The Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog
During a cruel presidency where many people are in desperate need of hope, the inflatable frog stepped into the breach. Everyone loves the Portland Frog. The juxtaposition of a frog (and people in other inflatable character costumes) standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd, and that’s part of why it’s hitting so hard. But the frog is also a practical piece of passive resistance protest kit in an age of mass surveillance, police brutality, and masked federal agents disappearing people off the streets.
On October 2—just a few minutes shy of 11 PM in Portland, Oregon—a federal agent shot pepper spray into the vent hole of Seth Todd’s inflatable frog costume. Todd was protesting ICE outside of Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office when he said he saw a federal agent shove another protester to the ground. He moved to help and the agent blasted the pepper spray into his vent hole.
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The attorney not only submitted AI-generated fake citations in a brief for his clients, but also included “multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations” in the process of opposing a motion for sanctions. #law #AI
Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI
An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.
New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff’s attorneys’ request for sanctions that the defendant’s counsel, Michael Fourte’s law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions, but also included “multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations” in the process of opposing the motion.
“In other words,” the judge wrote, “counsel relied upon unvetted AI — in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues — to defend his use of unvetted AI.”
The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte’s office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.
The plaintiff and their lawyers discovered “inaccurate citations and quotations in Defendants’ opposition brief that appeared to be ‘hallucinated’ by an AI tool,” the judge wrote in his decision to sanction Fourte. After the plaintiffs brought this issue to the Court's attention, the judge wrote, Fourte submitted a response where the attorney “without admitting or denying the use of AI, ‘acknowledge[d] that several passages were inadvertently enclosed in quotation’ and ‘clarif[ied] that these passages were intended as paraphrases or summarized statements of the legal principles established in the cited authorities.’”
Judge Cohen’s order is scathing. Some of the fake quotations “happened to be arguably correct statements of law,” he wrote, but he notes that the fact that they tripped into being correct makes them no less frivolous. “Indeed, when a fake case is used to support an uncontroversial statement of law, opposing counsel and courts—which rely on the candor and veracity of counsel—in many instances would have no reason to doubt that the case exists,” he wrote. “The proliferation of unvetted AI use thus creates the risk that a fake citation may make its way into a judicial decision, forcing courts to expend their limited time and resources to avoid such a result.” In short: Don’t waste this court’s time.
The judge included some of the excuses Fourte gave when he was caught, including that his staff didn’t follow instructions. He seemed less contrite. “Your Honor, I am extremely upset that this could even happen. I don't really have an excuse,” the decision says the lawyer told Cohen. “Here is what I could say. I literally checked to make sure all these cases existed. Then, you know, I brought in additional staff. And knowing it was for the sanctions, I said that this is the issue. We can't have this. Then they wrote the opposition with me. And like I said, I looked at the cases, looked at everything; so all the quotes as I'm looking at the brief — and I thought it was a well put together brief. So I looked at the quotes and was assured every single quote was in every single case, but I did not verify every single quote. When I looked at — when I went back and asked them, because I looked at their [reply brief] last week preparing for this for the first time, and I asked them what happened? How is this even possible because, you know, when you read the opposition, I mean, it's demoralizing. It doesn't even seem like, you know, this is humanly possible.”
When the defendants’ lawyer attempted to oppose the sanctions proposed for including fake citations, he ended up submitting twice as many nonexistent or incorrect citations as before, including seven quotations that do not exist in the cited cases and three that didn’t support the propositions they were offered to, Cohen wrote. The judge said the plaintiffs found even more fake citations in the defendants’ opposition to their application seeking attorneys’ fees.
The plaintiff asked that the defendant cover her attorney’s fees that came as a result of the delay caused by untangling the AI-generated citations, which the judge granted. He also ordered the plaintiff’s counsel to submit a copy of this decision and order to the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics.
“When attorneys fail to check their work—whether AI-generated or not—they prejudice their clients and do a disservice to the Court and the profession,” Cohen wrote. “In sum, counsel’s duty of candor to the Court cannot be delegated to a software program.”
Fourte declined to comment. “As this matter remains before the Court, and out of respect for the process and client confidentiality, we will not comment on case specifics,” he told 404 Media. “We have addressed the issue directly with the Court and implemented enhanced verification and supervision protocols. We have no further comment at this time.” playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
More than 10,000 images of signs, placards, quotes, photos and more are part of the crowdsourced effort from over 300 national park and monument sites around the U.S.
‘Save Our Signs’ Preservation Project Launches Archive of 10,000 National Park Signs
On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration.
Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they’re ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration’s rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September.
The signs people have captured include historical photos from Alcatraz, stories from the African American Civil War Memorial, photos and accounts from the Brown v. Board of Education National History Park, and hundreds more sites.
Launched in July by volunteer preservationists from Safeguarding Research & Culture and the Data Rescue Project, in collaboration with librarians at the University of Minnesota, Save Our Signs started in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order, signed by Trump in March, demanded that public officials ensure that public monuments and markers under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction only ever emphasize the “beauty” and “grandeur” of the country, and demanded they remove signs that mention “negative” aspects of American history.
The order gave a deadline of September 17, and by September 20, some signs were already going missing, including signs at Acadia National Park in Maine that referenced climate change, and another at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City that referenced historical events like slavery, Japanese camps and conflicts with Native Americans, according to the Washington Post.
Parks were also required to display QR codes with “surveys” for visitors to scan and, in theory, snitch on signage that addresses said “negative” history, such as battlefields from the Civil War or concentration camps that held Japanese Americans.
The order and destruction of such signage represented another step in the Trump administration’s efforts to whitewash, alter or completely delete important public information about history, research, and science. In April, National Institutes of Health websites were marked for removal and archivists scrambled to save them, and in February, NASA website administrators were told to scrub their sites of anything that could be considered “DEI,” including mentions of indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership.
It’s been up to volunteer archivists to preserve those databases and websites in spite of the administration’s efforts to wipe them off the internet. Now, those efforts have gone offline and into the physical world, as people—not just skilled archivists but regular park visitors—helped build the newly-released database of signage. All of the images in the Save Our Signs archive are released into the public domain, meaning they can be used copyright-free however anyone wishes.
Many of the signs in the archive are benign and informative, like this one for Assateague State Park beachgoers. Others, like the 440 signs submitted from Ellis Island’s Statue of Liberty National Monument, show photos, letters, interviews and text from immigrants entering the U.S. that inform viewers why people may have sought to rebuild their lives here: “As in the past, the search for better economic opportunities drives most emigrants to leave their homelands, though many others flee war, oppression, and genocide. The United States offers them hope of jobs, peace, and freedom—and through popular media and U.S. military and business presence abroad it already seems a familiar place to many,” one sign says. “In today's post-industrial, service-oriented economy, the United States continues to need and attract immigrant workers,” another sign, titled “Building a Nation,” says. “Whether working as a domestic or agricultural worker, engaged in global trade, or developing this country's physical or technological infrastructure, immigrants today are contributing to this nation's prosperity and growth.”
