centers are more likely to be reported due to their significance and physical footprint, there are many smaller data centers (<100 MW) that could add up to significant levels of AI compute,” Epoch AI said.

But Epoch AI continues to expand its toolset and look through more satellite imagery with the goal of mapping Big Tech’s newest project. The goal is to cast light into the darkness. “Even if we have a perfect analysis of a data center, we may still be in the dark about who uses it, and how much they use,” Epoch AI’s website said. “AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic make deals with hyperscalers such as Oracle and Amazon to rent compute, but the arrangement for any given data center is sometimes secret.”

Meta Prometheus - Frontier Data Centers Satellite Explorer

See how satellite imagery, permits, and public disclosures are used to track the power capacity and performance of frontier data centers.

^{Epoch AI}

404 Media

2025-12-30 14:00:15

The Weird Way the 404 Media Zine Was Built

This post originally ran on Tedium, our zine designer Ernie Smith's wonderful website and newsletter about the Dull Side of the Internet. Check it out here.

I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.

For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.

But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.

So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.

I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).

But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.

Why page layout on Linux is fairly uncommon

The meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops that have no time for your weird non-standard app.)

Admittedly, the native tools have been getting better. I’m not really a fan myself, but I know GIMP is getting closer in parity to Photoshop. Inkscape is a totally viable vector drawing app. Video is very doable on Linux thanks to the FOSS Kendenlive and the commercial DaVinci Resolve. Blender is basically a de facto standard for 3D at this point. The web-based Penpot is a capable Figma alternative. And Krita, while promoted as a digital painting app, has become my tool of choice for making frame-based animated GIFs, which I do a lot for Tedium.

But for ink-stained print layout nerds, it has been tougher to make the shift (our apologies to Scribus). And Adobe locks down Creative Cloud pretty hard.

However, the recent Affinity release, while drawing some skepticism from the open-source community as a potential enshittification issue, is starting to open up a fresh lane. For those not aware, the new version of Affinity essentially combines the three traditional design apps—vector editor, raster editor, and page layout—into a single tool. It’s pretty good at all three. (Plus, for business reasons related to its owner Canva, it’s currently free to use.)

While it doesn’t have a dedicated Linux version, it more or less runs very well using WINE, the technology that has enabled a Linux renaissance via the Steam Deck. (Some passionate community members, like the WINE hacker ElementalWarrior, have worked hard to make this a fully-fleshed out experience that can even be installed more or less painlessly.)

The desire for a native Linux version of a pro-level design app is such that the Canva subsidiary is thinking about doing it themselves.

But I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, so I decided to try to build as much of the zine as I could with Affinity for page layout. For the few things I couldn’t do, I would remote into a Mac.

The RISO factor

Another consideration here is the fact that this zine is being built with Risograph printing, a multicolor printing approach distinct from the more traditional CMYK. The inky printing process, similar to screen printing, has a distinct, vibrant look, even if it avoids the traditional four-color approach (in our case, using layers of pink, black, and lime green).

Throughout the process, I spent a lot of time setting layers to multiply to ensure the results looked good, and adding effects like halftone and erase to help balance out the color effects. This mostly worked OK, though I did have some glitches.

At one point, a lime-green frog lost much of its detail when I tried to RISO-fy it, requiring me to double-check my color settings and ensure I was getting the right tone. And sometimes, PDF exports from Affinity added unsightly lines, which I had to go out of my way to remove. If I was designing for newspapers, I might have been forced to come up with a quick plan B for that layout. But fortunately, I had the luxury of not working on a daily deadline like I might have back in the day.

I think that this layout approach is genuinely fascinating—and I know Jason in particular is a huge fan of it. Could I see other publications in the 404 mold taking notes from this and doing the same thing? Heck yes.

A sneak peek at the inside layout of the 404 Media zine.

The ups and downs of print layout on Linux

So, the headline you can take away from this is pretty simple: Laying stuff out in Affinity over Linux is extremely doable, and if you’re doing it occasionally, you will find a quite capable tool.

Admittedly, if this was, like, my main gig, I might still feel the urge to go back to MacOS—especially near the end of the process. Here’s what I learned:

The good: Workflow-wise, it was pretty smooth. Image cutouts—a tightly honed skill of mine that AI has been trying to obsolete for years—were very doable. Affinity also has some great effects tools that in many ways beat equivalents in other apps, such as its glitch tool and its live filter layers. It didn’t feel like I was getting a second-class experience when all was said and done.

The bad: My muscle memory for InDesign shortcuts was completely ineffective for this, and there were occasional features of InDesign and Photoshop that I did not find direct equivalents for in Affinity. WINE’s file menus tend to look like old Windows, which might be a turn-off for UX purists, and required a bit of extra navigation to dig through folders. Also, one downside of WINE that I could not work past was that I couldn’t use my laptop’s Intel-based GPU for machine learning tasks, a known bug that I imagine slowed some things down on graphically intensive pages.
I checked, by the way; this was not a WINE thing, it did this in MacOS too. (Ernie Smith)
The ugly: I think one area Affinity will need to work on as it attempts to sell the idea that you can design in one interface are better strategies to help mash down content for export. At one point while I was trying to make a PDF, Affinity promised me that the file I would be exporting was going to be 17 exabytes in size, which my SSD was definitely not large enough for. That wasn’t true, but it does emphasize that the dream of doing everything in one interface gets complicated when you want to send things to the printer. Much of the work I did near the end of the process was rasterizing layers to ensure everything looked as intended.

When I did have to use a Mac app for something (mainly accessing Spectrolite, a prepress app for RISO designs), I accessed an old Hackintosh using NoMachine, a tool for connecting to computers remotely. So even for the stuff I actually needed MacOS for, I didn’t need to leave the comforts of my janky laptop.

Looking for a Big Tech escape hatch

Was it 100% perfect? No. Affinity crashed every once in a while, but InDesign did that all the time back in the day. And admittedly, an office full of people using Affinity on Linux isn’t going to work as well as one guy in a coffee shop working with a team of editors over chat and email.

But it’s my hope that experiences like mine convince other people to try it, and for companies to embrace it. Affinity isn’t open-source, and Canva is a giant company with plenty of critics, just like Adobe. But there are emerging projects like PixiEditor and Graphite that could eventually make print layout an extremely viable and even modern open-source endeavor.

But we have to take victories where we can find them, and the one I see is that Affinity is a lot less locked down than Creative Cloud, which is why it’s viable on Linux. And in general, this feels like an opportunity to get away from the DRM-driven past of creative software. (Hey Canva, it’s never too late to make Affinity open-source.)

Difficult reporting shouldn’t have to be tethered to the whims of Big Tech to exist. Especially when that tech—on Amazon’s cloud, using Adobe’s PDFs, through Google’s search, over Meta’s social network, with Apple’s phones, and on Microsoft’s operating system—too often causes uncomfortable tensions with the reporting. This is one step towards a better escape hatch.

Affinity for Linux? Canva's next big move could reshape the desktop software market

Canva is seriously considering porting Affinity to Linux - a move that could transform desktop Linux and challenge Adobe.

^{Duncan McLeod (TechCentral)}

404 Media

2025-12-29 15:34:18

The Shifting World of OSINT (with Craig Silverman)

Joseph speaks to Craig Silverman, one of the co-founders of Indicator. Indicator is a new, independent media company that Craig runs with Alexios Mantzarlis. For years Craig has covered the world of ad fraud and disinformation using all sorts of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. Definitely check out Indicator at Indicator.media. The site publishes its own investigations but also tips and tricks you can use yourself.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA6…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/Lmj42F6HrPo?…

• Indicator’s site

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

2025-12-29 14:00:37

We Bought 404media.com

“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com.