Visitors submitted dozens of signs with text from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., including several quotes from Douglass: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,” one sign captured in the archive, quoting the abolitionist statesman’s “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July” address, says. “To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and you must do your work.”
“I’m so excited to share this collaborative photo collection with the public. As librarians, our goal is to preserve the knowledge and stories told in these signs. We want to put the signs back in the people’s hands,” Jenny McBurney, Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of the Save Our Signs project, said in a press release. “We are so grateful for all the people who have contributed their time and energy to this project. The outpouring of support has been so heartening. We hope the launch of this archive is a way for people to see all their work come together.”
People can still submit signs, and the project organizers are encouraging more submissions; another batch with more recent submissions will be released in the future, the Save Our Signs organizers said.
A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network.#News #nuclear
Man Stores AI-Generated Robot Porn on His Government Computer, Loses Access to Nuclear Secrets
A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network. As part of an appeals process in an attempt to get back his security clearance, the man told investigators he felt his bosses spied on him too much and that the interrogation over the porn snafu was akin to the “Spanish Inquisition."
On March 23, 2023, a DOE employee attempted to back up his personal porn collection. His goal was to use the 187,000 images collected over the past 30 years as training data for an AI-image generator. He said he had depression, something he’d struggled with since he was a kid. “During the depressive episode he felt ‘extremely isolated and lonely,’ and started ‘playing’ with tools that made generative images as a coping strategy, including ‘robot pornography,’” according to a DOE report on the incident. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Fueled by depression, the man meant to back up his collection and create a base for training AI to make better “robot pornography” but he uploaded it to the government computer by accident. He didn’t realize what he’d done until DOE investigators came calling six months later to ask why their servers were now filled with thousands of pornographic pictures.
“The Individual ‘thought that even though his personal drives were connected to [his employer’s], they were somehow partitioned, and his personal material would not contaminate his [government-issued computer],” a DOE report said.
According to the report, the man was using his cellphone to look at AI-generated porn images, but the screen wasn’t big enough so he moved the pictures to his government computer. “He also reported that, since the 1990s, he had maintained a ‘giant compressed file with several directories of pornographic images,’ which he moved to his personal cloud storage drive so he could use them to make generative images,” he said. “It was this directory of sexually explicit images that was ultimately uploaded to his employer’s network when he performed a back-up procedure on March 23, 2023.”
The 187,000 images represented a lifetime’s collection. “He stated that the sexually explicit images were an accumulation of ‘25–30 years worth of pornographic material’ he had collected on his personal computer,” he said. He told a DOE psychologist that he should have realized he’d backed up his personal porn collection to a DOE network but said he “was not thinking multiple steps ahead or considering the consequences at the time because he was so depressed.”
According to the DOE employee, he’s been treated for depression since he was a kid. He has ups and downs, and was in a bad headspace when he accidentally uploaded his entire porn collection. He admitted he violated HR rules, but “did not think it was very wrong,” according to the DOE ruling. He also “asserted that his employer ‘was spying on him a little too much’...and compared the interview with his employer following the discovery of his conduct to ‘the Spanish Inquisition.’”
When someone loses their security clearance with the DOE, they can appeal to get it back. In this case, the appeal led to a lengthy investigation and multiple interviews with various DOE psychologists and the man’s wife. When the DOE makes a ruling on an appeal they publish it publicly online, which is why we know about the man’s private porn stash.
He did not get his clearance back. “The DOE Psychologist opined that the individual's probability of experiencing another depressive episode in the future was ‘very high,’” according to the report.
A prominent beer competition introduced an AI-judging tool without warning. The judges and some members of the wider brewing industry were pissed.#News #AI
A prominent beer judging competition introduced an AI-based judging tool without warning in the middle of a competition, surprising and angering judges who thought their evaluation notes for each beer were being used to improve the AI, according to multiple interviews with judges involved. The company behind the competition, called Best Beer, also planned to launch a consumer-facing app that would use AI to match drinkers with beers, the company told 404 Media.
Best Beer also threatened legal action against one judge who wrote an open letter criticizing the use of AI in beer tasting and judging, according to multiple judges and text messages reviewed by 404 Media.
The months-long episode shows what can happen when organizations try to push AI onto a hobby, pursuit, art form, or even industry which has many members who are staunchly pro-human and anti-AI. Over the last several years we’ve seen it with illustrators, voice actors, music, and many more. AI came for beer too.
“It is attempting to solve a problem that wasn’t a problem before AI showed up, or before big tech showed up,” Greg Loudon, a certified beer judge and brewery sales manager, and who was the judge threatened with legal action, said. “I feel like AI doesn’t really have a place in beer, and if it does, it’s not going to be in things that are very human.”
“There’s so much subjectivity to it, and to strip out all of the humanity from it is a disservice to the industry,” he added. Another judge said the introduction of AI was “enshittifying” beer tasting.
💡 Do you know anything else about how AI is impacting beer? 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 story started earlier this year at a Canadian Brewing Awards judging event. Best Beer is the company behind the Canadian Brewing Awards, which gives awards in categories such as Experimental Beer, Speciality IPA, and Historic/Regional Beers. To be a judge, you have to be certified by the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which involves an exam covering the brewing process, different beer styles, judging procedures, and more.
Around the third day of the competition, the judges were asked to enter their tasting notes into a new AI-powered app instead of the platform they already use, one judge told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the judge anonymity to protect them from retaliation.
Using the AI felt like it was “parroting back bad versions of your judge tasting notes,” they said. “There wasn't really an opportunity for us to actually write our evaluation.” Judges would write what they thought of a beer, and the AI would generate several descriptions based on the judges’ notes that the judge would then need to select. It would then provide additional questions for judges to answer that were “total garbage.”
“It was taking real human feedback, spitting out crap, and then making the human respond to more crap that it crafted for you,” the judge said.
“On top of all the misuse of our time and disrespecting us as judges, that really frustrated me—because it's not a good app,” they said.
Screenshot of a Best Beer-related website.
Multiple judges then met to piece together what was happening, and Loudon published his open letter in April.
“They introduced this AI model to their pool of 40+ judges in the middle of the competition judging, surprising everyone for the sudden shift away from traditional judging methods,” the letter says. “Results are tied back to each judge to increase accountability and ensure a safe, fair and equitable judging environment. Judging for competitions is a very human experience that depends on people filling diverse roles: as judges, stewards, staff, organizers, sorters, and venue maintenance workers,” the letter says.
“Their intentions to gather our training data for their own profit was apparent,” the letter says. It adds that one judge said “I am here to judge beer, not to beta test.”
The letter concluded with this: “To our fellow beverage judges, beverage industry owners, professionals, workers, and educators: Sign our letter. Spread the word. Raise awareness about the real human harms of AI in your spheres of influence. Have frank discussions with your employers, colleagues, and friends about AI use in our industry and our lives. Demand more transparency about competition organizations.”
33 people signed the letter. They included judges, breweries, and members of homebrewer associations in Canada and the United States.
Loudon told 404 Media in a recent phone call “you need to tell us if you're going to be using our data; you need to tell us if you're going to be profiting off of our data, and you can't be using volunteers that are there to judge beer. You need to tell people up front what you're going to do.” playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… At least one brewery that entered its beer into the Canadian Brewing Awards publicly called out Best Beer and the awards. XhAle Brew Co., based out of Alberta, wrote in a Facebook post in April that it asked for its entry fees of $565 to be refunded, and for the “destruction of XhAle's data collected during, and post-judging for the Best Beer App.”
“We did not consent to our beer being used by a private equity tech fund at the cost to us (XhAle Brew Co. and Canadian Brewers) for a for-profit AI application. Nor do we condone the use of industry volunteers for the same purpose,” the post said.
Ob Simmonds, head of innovation at the Canadian Brewing Awards, told 404 Media in an email that “Breweries will have amazing insight on previously unavailable useful details about their beer and their performance in our competition. Furthermore, craft beer drinkers will be able to better sift through the noise and find beers perfect for their palate. This in no way is aimed at replacing technical judging with AI.”
With the consumer app, the idea was to “Help end users find beers that match their taste profile and help breweries better understand their results in our competition,” Simmonds said.
Simmonds said that “AI is being used to better match consumers with the best beers for their palate,” but said Best Beer is not training its own model.
Those plans have come to a halt though. At the end of September, the Canadian Brewing Awards said in an Instagram post the team was “stepping away.” It said the goal of Best Beer was to “make medals matter more to consumers, so that breweries could see a stronger return on their entries.” The organization said it “saw strong interest from many breweries, judges and consumers” and that it will donate Best Beer’s assets to a non-profit that shows interest. The post added the organization used third-party models that “were good enough to achieve the results we wanted,” and the privacy policies forbade training on the inputted data. A screenshot of the Canadian Beer Awards' Instagram post. The post included an apology: “We apologize to both judges and breweries for the communication gaps and for the disruptions caused by this year’s logistical challenges.”
In an email sent to 404 Media this month, the Canadian Brewing Awards said “the Best Beer project was never designed to replace or profit from judges.”
“Despite these intentions, the project came under criticism before it was even officially launched,” it added, saying that the open letter “mischaracterized both our goals and approach.”
“Ultimately, we decided not to proceed with the public launch of Best Beer. Instead, we repurposed parts of the technology we had developed to support a brewery crawl during our gala. We chose to pause the broader project until we could ensure the judging community felt confident that no data would be used for profit and until we had more time to clear up the confusion,” the email added. “If judges wanted their data deleted what assurance can we provide them that it was in fact deleted. Everything was judged blind and they would have no access to our database from the enhanced division. For that reason, we felt it was more responsible to shelve the initiative for now.”
One judge told 404 Media: “I don’t think anyone who is hell bent on using AI is going to stop until it’s no longer worth it for them to do so.”
“I just hope that they are transparent if they try to do this again to judges who are volunteering their time, then either pay them or give them the chance ahead of time to opt-out,” they added.
Now months after this all started, Loudon said “The best beers on the market are art forms. They are expressionist. They're something that can't be quantified. And the human element to it, if you strip that all away, it just becomes very basic, and very sanitized, and sterilized.”
XhAle is not just a craft beer company. We are a company comprised of majority equity-deserving folks, and have been and still are marginalized in this industry. We understand and have personally...
Earth’s Climate Has Passed Its First Irreversible Tipping Point and Entered a ‘New Reality’
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Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November.
Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.
“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.
The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5°C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.
Warm-water corals are rich ecosystems that support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and income to more than a billion people. These vital reefs have experienced “diebacks” for years as rising marine temperatures produce mass-mortality bleaching events. But the severe marine heat waves of 2023 were particularly devastating, and the corals are now reaching their thermal threshold. The report concludes that they are virtually certain to tip toward widespread diebacks, though preventive actions can mitigate the extent of loss and secure small refuges.
“The marine heat wave hit 80 percent of the world's warm-water coral reefs with the worst bleaching event on record,” said Smith. “Their response confirms that we can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk. The widespread dieback of warm-water coral reefs is already underway, and it's impacting hundreds of millions of people who depend on the reef for fishing, for tourism, for coastal protection, and from rising seas and storm surges.”
The report singled out Caribbean corals as a useful case study given that these ecosystems face a host of pressures, including extreme weather, overfishing, and inadequate sewage and pollution management. These coral diebacks are a disaster not only for the biodiverse inhabitants of the reefs, but also for the many communities who depend on them for food, income, coastal protection, and as a part of cultural identity.
“The Caribbean is in a particularly precarious situation,” Melanie McField, founder and director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, an NGO operating in the Mesoamerican Reef, told 404 Media during the briefing. "We are very concerned about the Caribbean, but it's actually all of these warm-water reefs. They're all facing the same thing.”
McField added that the actions needed to bolster the corals’ defense against rising temperatures are clear, and include better sewage treatment, the creation of marine preserves, and more strident efforts to tackle overfishing.
“We've been saying the same things,” she said. “We haven't done them. Those are things that are completely in the power of national and local regulators.”
To that end, the report emphasizes that new governmental frameworks and institutions will need to be formed to tackle these problems, because the current system is clearly not up to the task. Avoiding future tipping points will not only require a doubling-down on decarbonization, but also demands major progress toward carbon removal technologies.
“We need to rapidly scale and take seriously the need for sustainable and equitable carbon removal technologies,” said Manjana Milkoreit, a postdoctoral researcher of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo. “Carbon removal is now the only way to bring global temperatures back down after overshoot—to achieve net negative, not just net zero emissions. That requires serious and sustained investment, starting now.”
“We are currently not preparing for the distinct impacts of tipping points, and we do not have the capacities to address the cascading effects of tipping points,” she concluded. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we're already doing everything we can. It's not just more of the same. A different approach to governance is needed.”
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Tipping Points Briefing Papers Download the Tipping Points Policy Brief here. Download A positive tipping cascade in power, transport and heating Download the study here.
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that lived long, played hard, crashed out, and topped it off with a glass of claret.
First off, it’s Naked Mole-Rat Week! Or at least it should be, given that there are multiple new studies about these rodents, which are neither moles nor rats, but are certifiably naked. Then: dogs on benders; ships on ice; and an aged wine with notes of oak, blackberry, and aggressive trade policy.