That September day I was on holiday in an Airbnb. Sam was in San Diego to report on the sentencing of a high profile sex trafficker. Emanuel was home. Jason was also at home and eating a bagel. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be able to buy a .com for two main reasons: they are typically quite expensive, and when we created our company the domain was already in use by someone else.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

We Bought 404media.com

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-27 14:00:50

Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars

Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the discovery of 3I ATLAS, the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks.

First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention.

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

The Vindication of Nanotyrannus

Zanno, Lindsay E. et al. “Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus coexisted at the close of the Cretaceous.” Nature.

Griffin, Christopher T. et al. “A diminutive tyrannosaur lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science.

For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus—sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse.

This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex.

“Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study. “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensis representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex.”

The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.”
youtube.com/embed/yJw1WUXIFG8?…
These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon…that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University.

Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era—right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex, said Zanno’s team.

In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign supreme as the tyrant king of its time, we also salute this new dinosaurian dauphin.

In other news…

I can haz seas-burger?

Welker, Martin H. et al. “Exploring the Arrival of Domestic Cats in the Americas.” American Antiquity.

In 1559, a Spanish colonial fleet was dashed to pieces by a hurricane in Florida. Among the many casualties of this disaster were a cat and a kitten, whose remains were found centuries later in the lower hull of a galleon shipwreck at Emanuel Point, near Pensacola.

These felines “are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States,” according to a study from April filled with fascinating facts about the fallen felines. For example, the adult cat ate like a sailor, devouring nutritious fish and domestic meat (like pork or poultry), with few signs of rodents in its diet.

This suggests the cat “was so effective at controlling rat populations that such prey was an insufficient food source,” said researchers led by Martin Welker of the University of Arizona.

It seems that cats have been impressing people with their legendary hunting prowess for centuries.

The study also includes some fun passages about the prized role of cats as pest control on these European ships, including this excerpt from a marine treatise from 1484:

“If goods laden on board of a ship are devoured by rats, and the owners consequently suffer considerable damage, the master must repair the injury sustained by the owners, for he is considered in fault. But if the master kept cats on board, he is excused from the liability.”

A resolution for 2026: Bring back cat-based legal exemptions.

The search for the ur-stars

Visbal, Eli et al. LAP1-B is the First Observed System Consistent with Theoretical Predictions for Population III Stars. The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For generations, astronomers have dreamed of glimpsing the very first stars in the universe, known as Population III. This year, these stellar trailblazers may have finally come into view, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope and the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which can magnify distant objects in space.

Lensed light from an ancient galaxy called LAP1-B, which traveled more than 13 billion years before it was captured by JWST, contains the expected low-metal signatures of Population III stars, according to a December study.

“Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars in the Universe is currently an exciting frontier in astrophysics and cosmology,” said researchers led by Eli Visbal of the University of Toledo. “Up to this point, there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars, defined by their extremely low metallicities.”

“We argue that LAP1-B is the first Pop III candidate to agree with three key theoretical predictions for classical Pop III sources,” the team added. “LAP1-B may only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study of Pop III stars with gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters.”

JWST continues to be a JW-MVP, and it will be exciting to see what else it might spy next.

A swing-kle in time

Norton, M., Kuhn, J. “Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world.” postmedieval.

Let’s close out this wild year with some rest and relaxation in the most soothing of all human creations: the hammock. In a study published last month, researchers meditated on the history of these sleepy slings, from their Indigenous origins in the Americas to their widespread adoption by European mariners and settler-colonists.

The work is full of interesting ruminations about the unique properties and its multifaceted purposes, which ranged from rocking newborn babies to sleep at the dawn of life to comforting the ailing in the form of death beds and burial shrouds.

“The hammock facilitated transitions between life stages like birth, puberty, leadership, and death,” said researchers Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Kuhn of SUNY-Binghamton. But it also facilitated more quotidian shifts in the body: sleep, dreaming, entering hallucinogenic states, and healing.”

What better way to celebrate this weird liminal week, suspended between the past and the future, than an ode to this timeless technology of transitions. It’s been so much fun hanging out with you all in 2025, and I look forward to swinging into a New Year of all things Abstract.

Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you next week.

Comet 3I/ATLAS

NASA missions are working together to track and study this rare, interstellar comet as it passes through our solar system.

^{dghernandez (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2025-12-26 14:00:43

Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You

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 our recommendations for the year.

SAM: Whenever we shout out a podcast, book, TV show, or other media or consumable product on our own podcast or in a Behind the Blog, you guys seem to enjoy it and want more. To be totally real with you, I get a ton of great recommendations from you, the readers and listeners, all year long and am always learning a lot from the things you throw in the comments around the site and on social media. The 404 Media community has good taste.

We talked through some of our top recommendations of the year in this week’s podcast episode, but here’s a more complete list of what each of us has enjoyed this year, and thinks you might also find worth digging into.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You

This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-25 14:00:41

When Will My Pornographic Shrek Christmas Ornament Arrive?

I am starting to think I will never receive my personalized, likely AI-generated horny Shrek Christmas ornaments I purchased from Wear and Decor. I had hoped the indecent and probably unauthorized Shrek ornament depicting the green ogre getting a blowjob would arrive before Christmas and, ideally, before I traveled home for the holidays. I doubt that’s going to happen. I think I’ve been rooked.

The ornament depicts Shrek, his eyes wide and a smile on his ogre lips, as a long haired Fiona descends upon his crotch. “Let’s get Shrekxy and save Santa the trip,” reads a caption above the scene on the online retailer Wear and Decor read. There was space at the bottom where I could personalize the ornament with the name of myself and a loved one, as if to indicate that I was Shrek and that Fiona was my wife.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
When I showed it to my wife weeks ago, after we first put up our Christmas tree, she simply said “No.” “Don’t you think it’s funny?” I said.“You’re supposed to be shopping for a tree topper,” she said.

“It’s only $43.99 for two,” I said. “That’s a bargain.”She stared.

I had been shopping for a tree topper online when I stumbled into the strange world of AI generated pornographic custom ornaments starring popular cartoon characters listed on sites of dubious repute. I do not know what it says about my algorithms that attempting to find a nice, normal, and classy tree topper for Christmas led me to a horrifying world of horny—and seemingly AI generated— knock off novelty Christmas ornaments. I don’t want to reflect on that. I just want to show you what I’ve stumbled upon.

There is a whole underground world of erotic Christmas ornaments starring famous cartoon characters. Some of them are on Etsy, but most are dubious looking sites with names like Homacus and Pop Art. There are themes that repeat. Spanking. Butts. In flagrante delicto bedroom scenes. The promise that the purchaser can personalize these gifts with the name of their loved one and the logo of their favorite football team. I am sure the Baltimore Ravens love that you can buy an ornament depicting a nude Grinch gripping the ass of a female Grinch (notably not that of his canonical wife Martha May Whovier) emblazoned with their logo.
Image via Homacus.
“My butt would be so lonely without you touching it all the time,” reads the inscription above Zootopia’s Nick Wilde with Judy Hopps bent over his knee. You can purchase this same scene with Belle and Beast, Rey and Ben from Star Wars, a pair of Grinches, or Jack Skellington and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. In another variant, a male cartoon character is bent over the ass of a presenting female. Shrek is nose deep in Fiona’s ass. “I adore and love every part of you—Especially your butt. Merry Grinchmas,” the caption reads.
Image via Homacus.
The ornaments rarely carry the name of the actual characters they’re depicting. They are “Funny Fairytale Ornament” and “Funny Green Monsters” and “Personalized Funny Lion Couple Christmas Ornament, Custom Name Animal Lovers Decoration, Cute Romantic Holiday Gift.” These titles feel like hold overs from the prompt that was, I assumed, used in an AI image generator to create the ornaments. There are other signs.

Some of the Shrek ornaments refer to the green ogre as Grinches. Shrek often looks correct but Fiona is sometimes Yassified, her ogre features smoothed and made more feminine. In an ornament with Belle draped over Beast’s leg, the smiling prince has seven fingers on his left hand. The lighting in the “photos” of the objects is never quite right.
Image via Homacus.
Time Magazine declared the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year in 2025 and there is something about flipping through these listings for cheap and horny ornaments that feels like living in the future. This is the world the architects have built, one where some anonymous person out there in the online ether can quickly generate a lewd cartoon drawing of something from your childhood in an attempt to swindle you for a few bucks while you’re shopping for a Christmas tree topper.

I clicked “purchase” on the $40 Shrek blowjob ornament on November 28. The money was deducted from my account but I have not received confirmation of shipping.

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{playlist.megaphone.fm}

404 Media

2025-12-25 14:00:22

In the Dark Arctic Deep, Scientists Find a Hidden Oasis of Strange Life

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

Scientists have discovered a hotspot of weird marine life more than two miles underwater in the Arctic, making it the deepest known example of an environment called a gas hydrate cold seep, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

Researchers found the thriving ecosystem some 2.2 miles under the Greenland Sea using a remote operated vehicle during the Ocean Census Arctic Deep EXTREME24 expedition in 2024. Gas hydrate seeps are patches of seafloor that releases large amounts of gasses, such as methane; the newly discovered site is more than a mile deeper than any previously documented gas hydrate.

The discovery sheds new light on these influential seeps, which play a role in the climate and carbon cycle and support chemosynthetic ecosystems that feed on seafloor gasses instead of sunlight. Giuliana Panieri, the chief scientist of the expedition and lead author of the new study, recalled yelling out with excitement when the team received the first visuals of the seafloor hotspot, which the researchers named the Freya gas hydrate mounds.

“It was crazy because we saw several of these mounds, which are filled with gas hydrates, and all the organisms living there,” said Panieri, who is a professor at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway and the director of the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Polar Sciences, in a call with 404 Media.

“What is fascinating when we have this kind of expedition is the organisms that are living down there,” she added. “At a water depth of almost 4,000 meters, you have these dense oases of organisms. I know that there are many new species. I have to admit, it was very exciting.”

Some of the lifeforms found at Freya mounds: Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

Panieri and her colleagues decided to explore this region after previous detections of massive plumes of gassy bubbles rising up from the seafloor. One of these plumes measured two miles in height, making it the tallest plume of this kind ever found in the oceans. While the team expected to find geological activity, it was still a surprise to see this wealth of gas-stuffed mounds, leaking crude oil and methane, as well as the ecosystem of tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes that are fueled by chemicals from the seep.

In addition to discovering this biological hub at the Freya mounds, the team also explored ecosystems living on hydrothermal vents in the nearby seafloor in the Fram Strait. Hydrothermal vents form at fissures in the seafloor where hot mineral-rich water erupts into the ocean, and they are also known for supporting rich chemosynthetic ecosystems.

The expedition revealed that the organisms living in the hydrate seeps and the vent systems are related, suggesting an ecological connectivity in the Arctic that is absent in other parts of the ocean.

“The Fram Strait of the Arctic is a rare place where deep-sea vents and seeps occur close to each other,” said study co-author Jon Copley, a professor of ocean exploration and science communication at the University of Southampton, in an email to 404 Media.

“The deep Arctic is also a part of the world where there aren't as many deep-sea species overall as other regions, because deep-sea life is still recovering from when a thick ice sheet covered much of the ocean around 20,000 years ago,” he continued. “But hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are an important part of deep-sea biodiversity there today, because life carried on in those chemosynthetic oases beneath that ice-capped ocean.”

Freya gas hydrate mounds with different morphologies. Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

Gas hydrates also store huge volumes of greenhouse gases, like methane, which could potentially be released as ocean temperatures rise, making these environments a bit of a wild card for climate predictions. While the Freya mounds are too deep to be affected by ocean warming, its discovery helps to fill in the map of these oily, gas-rich sites in the ocean.

To that point, these seeps are also potential sites for resource extraction through offshore oil drilling and deep sea mining. A central goal of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep expedition is to explore these remote regions to document their ecological activity and assess their vulnerability to future industrial activities.

“Research has already established that hydrothermal vents must be protected from deep-sea mining anywhere in the world, because of the unique colonies of species that live around them,” Copley said. “Our study indicates that deep cold seeps in the Arctic will need similar protection, because they are part of the same web of life with hydrothermal vents in that region. And there are undoubtedly more deep methane hydrate seeps like the Freya Mounds out there in the Arctic, as other deep bubble plumes have been detected nearby.”

“So our discovery shows how much there still is to explore and understand about Arctic deep-sea life—and the need for caution and protection if the Norwegian government resumes plans for deep-sea mining there,” he added, noting that Norway’s parliament has put these plans temporarily on hold, but they could reverse that decision in the future.

This is why Panieri and her colleagues believe that it is critical to secure more funding and support for Arctic exploration, and ocean research more broadly. These expeditions not only reveal new and exotic organisms, they have also been inspired novel biomolecules used in medicines, among other applications.

“The sea floor and the ocean is almost unknown,” Panieri said. “There is so much to be investigated. I think this is also the take-home message here: Every time that we have the possibility to see the seafloor, we discover something new.”

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

Deep-sea gas hydrate mounds and chemosynthetic fauna discovered at 3640 m on the Molloy Ridge, Greenland Sea - Nature Communications

This study reveals dissociating methane hydrate mounds on the seafloor at more than 3600 m deep in the Greenland Sea.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-12-24 14:00:14

Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes

Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up.

There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.

I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance.

This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
People areleaving Spotify, and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artistspulled their music off the platform this year in protest of the company’sICE recruitment ads and connections tomilitary drones, and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural faux pas. Many folks aresick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and aninternet infested with AI slop. Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go,people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll, desperately wanting to reconnect with something real.

My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up aself-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out of storage on my phone, and the amount of music I had available on-the-go shrank even more.

When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music.

There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids’ Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather.” Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit “skip.” Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification — with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits.

Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call “user friction,” turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes “Content,” flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by“perfect fit” algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized “vibes.”

What we now call “AI Slop” is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses — a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, we’re simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class.

On one hand, I empathize with those who still feel like they get something out of streaming. Having access to so much music can feel empowering, especially when so many people feel like they lack the time and resources to develop a music-listening practice. “What streaming service should I use instead of Spotify?” is a question I’ve been seeing constantly over the past few months.

Here’s my contrarian answer: What if there’s no ethical way to have unlimited access to every book, film, and record ever created? And moreover, what if that’s not something we should want?

What if we simply decided to consume less media, allowing us to have a deeper appreciation for the art we choose to spend our time with? What if, instead of having an on-demand consumer mindset that requires us to systematically strip art of all its human context, we developed better relationships with creators and built new structures to support them? What if we developed a politics of refusal — the ability to say enough is enough — and recognized that we aren’t powerless to the whims of rich tech CEOs who force this dystopian garbage down our throats while claiming it’s “inevitable?”

0:00
/0:07
1×

Tapes and other physical media aren’t a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals.