The age of Man is over; the time of the Mole-Rat has come
What a whirlwind week it’s been for the naked mole-rat beat, with studies that shed light into the complex social behavior of these burrowing rodents as well as their extreme longevity. Let’s make like a naked mole-rat and dig in!
Naked mole-rats didn’t get the memo about being a normal mammal and instead opted for a “eusocial” society similar to insects that is ruled by a colony queen with an entourage of breeder males, which are supported by a caste system of non-breeding workers. It’s super weird, but it seems to be working out for them because they can live to nearly 40 years old—ten times longer than most animals their size—and they are highly resistant to cancer and a host of other deathbringers.
Scientists took a closer look at the palace intrigue of these rodents by setting up several colonies in laboratory conditions and tracking their movements with microchips. The results revealed that queens are bossy bullies that get so tired from shoving their subjects around that they have to take frequent royal naps. Different chambers in the experiment. Image: Yamakawa, Masanori et al. Non-breeding workers, meanwhile, fell into six main “clusters” including cleaners, transport specialists, caretakers, diggers, and a group that just kind of idly loafs around (my spirit mole-rat cluster).
“Breeding females patrol burrows and display agonistic dominance toward nonbreeders paralleling queen aggression in primitively eusocial insects,” said Masanori Yamakawa of Kumamoto University. Meanwhile, non-breeding “cluster 1 individuals (high mobility and garbage occupancy) may serve as transport specialists, whereas those in cluster 4 (low mobility and frequent occupancy of nonfunctional chambers) may engage primarily in digging tasks. Cluster 5 individuals, who frequently occupied toilet chambers, may contribute to cleaning-related roles.”
In addition to this window into mole-rat social behavior, a new genetic analysis identified the critical role of an enzyme called cGAS, a common component in animal immune systems, in extending the lives of these subterranean super-agers.
Whereas cGAS may hinder DNA repair in most animals, including humans and mice, the naked mole-rat has evolved a version of the enzyme with four modified amino acids that enhances DNA repair . Naturally, the researchers also engineered some fruit flies with this naked mole rat enzyme—you gotta mess with fruit flies or it’s not science—and lo and behold, the juiced flies lived to about 70 days, roughly ten days longer than the control group.
“Our work provides a molecular basis for how DNA repair is activated to contribute to the exceptional longevity during evolution in naked mole-rats,” said researchers led by Yu Chen of Tongji University in Shanghai. “These findings support the notion that efficient DNA repair decelerates the aging process and raise the possibility that targeting cGAS to enhance DNA repair could provide an intervention strategy for promoting longevity.”
All those past adventurers were looking for the Fountain of Youth in the wrong places; it wasn’t in some beautiful tropical grove, but rather a stanky underground rodent pit.
Dogs can literally get addicted to the game, according to a study that probed “‘excessive toy motivation” in domestic dogs as “a potential parallel to behavioral addictions in humans.” What this means in practice is that researchers enlisted 105 dogs to play with a lot of really fun toys and about a third of them got totally hooked. youtube.com/embed/6hDndTOibQs?… Thirty-three of the playful pooches “exhibited behaviors consistent with addictive-like tendencies including an excessive fixation on toys, reduced responsiveness to alternative stimuli, and persistent efforts to access toys,” said researchers led by Alja Mazzini of the University of Bern. “Dogs [are] the only non-human species so far that appears to develop addictive-like behaviours spontaneously without artificial induction.” A bull terrier during tug-of-war play. Image: Alja Mazzini While this an interesting scientific conclusion, the study is perhaps most notable for producing delightful footage of dogs in the midst of full-on toy benders. Like all of us who struggle with bad habits and fixations, these dogs will just have to take it one play at a time.
Endurance, the ship crushed by ice in 1915 during Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition, was actually not all that endurant, according to Jukka Tukuri of Aalto University who concludes in a new study that “Shackleton was well aware of the risks related to the strength of Endurance, but chose to use it anyway.”
“This ship is not as strong as the Nimrod constructionally” wrote Shackleton of Endurance in a letter to his wife in 1914, comparing it to his previous Antarctic ride. “There is nothing to be scared of as I think she will go through ice all right only I would exchange her for the old Nimrod any day now except for comfort.”
To fight off that polar chill, let’s warm up for the (North American) long weekend with a really, really aged glass of wine. A new study upends the traditional narrative about the emergence of Bordeaux claret as a desired wine in the 1600s, suggesting it was not strictly developed in response to tariffs (Sike! I used wine to lure you into a disguised tariff story).
“The advent of a stronger, darker style of Bordeaux red wine, known as claret, in the English market has drawn substantial scholarly interest because it played a pivotal role in the balance of trade and international political economy during the eighteenth century,” said author Charlie Leary, a wine historian.
“Economic historians have posited that Bordeaux vignerons developed high-quality, high-priced claret in response to England’s fixed, volume-based tariffs on French wine,” he continued. “This article…shows that the new claret style pre-existed England’s tariff regime.”
With that, cheers to lost years and jeers to economic fears.
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a ransomware gang, book bans, and infrastructure.
JOSEPH: I thought I’d give you something from the digital underground that happened last night. So recently a group that goes by the name Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (I know, it’s a mouthful) has been threatening to dump data from customers of Salesforce. The group’s name is an amalgamation of a bunch of other English-speaking loosely connected hacking groups: Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, Shiny Hunters, etc. This latest iteration is trying to get Salesforce to pay a ransom; Salesforce says it won’t. The group says it has data from all sorts of companies, including Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more.
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A Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media .
“Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, said (AI4P is AI for Productivity). The idea is that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working—not just using it to go 5 percent more efficiently.
“Our goal is simple yet audacious: make Al a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone, so that using Al becomes second nature—just like any other tool we rely on,” the message read. “It also means integrating Al into every major codebase and workflow.” Shah added that this doesn’t just apply to engineers. “I want to see PMs, designers, and [cross functional] partners rolling up their sleeves and building prototypes, fixing bugs, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible,” he wrote. “I want to see us go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down. And 5X faster to get to how our products feel much more quickly. Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea, and feedback loops are measured in hours—not weeks. That's the future we're building.”
Zuckerberg has spoken extensively about how he expects AI agents to write most of Meta’s code within the next 12 to 18 months. The company also recently decided that job candidates would be allowed to use AI as part of their coding tests during job interviews. But Shah’s message highlights a fear that workers have had for quite some time: That bosses are not just expecting to replace workers with AI, they are expecting those who remain to use AI to become far more efficient. The implicit assumption is that the work that skilled humans do without AI simply isn’t good enough. At this point, most tech giants are pushing AI on their workforces. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in July that he expects AI to completely transform how the company works—and lead to job loss. "In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," he said.
Many experienced software engineers feel like AI coding agents are creating a new crisis, where codebases contain bugs and errors that are difficult to fix since humans don’t necessarily know how specific code was written or what it does. This means a lot of engineers have become babysitters who have to fix vibe coded messes written by AI coding agents.