More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

How To Ditch Spotify and Support Music in the Age of AI Slop

There’s no shortage of reasons to quit Spotify in 2025. Artists and fans have been departing the platform in droves because they’re fed up with the company paying artists virtually nothing, using algorithms that promote AI-generated slop, running rec…

^{Janus Rose (Touch Grass)}

404 Media

2025-12-24 14:00:07

Podcast: We Tracked Ourselves with Exposed Flock Cameras

We start this week with Jason’s story about Flock exposing a bunch of AI-powered cameras. These cameras zoom in on people as they walk by, sometimes so closely you can read what’s on their phone screen. After the break, we talk about some of our biggest stories this year. In the subscribers-only section, we give some of our personal recommendations of games, other reporting, or just a more chill life.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA7…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
• Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website
• Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages
• How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
• Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn

Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages

A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz's phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-22 23:46:13

Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed

Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.

The moves show how difficult it may be for CBS to stop the episode, which focused on the experience of Venezuelans deported to El Salvadorian mega prison CECOT, from spreading across the internet. Bari Weiss stopped the episode from being released Sunday even after the episode was reviewed and checked multiple times by the news outlet, according to an email CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent to her colleagues.

“You may recall earlier this year when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to,” the show starts, according to a copy viewed by 404 Media.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-22 17:42:58

Podcast: Marisa Kabas on Landing Big Scoops as an Independent Journalist

Marisa Kabas is the founder of The Handbasket, an independent newsletter and website that has been breaking stories left and right about government workers, the media business, and Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Please go subscribe to The Handbasket here!

In this episode of the podcast, Jason and Marisa share notes Marisa about doing journalism without a big newsroom, how the media business has changed over the last decade, and why sources often prefer to talk to journalists who don’t work for mainstream media.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA5…
Stories discussed:

Truth, morality and independence in journalism under the second Trump regime
My full remarks to students and faculty at Grinnell College.
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas

Breaking: The Handbasket is first to report catastrophic OMB funding memo
Posted on Bluesky earlier this evening, other major outlets have since confirmed.
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas

Move fast and break people
For Elon Musk’s government, the psychological warfare is the point.
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas

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.

Or watch it here:
youtube.com/embed/e73spvZnc9s?…

Move fast and break people

For Elon Musk's government, the psychological warfare is the point.

^{Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket)}

404 Media

2025-12-22 16:05:19

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.

Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.

Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.

0:00
/0:16
1×

The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. They shared the details of what they found with me, and I verified many of the details seen in the exposed portals by driving to Bakersfield to walk in front of two cameras there while I watched myself on the livestream. I also pulled Flock’s contracts with cities for Condor cameras, pulled details from company presentations about the technology, and geolocated a handful of the cameras to cities and towns across the United States. Jordan also filmed himself in front of several of the cameras on the Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. Jordan said he and Gaines discovered many of the exposed cameras with Shodan, an internet of things search engine that researchers regularly use to identify improperly secured devices.
youtube.com/embed/vU1-uiUlHTo?…
After finding links to the feed, “immediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,” Jordan told me in an interview. “I think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared … I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.” In a YouTube video about his research, Jordan said he was able to use footage pulled from the exposed feed to identify specific people using open source investigation tools in order to show how trivially an exposure like this could be abused.
Benn Jordan
Last year, Flock introduced AI features to Condor cameras that automatically zoom in on people as they walk by. In Flock’s announcement of this feature, it explained that this technology “zooms in on a suspect exiting one car, stealing an item from another, and returning to his vehicle. Every detail is captured, providing invaluable evidence for investigators.” On several of the exposed feeds, we saw Flock cameras repeatedly zooming in on and tracking random people as they walked by. The cameras can be controlled by AI or manually.

The exposure highlights the fact that Flock is not just surveilling cars—it is surveilling people, and in some cases it is doing so in an insecure way, and highlight the types of places that its Condor cameras are being deployed. Condor cameras are part of Flock’s ever-expanding quest to “prevent crime,” and are sometimes integrated with its license plate cameras, its gunshot detection microphones, and its automated camera drones.

Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me the behavior he saw in videos we shared with him “shows that Flock's ambitions go far beyond license-plate surveillance. They want to be a nation-wide panopticon, watching everyone all the time. Flock's goal isn't to catch stolen cars, their goal is to have total surveillance of everyone all the time."

0:00
/1:03
1×

The cameras were left not just livestreaming to the internet for anyone who could find the link, but in many cases their administrative portals were left open with no login credentials required whatsoever. On this portal, some camera settings could be changed, diagnostics could be run, and text logs of what the camera was doing were being streamed, too. Thirty days of the camera’s archive was left available for anyone to watch or download from any of the cameras that we found. We were not able to geolocate every camera that was left unprotected, but we found cameras at a New York City Department of Transportation parking lot, on a street corner in suburban New Orleans, in random cul-de-sacs, in a Lowes parking lot, in the parking lot of a skatepark, at a pool, outside a parking garage, at an apartment complex, outside a church, on a bike path, and at various street intersections around the country.

Quintin told me the situation reminds him of ALPR cameras from another company that were left unprotected a decade ago.

“This is not the first time we have seen ALPRs exposed on the public internet, and it won't be the last. Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected,” Quintin said. “Law enforcement should not collect information they can’t protect. Surveillance technology without adequate security measures puts everyone’s safety at risk.”

It was not always clear which business or agency owned specific cameras that were left exposed, or what type of misconfiguration led to the exposure, though I was able to find a $348,000 Flock contract for Brookhaven, Georgia, which manages the Peachtree Creek Greenway, and includes 64 Condor cameras.

"This was a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices, and it has since been remedied," a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. It did not answer questions about what caused the misconfiguration or how many devices ultimately were affected.

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

In response to Jordan and Gaines’ earlier research on vulnerabilities in other Flock cameras, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a LinkedIn post that “The Flock system has not been hacked. We secure customer data to the highest standard of industry requirements, including strict industry standard encryption. Flock’s cloud storage has never been compromised.” The exposure of these video feeds is not a hack of Flock’s system, but demonstrates a major misconfiguration of at least some cameras. It also highlights a major misconfiguration in its security that persisted for at least days.

“When I was making my last video [about Flock ALPR vulnerabilities], it was almost like a catchphrase where I'd say like, ‘I don't see how it could get any worse.’ And then something would happen where you'd be like, wow, they pulled it off. They made it worse,” Jordan said. “And then this is like the ultimate one. Because this is completely unrelated [to my earlier research] and I don’t really know how it could be any worse to be honest.”

In a 2023 video webinar introducing the Condor platform to police, Flock executives said the cameras are meant to be paired with their ALPR cameras and are designed to feed video to FlockOS, a police panel that allows cops to hop from camera to camera in real time across a mapped-out view of their city. In Bakersfield, which has 382 Flock cameras according to a transparency report, one of the Condor cameras we saw was located next to a mall that had at least two Flock ALPR cameras stationed at the entrances to the mall parking lot.

Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who used to work for the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department, said in the webinar that he built an “intel center” with a high “density” of Flock cameras in that city. “I am passionate about this because I’ve lived it. The background behind video [Condor] with LPR is rich with arrests,” he said. “That rich experience of seeing what happened kind of brings it alive to [judges]. So video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.”

“You can look down a tremendous distance with our cameras, to the next intersection and the next intersection,” he said. “The camera will identify people, what they’re wearing, and cars up to a half a mile away. It’s that good.”

0:00
/0:08
1×

Condor cameras in a Flock demo showing off its AI tracking features

In the webinar Cox pulled up a multiview panel of a series of cameras and took control of them, dragging, panning, and zooming on cameras and hopping between multiple cameras in real time. Cox suggested that police officers could either use Flock’s cameras to pinpoint a person at a place and time and then use it to request “cell tower dumps” from wireless companies, or could use cell GPS data to then go into the Flock system to track a person as they moved throughout a city. “If you can place that person’s cell phone and then the Condor video and Falcon LPR evidence, it would be next to impossible to beat that in court,” he said, adding that some towns may just want to have always-on, always recording video of certain intersections or town squares. “There’s endless endless uses to what we can do with these things.”