In his message, Shah said that “we expect 80 percent of Metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year, with rapid growth in engineering usage and a relentless focus on learning from the time and output we gain.” He went on to reference a series of upcoming trainings and internal documents about AI coding, including two “Metaverse day of AI learning” events.
“Dedicate the time. Take the training seriously. Share what you learn, and don’t be afraid to experiment,” he added. “The more we push ourselves, the more we’ll unlock. A 5X leap in productivity isn’t about small incremental improvements, it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we work, build, and innovate.” He ended the post with a graphic featuring a futuristic building with the words “Metaverse AI4P Think 5X, not 5%” superimposed on top.
A Meta spokesperson told 404 Media “it's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work."
Vibe/No Code Tech Debt Like many, I’ve been dabbling with Vibe and No Code — to see who and what are coming for my lunch. At the same time, I’m reading all the articles on the rise in tech debt …
The project, called Epstein Archive and released on Github, allows people to search the database to find files that mention specific people, organizations, locations, and dates. Thousands of people are named in the more than 33,295 pages worth of files released by the House Oversight Committee last month as part of its investigation into Epstein. The files, which are partial and redacted (as in, they are not the “full Epstein files”), were subpoenaed by the committee from the Department of Justice. The files were released to the public in an extremely poorly organized Google Drive folder, and were released primarily as jpg and tif images of documents, which are not in any discernible order. Because of this, they have been an absolute nightmare to search.
The Redditor, nicko170, said they had a large language model transcribe, collate, and summarize the documents and built the database to make the files more easily searchable.
“It processes and tries to restore documents into a full document from the mixed pages - some have errored, but will capture them and come back to fix,” they wrote. “Not here to make a buck, just hoping to collate and sort through all these files in an efficient way for everyone.”
On the project’s GitHub, they further explain how it was built:
“This project automatically processes thousands of scanned document pages using AI-powered OCR to:
Extract and preserve all text (printed and handwritten)
Identify and index entities (people, organizations, locations, dates)
Reconstruct multi-page documents from individual scans
Provide a searchable web interface to explore the archive
This is a public service project. All documents are from public releases. This archive makes them more accessible and searchable.”
The database only features OCR’ed transcripts of the files and not images of the files, though it does tell users the filename so they can go and download the actual document themselves. Like essentially all OCR and LLM projects, there are some errors. Some of the transcripts are gibberish, presumably caused by blurry or illegible type and handwriting on the source documents. But the project represents a pretty good use of AI technology, because the source documents themselves are so messy and were released in such a terrible format that is extremely time consuming to go through them.
The database is indeed pretty usable; I was able to quickly find files that mention Donald Trump (which have already been widely reported on).
To be clear, there are no new files included in this tool, but for people who are looking to explore what has been released in a coherent, straightforward way, this is one of the better options out there. Besides releasing the database and the code for it on Github, they have also turned the entire project into a torrent file, meaning it cannot be easily deleted from the internet.
A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive information online.#News
A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.
The hack, carried out by a group that is attempting to extort Discord, shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ identity documents, and specifically in the context of verifying their age. Discord started asking users in the UK, for example, to upload a selfie with their ID as part of the country’s age verification law recently.
💡 Do you know anything else about this breach? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
“This is about to get really ugly,” the hackers wrote in a Telegram channel, which 404 Media joined, while posting user data on Wednesday. A source with knowledge of the breach confirmed to 404 Media that the data is legitimate. 404 Media granted the source anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive incident.
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The vast majority of mice that received the vaccine warded off repeated exposure to cancer cells, but the applications for humans are still not known.#vaccine #science #TheAbstract
A New 'Nanoparticle Vaccine' Prevented Cancer In Mice, Study Says
Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday.
Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.
It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.
“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”
“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.” playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system.
Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.
Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors.
What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells.
Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.
“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”
One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.
“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.
Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors.
“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”
That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all.
“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”
Nanoparticles are polymeric particles in the nanometer size range whereas microparticles are particles in the micrometre size range. Both types of particle are used as drug carriers into which drugs or antigens may be incorporated in the form of ...
Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America
Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread, highly successful effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This movement has leveraged these successes to seize power not just in city councils and local school boards but has succeeded in making censorship and “anti wokeness” one of the dominant political ideologies in the United States.
We have successfully gained access to public records that show, for example, how a local group in Idaho successfully got a police officer to go hunting for “obscene” books at the public library, the playbook behind getting "Drag Storytime" library events canceled, how superintendents in Florida couldn’t figure out how to comply with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and have spoken to numerous librarians, scientists, and professors to learn how educational freedom, free access to information, and historic archives are under attack. Today—which happens to be the fourth day of Banned Books Week—we are proud and excited to announce that we will be continuing and ramping up this work over the next year with the help of a grant from our friends and colleagues at government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. (We’re also excited to partner with Muckrock on this new piece of limited edition merch it made for Banned Books week).
From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.”
Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media.
As always, we will need some help from our readers. We need help deciding what to look for, which school districts and cities to seek public records from, and need leads on where we should point our reporting efforts. During the height of the pandemic, many city councils made their meeting minutes and meeting transcripts searchable, so we have a good sense of the types of organizations and communities that have been most severely affected by educational censorship and book bans, and have a good idea of where to get started. But if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know by emailing jason@[url=https://web.brid.gy/404media.co]404 Media[/url] or by reaching out to Jason securely over Signal at jason.404. And if you want to further support this work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber or by donating to our tip jar.
‘We don’t want democracy lol. We want caliphate.’ According to court records, an Oklahoma guardsman with a security clearance gave 3D printed firearms to an FBI agent posing as an Al Qaeda contact.#News
National Guardsman Planned American Caliphate on Discord, Sent 3D Printed Guns to Al Qaeda, Feds Say
The FBI accused a former National Guardsman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma of trying to sell 3D printed guns to Al Qaeda. According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department in September, 25-year-old Andrew Scott Hastings used a Discord server to plan a Caliphate in America and shipped more than 100 3D printed machine gun conversion kits to an undercover FBI operative who claimed he had contacts in the terrorist organization. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The Army Times first reported the story after the DOJ unsealed the charging documents. According to the court records, Hastings first landed on the radar of authorities in 2019 when a co-worker at an Abuelo’s restaurant in Tulsa called the police to report he’d been talking about blowing things up. When the cops interviewed Hastings, he told them he was just interested in chemistry and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. In 2020, the cops interviewed his mom. “Hastings’ mother, Terri, told TPD that her son was on the [autism] spectrum, was socially active online, and had converted to Islam.”
According to Terri, odd incidents piled up. She said that someone mailed Hastings a Quran, that he’d once received an order of chicken wings paid for by someone in Indonesia, and that he’d once threatened his family with a can of gasoline. “She also mentioned an incident in the family home where Hastings became enraged when she cooked bacon, and thereafter called someone she described as his ‘handler,’” according to court records.