On the webinar, Seth Cimino, who was a police officer at the Citrus Heights, California police department at the time but now works directly for Flock, told participants that officers in his city enjoyed using the cameras to zoom in on crimes.

“There is an eagerness amongst our staff that are logged in that have their own Flock accounts to be able to monitor our ALPR and pan tilt zoom Condor cameras throughout the community, to a point where sometimes our officers are beating dispatch with the information,” he said. “If there’s an incident that occurs at a specific intersection or a short distance away where our Condor cameras can zoom in on that area, it allows for real time overwatch […] as I sit here right now with you—how cool is this? We just had a Flock alert here in the city. I mean, it just popped up on my screen!”

Samantha Cole contributed reporting.

Introducing Condor Live and Recorded Video

Respond with Confidence with a cutting-edge video camera that empowers officers

^{www.flocksafety.com}

404 Media

2025-12-20 14:00:00

Scientists Discover ‘Black Widow’ Exoplanet That Defies Explanation

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied expectations, broke barriers, made trash into shelter, and lived to swear another day.

First, there’s a giant, lemony, diamond-studded, black widow in space. I’ll explain. Then: electrons get ready for a close-up, the ultimately tiny home, and why expletives are the hottest new workout hack.

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

“Lemonworld”

Zhang, Michael et al. “A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have observed a Jupiter-sized planet more than 700 light years from Earth that is unlike anything spotted before and defies explanation.

Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet is shaped like a lemon, boasts baffling skies, and may have hidden troves of diamonds in its belly. The distant world closely orbits a pulsar, a type of hyper-dense dead star that is tugging on the gassy planet, giving it the distended shape.

Pulsar companions are normally other stars. These are called “black widow” systems because winds from the pulsar weather down the stellar companion, eventually destroying it, similar to the deadly embrace of the namesake spider. It is very rare to see a black widow system with a planet as the pulsar companion.

Curious about this unusual exoplanet, astronomers observed it with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), thereby “unveiling a bizarre atmosphere that raises more questions than it answers,” according to their new study.

“PSR J2322–2650b is different from other ultralight pulsar companions, being the only pulsar companion with a mass, a density, and a temperature similar to those of hot Jupiters,” said researchers led by Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago. “The atmosphere of such an object has never been observed.”

“In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds,” they said.
youtube.com/embed/oBf1GFkFjdc?…
Molecular carbon is unusual in planetary atmospheres because carbon atoms tend to bind to other elements, producing more familiar compounds like carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so carbon-dominated, and so depleted in oxygen and nitrogen, that it doesn’t neatly line up with any known planetary formation scenarios. In a sparkling twist, its dense carbon atmosphere may produce soot clouds that then solidify into diamonds, bedazzling its core.

Is this a long-lived gas giant that survived the transformation of its star into a pulsar? Or was it born from the debris of the supernova that created the pulsar? And will this black widow system end as others do, with a slow death by pulsar winds? Nobody knows!

“Our findings pose a challenge to the current understanding of black-widow formation” and it will take more observations of similar systems “to determine whether PSR J2322–2650b’s composition is unusual or representative of the class.”

In other news…

An attofirst for attoseconds

Ardana-Lamas, Fernando et al. “Brilliant Source of 19.2-Attosecond Soft X-ray Pulses below the Atomic Unit of Time.” Ultrafast Science.

Scientists have created the shortest X-ray light pulse ever produced, a breakthrough that could resolve the previously hidden motions of electrons and other particles at subatomic scales.

These newly-demonstrated soft X-ray pulses last for just 19.2 attoseconds, where an attosecond is equal to one quintillionth (10⁻¹⁸) of a second. In other words, an attosecond is to a second as a second is to 31.69 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe.
This is where the science happened. Image: ICFO
“Excitation, scattering, and electron relaxation are crucial processes that control how matter interacts with light,” said researchers led by Fernando Ardana-Lamas of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Spain. “Their timing influences how chemical bonds form or break, how charge and energy move, and how properties of molecules and materials emerge. Understanding these dynamics requires attosecond resolution, as electronic excitations and dynamics occur on timescales of tens of attoseconds.”

“We demonstrated the generation of coherent attosecond [short X-ray] pulses with a duration of 19.2 as, significantly shorter than the atomic unit of time,” a milestone that offers “exciting new opportunities to investigate atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics,” the team concluded.

This high pulse speed is necessary for the development of instruments that could capture the mysterious dynamics of particles on subatomic timescales. Other experimental technologies are still required to make these ultrafast cameras a reality, but for now, here’s to shattering the shutter speed record.

My other house is a tooth socket

Viñola-López, Lázaro W. et al “Trace fossils within mammal remains reveal novel bee nesting behaviour.” Royal Society Open Science.

Here’s a question for prospective home owners: have you ever considered living in a clump of regurgitated bones? This solution worked out well for Caribbean cave bees that lived some 20,000 years ago, according to a new study that reports the discovery of the first known fossilized bee nests built inside skeletal remains.

Scientists found the honeycombed bones buried in a cave on the island of Hispaniola that was once also inhabited by owls. Since owls regularly barf up pellets—gnarly globs of half-digested prey—the solitary bee species had a ready-made supply of skeletal remains, which were apparently a perfect place to raise offspring.
A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee. Image: Courtesy of Lazaro Viñola López.
“Isolated brood cells…were found inside cavities of vertebrate remains,” including tooth sockets and the spinal canal, said researchers led by Lázaro Viñola López of the Field Museum in Chicago. “The high abundance of nests throughout the deposit indicated that this cave was used for a long period as a nesting aggregation area by this solitary bee.”

There’s nothing like getting the skeleton keys to your new skeleton house.

A prescription for profanity

Stephens, Richard et al. “‘Don’t Hold Back’: Swearing Improves Strength Through State Disinhibition.” American Psychologist.

Cussing is discouraged in polite company, but it may actually be good for your health and performance, according to a new study that confirms swearing alleviates inhibitions and provides increased endurance during physical challenges.

Psychologists recruited nearly 200 volunteers to hold themselves in a sustained chair pushup while repeating either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds. The results revealed a consistent “swearing advantage” characterized by “significant performance improvements in the swearing condition.”

“These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and contexts requiring courage or assertiveness,” said researchers led by Richard Stephens of Keele University. “As such, swearing may represent a low-cost, widely accessible psychological intervention to help individuals ‘not hold back’ when peak performance is needed.”

At long last, science has vindicated the foul-spoken, the pottymouths, the salty-tongued, and the vulgarians. So go forth, ye cursers, and f*ck that sh*t up! It’s the doctor’s orders, after all.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-12-19 16:10:49

Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization

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 history repeating itself and Meta's relationship with links.

JOSEPH: I wanted to add a little bit from behind the scenes of this piece: Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It. As I said on the podcast this week, there are and continue to be many questions around the case. Especially why CBP stopped Samuel Tunick in the first place.

In the piece I did not focus on Tunick’s activism because frankly we don’t know yet how big a role it played in CBP stopping him. I mentioned it but didn’t focus on it. I think regardless, someone being charged for allegedly wiping a phone is interesting essentially no matter who they are.

Yes, it absolutely may turn out that he was stopped specifically because of his activism. Maybe lots of people think it’s very likely that’s the reason. But I can’t frame a story because it feels like that’s maybe the case. I have to go on what actual evidence I have at the moment.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization

This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-18 20:53:49

The Government Added a Comments Section to the Epstein Photo Dump

Update: After publication of this piece, House Oversight Democrats disabled comments on the photos. The original article follows below.

Thursday afternoon House Democrats publicly released a new trove of photographs they’ve obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein via Dropbox. They left the comments on so anyone who is signed into Dropbox and browsing the material can leave behind their thoughts.

Given that the investigation into Epstein is one of the most closely followed cases in the world and a subject of endless conspiracy theories, and that the committee released the trove of photographs with no context, it’s not surprising that people immediately began commenting on the photographs.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“Really punchable face,” BedeScarlet—whose avatar is Cloud from Final Fantasy VII—said above a picture of New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks, who wrote a column about his boredom with the Epstein case in November, attended a dinner with Epstein in 2011 and appears in two photographs in this new document dump.

“Noam Chomsky,” Alya Colours (a frequent Epstein dropbox commenter) said below a photograph of the linguist talking to Epstein on a plane. Below this there is a little prompt from Dropbox asking me to “join the conversation” next to a smiley face.

In another picture, director Woody Allen is bundled up to his eyes in a heavy coat while Epstein side hugs him. “Yep, I’d know that face anywhere,” Susan Brown commented.

Among the pictures is a closeup of a prescription bottle labeled Phenazopyridine. “This is a medication used to treat pain from urinary tract infections,” Rebecca Stinton added, helpfully, in the comments.

“The fuck were they doing all that math for?” BedeScarlet said next to a picture of Epstein in front of a whiteboard covered in equations.

“Shit probably tastes like ass,” he added to a picture of Epstein cooking something in a kitchen.

There are darker and weird photographs in this collection of images that, as of this writing, do not yet have comments. There’s a pair of box springs in an unfinished room lit by the sun. There is a map of Little St James indicating where Epstein wants various buildings constructed. Bill Gates is shown in two photos standing next to women with their faces blocked out.

And then there are the Lolita pictures. A woman’s foot sits in the foreground, a worn annotated copy of Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita in the background. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet teen in one sock,” is written on the foot, a quote from the novel.

These photos are followed by a series of pictures of passports with the information redacted. Some are from Ukraine. There’s one from South Africa and another from the Czech Republic.

The House Democrats allowing the public to comment on these photos is funny and it’s unclear if intentional or a mistake. It’s also a continuation of the just-get-out-there approach when they have published other material, with it sometimes being in unsorted caches that readers then have to dig through. The only grand revelation in the new material is that Brooks was present at a dinner with Epstein in 2011.

“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner,” a Times spokesperson told Semafor’s Max Tani.

House Oversight Democrats did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.

12.18.25 Release

Shared with Dropbox

^Dropbox

404 Media

2025-12-18 17:19:25

ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people.

The contract comes as ICE is spending millions of dollars, and plans to spend tens of millions more, on skip tracing services more broadly. The practice involves ICE paying bounty hunters to use digital tools and physically stalk immigrants to verify their addresses, then report that information to ICE so the agency can act.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-18 14:42:58

Why Are We Obsessed With Aliens?

The past few years have been very exciting for those who want to believe. The U.S. government has released tantalizing videos and held several gripping hearings showing and discussing UFOs. People who always thought the government was hiding evidence of alien life from the general population saw it as proof that what they’ve said was happening all along. Skeptics have made compelling arguments for why all these revelations could be anything but aliens.

But this debate and humanity’s obsession with aliens goes as far back as recorded history. In her book, First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, 404 Media’s science reporter and author of The Abstract newsletter Becky Ferreira delves deep into this history, what it teaches us about humans, and what the near and far future of the search for alien life looks like.
open.spotify.com/embed/episode…
I had a great time reading Becky’s book and an even better time discussing it with her on the podcast. It’s a great conversation that unpacks why these stories get so much attention, and a perspective on aliens in the news and pop culture that’s rooted in history and science.

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

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/QToByEeq2vU?…

First Contact

Now Available from Hachette ,  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble , and  Powells .

^{BECKY FERREIRA}

404 Media

2025-12-18 14:00:53

Scientists Discover Massive Underwater Ruins That May Be a Lost City of Legend

Scientists have discovered the underwater ruins of huge stone structures erected by humans at least 7,000 years ago in the coastal waters of France, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

The submerged granite ruins near Sein Island, a Breton island in the Atlantic Ocean, are among the oldest large stone structures ever found in France, and may have inspired an ancient local legend about a city called Ys that vanished under the waves.

The structures vary in size from small stone dams, which were probably fish traps, to large monoliths and slabs that protrude six feet from the seafloor and extend 400 feet in length, which perhaps once served as a protective seawall.

Yves Fouquet, a geologist who works with the Society for Maritime Archaeology and Heritage (SAMM), first noticed hints of these long-lost megaliths in LiDAR data collected by the Litto3D program, a national initiative to create a precise 3D digital reconstruction of the entire French coastline. Fouquet and his colleagues confirmed the existence of the mysterious structures, and mapped out their locations, across dozens of dives carried out by ten SAMM divers between 2022 and 2024.

“The detailed analysis of these maps to redraw the underwater geological map of this area (faults, rock types) has made it possible to identify structures that did not appear natural to a geologist,” Fouquet said in an email to 404 Media.

Brittany, a peninsular region of northwest France, is home to the oldest megaliths in the nation and some of the earliest in Europe, which date back some 6,500 years. The team estimated that the submerged stone structures off Sein Island may predate these early megaliths in Brittany by about 500 years, based on their estimation of when the stones would have last been above sea level. But it will take more research to home in on the exact age of the megaliths.

“We plan to continue the exploration and carry out more detailed work to understand the architecture and precise the age of the structures,” Fouquet said.

The discovery of these stones opens a new window into the societies living in Brittany during the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition, a period when hunter-gatherers began to shift toward settled lifestyles involving fishing, farming, and the construction of megaliths and other buildings.
Photos of the structures in Figure 7 of the study. Image: SAMM, 2023
The peoples who made these structures must have been both highly organized and relatively abundant in population in order to erect the stones. They were also sophisticated marine navigators, as the waters around Sein Island are notoriously dangerous—prone to swells and strong currents—which is one reason its underwater heritage has remained relatively poorly explored.

“Our results bear witness to the possible sedentary lifestyle of maritime hunter-gatherers on the coast of the extreme west of France from the 6th millennium onwards,” said Fouquet and his colleagues in the study. “The technical know-how to extract, transport, and erect monoliths and large slabs during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition precedes by about 500 years the megalithic constructions in western France in the 5th millennium.”

The discovery raises new questions about the origins of these megalithics structures, which may have had a symbolic or religious resonance to these past peoples. the team added. “This discovery in a high hydrodynamic environment opens up new perspectives for searching for traces of human settlement in Brittany along the submerged coastline of the period 6000–5000 years cal. BCE.”

The researchers also speculate about a possible link between these structures, and the prehistoric people who made them, and local legends about sunken cities that may date back thousands of years.

“Legends about sunken cities, compared with recent data on rising sea levels, shows that the stories of ancient submergences, passed down by oral tradition, could date back as far as 5,000 to 15,000 years,” the team said, citing a 2022 study. “This suggests that oral traditions that may have preserved significant events in memory that could well be worthy of scientific examination. These settlements described in legend reveal the profound symbolic significance of maritime prehistory, which should not be overlooked.”

In particular, the people of Brittany have long told tales of the lost city of Ys, a sunken settlement thought to be located in the Bay of Douarnenez, about six miles east of Sein Island. The sunken megaliths off Sein Island “allow us to question the origin of the history of the city of Ys, not from the historical legends and their numerous additions, but from scientific findings that may be at the origin of this legend,” the team said.

It’s extremely tantalizing to imagine that the long-hidden ruins of these peoples, who appear to have been expert seafarers and builders, are the source of tales that date back for untold generations in the region. But while the researchers raise the possibility of a link between the stones and the story, they cannot conclusively confirm the connection.