The charging documents said the FBI got involved in 2024 because of a Discord server called “ARMY OF MUHAMMAD.” Discord cooperated with the FBI investigation and granted access to some of Hastings’ records to authorities. The FBI alleged that Hastings met with several other people on the Discord server and plotted terror attacks against Americans. At this time, Hastings worked for the National Guard as an aircraft powertrain repairer and held a SECRET-level national security clearance.
The charging documents detailed Hastings' alleged plot to establish a caliphate in the US via Discord. “[T]he most important theater right now is cyberspace…we need an actionable plan we can start work on--something slow and Ling(sic) term not hasty and slapdash,” Hastings allegedly said on Discord. “I think it would be best if we create a channel and I’ll list a physical training routine.”
“If we get 9-10 guys maybe inshaAllah we can …we could put headquarters in the USA cuz yk [you know] if we are fighting them the military is prohibited from operations on the homeland only ntnal [sic] guard and agencies can operate within borders…[y]ou need to contest air land and cyberspace…what my plan addresses is how to contest all of these at once while providing more aid than harm we can do in collateral and taking out targets of higher strength.”
According to the FBI’s version of events, Hastings talked about moving the group off of Discord and onto Signal because he believed Discord wasn’t secure. He also bragged about police interrogating him about explosives and “claimed to have made a firearm and discussed making a nuclear rocket.”
“We don’t want democracy lol,” he said on Discord, according to court records. “We want caliphate”
Hastings talked about other groups he was in contact with on Signal, offered to make training videos about weapon handling, and told others on the Discord server that he knew how to make firearms and was willing to ship them to like-minded militants. “I already have some small arms components partially finished and nearly ready to issue,” he said, according to the charging document. “I’ll send one photo but wanna remain kinda anonymous.”
The FBI said it slipped an “Online Covert Employee” (OCE) into Hastings’ life on March 26, 2025. Posing as a person on eBay, the FBI employee told Hastings he had contacts with Al Qaeda. “The OCE then recommended they move the conversation to Telegram or Signal, the latter of which Hastings said did not even have ‘a backdoor,’ meaning it could not be hacked or intercepted by law enforcement.”
The issue, of course, is that Hastings was speaking with an FBI employee. Over the next few months, Hastings spoke with the OCE about using a 3D printer to manufacture weapons for them with the eventual goal of getting them in the hands of Al Qaeda. Hastings allegedly told the OCE that he’d been discharged from the military and needed to make money.
In the summer of 2025, the FBI alleged that Hastings started mass printing Glock parts and switch conversion kits for Al Qaeda. “Hastings told the OCE he was moving out of his parent’s home in July 2025 after they complained about the noise and smell created when he 3D printed weapons,” the court documents said. The FBI allegedly has video of Hastings at a post office shipping multiple packages that summer that authorities said contained more than 100 3D printed switches, two 3D printed lower receivers for a Glock, and one 3D printed Glock slide.
The FBI has charged Hastings with attempting to provide material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations and illegal possession or transfer of a machinegun. The Justice Department considers every single 3D conversion kit Hastings shipped an individual machinegun, even when they’re not installed.
Eyes Up's purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Apple's crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.
Eyes Upx27;s purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Applex27;s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.#News
Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.
The news shows that Appleand Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.
“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”
💡 Do you work at Apple or Google and know anything else about these app removals? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.
The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.
“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.
Screenshots of Eyes Up.
The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.
Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.
“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told 404 Media “Like any other government agency, DHS is required to follow the law. The collection of video evidence is a powerful tool of oversight to ensure that the government respects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike. People have a right to film interactions with law enforcement in public spaces and to share those videos with others.”
“If DHS is concerned that the actions of their own officers might inflame public opinion against the agency, they should work to increase oversight and accountability at the agency — rather than seek to have the evidence banned,” he added.
Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.
Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”
ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.
Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”
The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.
Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.
OpenAI’s Sora 2 platform started just one week ago as an AI-generated copyright infringement free-for-all. Now, people say they’re struggling to generate anything without being hit with a violation error.#OpenAI #Sora #Sora2
People Are Crashing Out Over Sora 2’s New Guardrails
Sora, OpenAI’s new social media platform for its Sora 2 image generation model, launched eight days ago. In the first days of the app, users did what they always do with a new tool in their hands: generate endless chaos, in this case images of Spongebob Squarepants in a Nazi uniform and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting or throwing Pikachus on the grill.
In little over a week, Sora 2 and OpenAI have caught a lot of heat from journalists like ourselves stress-testing the app, but also, it seems, from rightsholders themselves. Now, Sora 2 refuses to generate all sorts of prompts, including characters that are in the public domain like Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content,” the app said when I tried to generate Dracula hanging out in Paris, for example.
When Sora 2 launched, it had an opt-out policy for copyright holders, meaning owners of intellectual property like Nintendo or Disney or any of the many, many massive corporations that own copyrighted characters and designs being directly copied and published on the Sora platform would need to contact OpenAI with instances of infringement to get them removed. Days after launch, and after hundreds of iterations of him grilling Pokemon or saying “I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us!” flooded his platform, Altman backtracked that choice in a blog post, writing that he’d been listening to “feedback” from rightsholders. “First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote on Saturday. But generating copyrighted characters was a huge part of what people wanted to do on the app, and now that they can’t (and the guardrails are apparently so strict, they’re making it hard to get even non-copyrighted content generated), users are pissed. People started noticing the changes to guardrails on Saturday, immediately after Altman’s blog post. “Did they just change the content policy on Sora 2?” someone asked on the OpenAI subreddit. “Seems like everything now is violating the content policy.” Almost 300 people have replied in that thread so far to complain or crash out about the change. “It's flagging 90% of my requests now. Epic fail.. time to move on,” someone replied.
“Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America's AI industry. I've cancelled my OpenAI PLUS subscription,” another replied, implying that copyright law is leftist.
A ton of the videos on Sora right now are of Martin Luther King, Jr. either giving brainrot versions of his iconic “I have a dream” speech and protesting OpenAI’s Sora guardrails. “I have a dream that Sora AI should stop being so strict,” AI MLK says in one video. Another popular prompt is for Bob Ross, who, in most of the videos featuring the deceased artist, is shown protesting getting a copyright violation on his own canvas. If you scroll Sora for even a few seconds today, you will see videos that are primarily about the content moderation on the platform. Immediately after the app launched, many popular videos featured famous characters; now some of the most popular videos are about how people are pissed that they can no longer make videos with those characters.