“Legend is legend, enriched by all the additions of human imagination over the centuries,” Fouquet said in his email. “Our discoveries are based on what can be scientifically proven.”

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

Accueil - Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique

Société d’Archéologie et de Mémoire Maritime Plongez dans l’histoire maritime. Vous recherchez sur le littoral Manche-Atlantique un navire, un naufrage, un ancêtre […]

^{Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique}

404 Media

2025-12-17 14:13:00

Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers

Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.

The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment.

“I could see the phones in use, which manager (the PCs controlling the phones) they had, which TikTok accounts they were assigned, proxies in use (and their passwords), and pending tasks. As well as the link to control devices for each manager,” the hacker told me. “I could have used their phones for compute resources, or maybe spam. Even if they're just phones, there are around 1100 of them, with proxy access, for free. I think I could have used the linked accounts by puppeting the phones or adding tasks, but haven't tried.”

As I reported in October, Doublespeed raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program, “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.” Doublespeed uses generative AI to flood social media with accounts and posts to promote certain products on behalf of its clients. Social media companies attempt to detect and remove this type of astroturfing for violating their inauthentic behavior policies, which is why Doublespeed uses a bank of phones to emulate the behavior of real users. So-called “click farms” or “phone farms” often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason.

The hacker told me he had access to around 1,100 smartphones Doublespeed operates. One way the hacker proved he had access to devices was by taking control of one phone’s camera, which seemingly showed it in a rack with other phones.

Images the hacker captured from some of the phones in Doublespeed's phone farm.

The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.

I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.

One health-themed Doublespeed Tiktok account named Chloe Davis posted almost 200 slideshows featuring a middle-aged AI-generated woman. In the posts, the woman usually discusses various physical ailments and how she deals with them. The last image in the slide always includes a picture of someone using a massage roller from a company called Vibit. Vibit did not respond to a request for comment.

A Doublespeed TikTok account promoting a Vibit massager.

Another Doublespeed-operated TikTok account named pattyluvslife posted dozens of slideshows of a young woman who, according to her bio, is a student at UCLA. All the posts from this account talk about how “big pharma” and the supplements industry is a scam. But the posts also always promoted a moringa supplement from a company called Rosabella. The AI-generated woman in these TikTok posts often holds up the bottle of supplements, but it’s obviously AI-generated as the text on the bottle is jumbled gibberish.
An AI-generated image promoting a Rosabella supplement.
Rosabella’s site also claims the product is “viral on TikTok.” Rosabella did not respond to a request for comment.
An image from Rosabella's site claiming its brand is viral on TikTok.
While most of the content I’ve seen on Doublespeed-operated TikTok accounts included AI-generated slideshows and still images, Doublespeed is also able to AI-generate videos as well. One Doublespeed-operated account posted several AI-generated videos of a young woman voguing at the camera. The account was promoting a company called Playkit, a “TikTok content agency” that pays users to promote products on behalf of its clients. Notably, this is the exact kind of business Doublespeed would in theory be able to replace with AI-generated accounts. Playkit did not respond to a request for comment.

0:00
/0:04
1×

An AI-generated video promoting Playkit, a TikTok content agency.

TikTok told me that its Community Guidelines make clear that it requires creators to label AI-generated or significantly edited content that shows realistic-looking scenes or people. After I reached out for comment, TikTok added a label to the Doublespeed-operated accounts I flagged indicating they're AI-generated.

A16z did not respond to a request for comment.

Doublespeed has said it has the ability to and soon plans to launch its services on Instagram, Reddit, and X, but so far seems to only be operating on TikTok. In October, a Reddit spokesperson told me that Doublespeed’s service would violate its terms of service. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. As we noted in October, Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, sits on Meta’s board of directors. Doublespeed’s business would clearly violate Meta’s policy on “authentic identity representation.”

404 Media

2025-12-17 14:00:08

Podcast: Is Wiping a Phone a Crime?

Joseph had to use a different mic this week, that will be fixed next time! We start this week talking about a very unusual case: someone is being charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it. There are a lot of questions remaining, but a super interesting case. After the break, we talk about Matthew’s article on an Anthropic exec forcing AI onto a queer gamer Discord. In the subscribers-only section, we all chat about the Disney and OpenAI deal.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA8…
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/tOpIpReZPoM?…
Timestamps:
00:48 - Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
17:44 - Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee
41:17 - Disney Invests $1 Billion in the AI Slopification of Its Brand

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

2025-12-16 14:58:37

Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee

A Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members.

Users voted to restrict Anthropic's Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee

“We’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence,” Anthropic's Jason Clinton said after launching the bot.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-15 16:00:18

Woman Who Helped Coerce Victims into GirlsDoPorn Sex Trafficking Ring Sentenced to Prison

The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday.

GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular on some of the world’s biggest porn tube sites, including PornHub, where the videos generated millions of views.

Valorie Moser was the bookkeeper for GirlsDoPorn and met victims as they arrived in San Diego to be filmed—and in many cases, brutally abused—by sex traffickers Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and their co-conspirators. More than 500 women were coerced into filming sex scenes in hotel rooms across the city after responding to “modeling” ads online. When they arrived, many testified, they were pressured into signing convoluted contracts, given drugs and alcohol, told the content they were filming would never appear online or reach their home communities, and were sexually abused for hours while the camera rolled.

GirlsDoPorn edited those hours of footage into clips of the women seeming to enjoy themselves, according to court documents. Many of the women were college aged—one celebrated her 18th birthday on camera as part of her GirlsDoPorn appearance—and nervous or inexperienced.

During Moser’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino told Moser, “You provided them assurances and comfort,” Courthouse News reported from the courtroom. “Much of that comfort was false assurances, and assurances you knew to be false. The court does believe you were involved in the fraud and took part in the fraud.”

Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
Michael James Pratt was sentenced to federal prison on charges of sex trafficking connected to the GirlsDoPorn crime ring. “He turned my pain into profit, my life into currency,” said one victim.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Moser was charged with federal sex trafficking counts in 2019 alongside Pratt, Wolfe, and several other co-conspirators. According to prosecutors, Pratt instructed Moser to deceive women about the scheme and how she was involved. Moser worked for GirlsDoPorn from 2015 to 2018. “Pratt instructed Moser not to tell the women the truth about their video’s distribution as she drove the young women to and from the video shoots,” prosecutors wrote in 2021 after she pleaded guilty to charges of sex trafficking. “Moser was to tell the women that she was just an Uber driver. Later, Pratt told Moser to tell the women that she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement and could not discuss it. After the videos were posted on-line and widely available, many women contacted Moser to ask that their videos be taken down. Pratt, Wolfe and co-defendant Ruben Garcia all told Moser to block any calls from these women.”

Moser wept during the sentencing and was unable to read her own statement to the victims, according to Courthouse News; her attorney Anthony Columbo read it on her behalf. “I want you to know that I hurt you,” she wrote. “I want you to know that I listened and I learned so much. I feel disgusted, shameful and foolish […] I failed and I am truly sorry.”

US Attorney Alexandra Foster read impact statements from victims, according to the report. “Valorie Moser was the one who picked me up and drove me to the hotel where I was trafficked,” an anonymous victim wrote, as read by Foster. “Her role was to make me feel more comfortable because women trust other women. She reassured me on the way to the hotel that everything would be OK... She wasn’t just a bookkeeper, she was a willing participant. She deserves to be sentenced to jail.”

‘She Turned Ghost White:’ How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Trafficking Ringleader
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Moser is ordered to self surrender to start her sentence at noon on January 30.

Judge Sammartino sentenced Pratt to 27 years in prison in September; Andre Garcia, the main “actor” in GirlsDoPorn videos, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on June 14, 2021; Theodore Gyi, the primary cameraman for the ring, was sentenced to four years on November 9, 2022 and ordered to pay victims $100,000; Wolfe was sentenced to 14 years on March 20, 2024; Douglas “James” Wiederhold, who performed in videos before Garcia and was the co-owner of MomPOV.com with Pratt, is set to be sentenced in January.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

Original ‘Girls Do Porn’ Actor and Owner of MomPOV.com Arrested on Felony Charges

Douglas "James" Wiederhold, the co-owner of MomPOV.com with Girls Do Porn ringleader Michael Pratt, will appear in San Diego court on Thursday.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-13 14:00:24

Earth-Like Planets Are More Common Than We Thought, Study Says

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability.

First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the duality of posters and lurkers, and an important update on toadlets.

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

Sink into a warm cosmic-ray bath

Sawada, Ryo et al. “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” Science Advances.

Earth was cosmically conceived in part by a massive shockwave from a nearby supernova, which seeded our home world and neighboring rocky planets with telltale radioactive signatures, according to a new study.

The solar system’s rocky planets contain short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), which are ancient elements that were likely barfed out from exploding stars. For this reason, scientists have long suspected that stars must’ve detonated next to the gassy disk that gave rise to the solar system. The heat generated from these radioactive elements helped the building blocks of the rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—melt together so they could become whole worlds, which means we owe our existence to these ancient supernovas.

Now, a team has developed a new model to explain how the primordial pyrotechnics didn’t just blow up the nascent solar system. The results suggest that rocky Earth-like worlds may be common in the universe, with potential implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

“A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are,” said researchers led by Ryo Sawada of the University of Tokyo. “The formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of SLRs, particularly aluminum-26, likely delivered from nearby supernovae.”

“However, the supernova injection scenario faces an unresolved problem in that existing supernova models could not reproduce both the relative and absolute abundances of SLRs without disrupting the protosolar disk,” an event that “would likely prevent the Solar System formation altogether,” the team added.

In other words, it’s hard to explain how the solar system got its high abundance of SLRs without killing it in the cradle. Sawada and his colleagues propose a solution that involves at least one star exploding about three light years of the disk, sparking a shockwave that created a cosmic-ray “bath.”
Schematic picture of the system assumed in this study. Image: Sawada et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadx7892
In this “immersion mechanism,” energetic cosmic rays trapped in the bath triggered SLR-producing reactions directly within the disk. This contrasts with the hypothesis that the SLRs were largely injected and then mixed up in the disk through some unknown process. This new solution can account both for the high abundance of certain SLRs, like aluminum-26, and the fact that the solar system was not destroyed, as evidenced by its apparent continued existence.

“Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the

Galaxy than previously thought,” the team said, noting that many disks are rocked by similar supernova-shockwaves. “This challenges previous interpretations that classified the Solar System as an outlier with a particularly high [aluminum-26] abundance.”

In addition to offering a new hypothesis for an old astronomical problem, the study gets bonus points for its extremely poetic title: “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” If you say this enchanted phrase three times, somewhere an Earth-like world will be born.

In other news…

The biometrics of a Baltic boatsman

Fauvelle, Mikael et al. “New investigations of the Hjortspring boat: Dating and analysis of the cordage and caulking materials used in a pre-Roman iron age plank boat.” PLOS One

Stars aren’t the only things leaving their dirty fingerprints in unexpected places this week. Archeologists working on the mysterious Hjortspring boat, a 2,400-year-old Scandinavian vessel, discovered a tantalizing partial human fingerprint in its caulking, providing “a direct link to the ancient seafarers who used this boat,” according to the study.
Photo of caulking fragment showing fingerprint on the left and high-resolution x-ray tomography scan of fingerprint region on the right. Image: Photography by Erik Johansson, 3D model by Sahel Ganji
The ridges of the fingerprint “fall within average distributions for both adult male and females as well as for juvenile adults, making it difficult to say much about the individual who produced the print,” said researchers led by Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University. “The most likely interpretation, however, is that it was made during repairs by one of the crew members on the boat itself, providing a direct link to the seafarers of the ancient vessel.”

Regardless of this person’s identity, their voyage didn’t end well. Researchers think the crew of the Hjortspring boat probably sailed from the eastern Baltic Sea to attack the Danish island of Als, where they were defeated. “The victors [deposited] the weapons of their vanquished foes together with one of their boats into the bog,” where they remained for millennia until they were rediscovered in the 1880s, the team said.

It’s a timeless reminder for would-be invaders: Don’t get caulky.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster

Oswald, Lisa et al. “Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment.” Science Advances.

At last, scientists have investigated the most elusive online demographic: the humble lurker. A team recruited 520 Redditors in the U.S. to participate in small subreddits focused on a variety of political topics during the summer of 2024. The aim was to probe why some people became prolific “power-users” that post with voluminous confidence, while others remained wallflowers.

“Online political discussions are often dominated by a small group of active users, while most remain silent,” said researchers led by Lisa Oswalt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “This visibility gap can distort perceptions of public opinion and fuel polarization.”

The team found that “lurking (posting nothing) was most common among users who perceived discussions as toxic, disrespectful, or unconstructive.” Lurkers were offered small payments to post in the experiment, which succeeded in motivating some to contribute to discussions. As a result, the study concluded that “future interventions may be able to make online political discussions more representative by offering more positive social rewards for lurkers to post.”

At last, an opportunity to unionize the lurkers of the world. Solidarity (in silence) forever.

It’s the great pumpkin toadlet, Charlie Brown

Bornschein, Marcos R. et al. “A new species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from Serra do Quiriri, northeastern Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil, with a review of the diagnosis among species of the B. pernix group and proposed conservation measures.” PLOS One.

We will close, as we have before, with an impossibly cute toadlet. Scientists have discovered this new species of “pumpkin toadlet” in the “cloud forests” of Brazil, a sentence so twee that it’s practically its own fairy tale. The tiny toad Brachycephalus lulai, pictured below on a pencil tip, belongs to a family of “flea toads” that are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth.
Basically it is very smol: Brachycephalus lulai is a tiny pumpkin toadlet measuring less than 14 mm in length. Photo: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro. Image credit 1: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
“Our team sought to better document the individual variation of all Brachycephalus species in southern Brazil, looking for them in the field over the past seven years,” said researchers led by Marcos R. Bornschein of São Paulo State University. “As a result of this work, we discovered and herein described a population collected on the eastern slope of Serra do Quiriri as a new species.”

The team also reported that the toads are actively colonizing newly formed cloud forests, which are high-altitude woods shrouded in mist. The researchers propose making these unique habitats into refuges for the adorable anurans.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-12-13 08:01:06

How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE's Facial Recognition Tech

This article is a partnership between Reveal and 404 Media.

Jesus Gutiérrez, 23, was walking home one morning from a Chicago gym when he noticed a gray Cadillac SUV with no license plates. He kept walking, shrugging it off. Then the car pulled over and two men got out.

The federal immigration officials told him not to run. They then peppered Gutiérrez with questions: Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Do you have your ID on you?

Gutiérrez is a U.S. citizen. He told the officials this. He didn’t have any identification on him, but, panicking, he tried to find a copy on his phone. The agents put him into the car, where another two agents were waiting, and handcuffed him. Just sit there and be quiet, they said.

💡
Has this happened to you or someone you know? Do you have any videos of ICE or CBP scanning people's faces? Do you work for either agency? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Without Gutiérrez’s ID, the agents resorted to another approach. They took a photo of his face. A short while later, the agents got their answer: “Oh yeah, he’s right. He’s saying the right thing. He does got papers,” Gutiérrez recalled the agents saying.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE's Facial Recognition Tech

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}