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OpenAI claimed it’s taken “measures” to block depictions of public features except those who consent to be used in the app. “Only you decide who can use your cameo, and you can revoke access at any time.” As Futurism noted earlier this week, Sora 2 has a dead celebrity problem, with “videos of Michael Jackson rapping, for instance, as well as Tupac Shakur hanging out in North Korea and John F. Kennedy rambling about Black Friday deals” all over the platform. Now, people are using public figures, in theory against the platform’s own terms of use, to protest the platform’s terms of use.
Oddly enough, a lot of memes for whining about the guardrails and content violations on Sora right now are using LEGO minifigs — the little LEGO people-shaped figures that are not only a huge part of the brand’s physical toy sets, but also a massively popular movie franchise owned by Universal Pictures — to voice their complaints.
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In June, Disney and Universal sued AI generator Midjourney, calling it a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" in the lawsuit, and Warner Bros. Discovery later joined the lawsuit. And in September, Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal sued Chinese image generator Hailuo AI for infringing on its copyright.
In recent months, studios have started to sue AI companies that allow users to generate images and videos of copyrighted characters. They characterize the alleged theft of their content as an existential threat to Hollywood.
We start this week with a couple of our articles about Sora 2, OpenAI’s new AI slop app. People are already using tools to remove watermarks from its AI-generated videos. Great! After the break, we talk about Apple and Google removing various ICE-spotting apps from their app stores, with Apple doing it after direct pressure from the U.S. government. In the subscribers-only section, we have a substantial update to a story concerning Flock and a woman who self-administered an abortion. 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/fTz5ODv_uZQ?…
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 …
New leaked documents show how the FBI convinced a judge to let its partners collect a mass of encrypted messages from thousands of phones around the world.#News
Cocaine in Private Jets and Sex Toys: What the FBI Found on its Secretly Backdoored Chat App
Private jets loaded with cocaine landing at an airport in Germany. A trafficker stuffing a racing sail boat with drugs and entering a tournament to blend in with other racers before speeding off. Vacuum-sealed layers of methamphetamine inside solar panels. And nearly 60 kilograms of drugs hidden inside a shipment of sex toys.
These are just some of the examples included in a cache of leaked U.S. Department of Justice documents the FBI used to convince a judge to let them continue harvesting messages from Anom. Anom was an encrypted phone and app the FBI secretly took over, backdoored, and ran for years as a tech company popular with organized crime around the world. The Anom operation, dubbed Trojan Shield, was the largest sting operation ever.
The documents provide more insight into the sorts of criminals swept up in the FBI’s investigation, and give behind-the-scenes detail on how exactly the FBI obtained legal approval for such a gigantic, and to some controversial, operation. The leaked documents include the original court orders from Lithuania, which assisted the FBI in collecting the data from Anom devices worldwide, and the FBI’s supporting documentation for those court orders. The documents were not supposed to be released publicly, but someone posted them anonymously online.
💡 Do you know anything else about Anom, Sky, Encrochat, or other encrypted phone companies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
“Like I said this Turbo crew are the Pablo Escobar of this time in that area and got full control there,” one message written by an alleged drug trafficker included in the documents reads.
404 Media showed sections of the documents to people with direct knowledge of the operation who said they appeared authentic. Finnish outlet Yle reported on some of their contents at the end of September, but 404 Media is publishing copies of the documents themselves.
In 2018 the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. In the wake of that, a seller from Phantom Secure and another popular company called Sky offered U.S. authorities their own, in-development encrypted device: Anom. The FBI then took Anom under its wing and oversaw a backdoor placed into the app. This involved adding a “ghost” contact to every group chat and direct message across the platform. The operation started in Australia as a beta test, before expanding to Europe, South America, and other parts of the world, sweeping up messages from cartels to biker gangs to hitmen to money launderers. A screenshot from the documents. Some of the documents are formal requests for continued assistance from the U.S. to Lithuania and spell out the sort of criminal activity the FBI has seen on the Anom platform. Several sections name specific and well-known drug traffickers. One is Maximillian Rivkin, also known as “Microsoft.” As I chronicled in my book about Anom, Rivkin was a devilishly creative drug trafficker, constantly making new schemes to smuggle cocaine or other narcotics. The new documents say Rivkin’s Serbia-based organized crime group was involved in the trafficking of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine between South America and Spain. To move the drugs, the group sailed a boat during a November 2020 regatta, a sailing race, “where their travel will be obscured by other boats and sail to the Caribbean,” the documents say. Around two or three weeks later, the boat would then return to Europe with the cocaine, before being dropped off the coast of Spain where another member of the group would pick it up, the documents add.
These sorts of audacious, over-the-top drug smuggling operations were a common sight on Anom, according to my own review of hundreds of thousands of Anom text messages between drug traffickers I previously obtained. The new documents also specifically name Hakan Ayik, who was the head of the so-called Aussie Cartel, which controlled as much as a third of all drug importation into Australia, and who at one point was Australia’s most wanted criminal. Ayik discussed sending a massive 900 kilograms of cocaine through Malaysia to Australia concealed within shipments of scrap metal, according to the documents.
“Can you give me roughly the coordinates where’s the better place to meet outside Indonesian waters,” Ayik, using the moniker Oscar, said in one of the messages included in the documents. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Both Rivkin and Ayik were later arrested by Turkish authorities. Ayik was also known as the “encryption king,” likely due to his prolific selling of encrypted communication devices to organized criminals.
Other examples in the documents include a Dutch drug trafficking group involving a man called Guiliano Domenico Azzarito. That group smuggled cocaine between South America and Europe with private jet flights into small and medium sized airports the group controls, according to the documents. “Look we can move 20 tons easily every month from here in the future,” one message said.
Another describes Baris Tukel, a high-ranking Comanchero motorcycle gang member who was later charged by the U.S. for helping to spread Anom devices, discussing plans to hide methamphetamine and MDMA in marble tiles. In another case, a drug trafficker with the username RealG discussed smuggling drugs on a sailboat, inside shipments of bananas and hides, and cocaine base hidden inside fertilizer.
In September 2020, a drug trafficking group smuggled a shipment of cocaine and methamphetamine from the UK, through Singapore, to Australia, according to the documents. Authorities later searched the shipment, and found nearly 60 kilograms of drugs “concealed within 21 boxes of sex toys,” the documents say. A screenshot from the documents. The messages included in the document also detail some of the extreme violence Anom users engaged in. Simon Bekiri, a Comanchero member, discussed an assault against a rival gang, according to the documents. “I even pistol whipped him 3 times and blood was squirting out of his head almost a meter high in time with his heartbeat (That part was really funny),” one of the messages reads. “But when you say I pistol whipped him, shot him, bashed him and then took off in his car I’ll admit it does sound violent.”
These examples were used to help convince a Lithuanian judge to allow local authorities to continue providing the FBI with Anom messages. In an unusual legal workaround, instead of running the Anom collection server in the U.S., which may have created more legal headaches, the Department of Justice arranged for it to be run in Lithuania. Lithuanian authorities then provided a regular stream of collected Anom messages to the FBI. In all, Anom grew to 12,000 devices and the FBI collected tens of millions of messages before shutting the network down in June 2021.
404 Media first revealed in September 2023 Lithuania was the so-called “third country” that harvested the messages for the FBI. The Department of Justice has never formally acknowledged Lithuania’s role despite the leaked documents further corroborating 404 Media’s reporting.
For years the FBI ran its own encrypted phone company to intercept messages from thousands of people around the globe. One country was critical to that operation, whose identity was unknown to the public. Until now.
Sora 2, Open AI’s new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes.
A simple search for “sora watermark” on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he’s not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. “It was predictable,” he said. “Sora isn’t the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn’t the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.” youtube.com/embed/QvkJlMWUUxU?… Hours after its release on September 30, Sora 2 emerged as a copyright violation machine full of Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pickachus. Open AI has tamped down on that kind of content after the initial thrill of seeing Rick and Morty shill for crypto sent people scrambling to download the app. Now that the novelty is wearing off we’re grappling with the unpleasant fact that Open AI’s new tool is very good at making realistic videos that are hard to distinguish from reality.
To help us all from going mad, Open AI has offered watermarks. “At launch, all outputs carry a visible watermark,” Open AI said in a blog post. “All Sora videos also embed C2PA metadata—an industry-standard signature—and we maintain internal reverse-image and audio search tools that can trace videos back to Sora with high accuracy, building on successful systems from ChatGPT image generation and Sora 1.”
But experts say that those safeguards fall short. “A watermark (visual label) is not enough to prevent persistent nefarious users attempting to trick folks with AI generated content from Sora,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, told 404 Media.
Tobac also said she’s seen tools that dismantle AI-generated metadata by altering the content’s hue and brightness. “Unfortunately we are seeing these Watermark and Metadata Removal tools easily break that standard,” Tobac said of the C2PA metadata. “This standard will still work for less persistent AI slop generators, but will not stop dedicated bad actors from tricking people.”
As an example of how much trouble we’re in, Tobac pointed to an AI-generated video that went viral on TikTok over the weekend she called “stranger husband train.” In the video, a woman riding the subway cutely proposes marriage to a complete stranger sitting next to her. He accepts. One instance of the video has been liked almost 5 million times on TikTok. It didn’t have a watermark.
“We're already seeing relatively harmless AI Sora slop confusing even the savviest of Gen Z and Millennial users,” Tobac said. “With many typically-savvy commenters naming how ‘cooked’ we are because they believed it was real. This type of viral AI slop account will attempt to make as much money from the creator fund as possible before social media companies learn they need to invest in detecting and limiting AI slop, before their platform succumbs to the Slop Fest.”
But it’s not just the slop. It’s also the scams. “At its most innocuous, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata accelerates the enshittification of the internet and tricks people with inflammatory content,” Tobac said. “At its most malignant, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata could lead to every day people losing their savings in scams, becoming even more disenfranchised during election season, could tank a stock price within a few hours, could increase the tension between differing groups of people, and could inspire violence, terrorism, stampede or panic amongst everyday folks.”
Tobac showed 404 Media a few horrifying videos to illustrate her point. In one, a child pleads with their parents for bail money. In another, a woman tells the local news she’s going home after trying to vote because her polling place was shut down. In a third, Sam Altman tells a room that he can no longer keep Open AI afloat because the copyright cases have become too much to handle. All of the videos looked real. None of them have a watermark.
“All of these examples have one thing in common,” Tobac said. “They’re attempting to generate AI content for use off Sora 2’s platform on other social media to create mass or targeted confusion, harm, scams, dangerous action, or fear for everyday folk who don’t understand how believable AI can look now in 2025.”
Farid told 404 Media that Sora 2 wasn’t uniquely dangerous. It’s just one among many. “It is part of a continuum of AI models being able to create images and video that are passing through the uncanny valley,” he said. “Having said that, both Veo 3 and Sora 2 are big steps in our ability to create highly visual compelling videos. And, it seems likely that the same types of abuses we’ve seen in the past will be supercharged by these new powerful tools.”
According to Farid, Open AI is decent at employing strategies like watermarks, content credentials, and semantic guardrails to manage malicious use. But it doesn’t matter. “It is just a matter of time before someone else releases a model without these safeguards,” he said.
Both Tobac and Farid said that the ease at which people can remove watermarks from AI-generated content wasn’t a reason to stop using watermarks. “Using a watermark is the bare minimum for an organization attempting to minimize the harm that their AI video and audio tools create,” Tobac said, but she thinks the companies need to go further. “We will need to see a broad partnership between AI and Social Media companies to build in detection for scams/harmful content and AI labeling not only on the AI generation side, but also on the upload side for social media platforms. Social Media companies will also need to build large teams to manage the likely influx of AI generated social media video and audio content to detect and limit the reach for scammy and harmful content.”
Tech companies have, historically, been bad at that kind of moderation at scale.
“I’d like to know what OpenAI is doing to respond to how people are finding ways around their safeguards,” Farid said. “We are seeing, for example, Sora not allowing videos that reference Hitler in the prompt, but then users are finding workarounds by simply describing what Hitler looks like (e.g., black hair, black military outfit and a Charlie Chaplin mustache.) Will they adapt and strengthen their guardrails? Will they ban users from their platforms? If they are not aggressive here, then this is going to end badly for us all.”
Open AI did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Court records show that the narrative Flock and a Texas Sheriff's Office has told the public isn't the whole story, and that police were conducting a 'death investigation' into the abortion.
Court records show that the narrative Flock and a Texas Sheriffx27;s Office has told the public isnx27;t the whole story, and that police were conducting a x27;death investigationx27; into the abortion.#Flock #Abortion
Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime
In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”
But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media, also show that the Flock search was performed more than two weeks after the woman had the abortion. The documents were created as part of an arrest affidavit against the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her at gunpoint on the day she took the abortion pill.
In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.
404 Media’s initial reporting on the incident became national news, has been cited in several government investigations into how Flock is used by police, and has led to several reforms by Flock itself. The company and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly used it as a high-profile example of an ‘activist’ mediathat is biased against his company. The documents show that the narrative pushed by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and repeated by Flock is not the full story, and that police did consider charging the woman with a crime. “For months, Flock Safety and the Johnson County Sheriff insisted that she was being searched for as a missing person and accused journalists and advocates of spreading 'clickbait' misinformation,” Rin Alajaji, legislative activist at the EFF, told 404 Media. “Now we have the official records, and they prove the exact opposite: Texas deputies did investigate this woman's abortion as a ‘death investigation,’ they did use Flock Safety’s ALPR network to track her down, and they did consult prosecutors about charging her. The only misinformation came from the company and the sheriff trying to cover their tracks. We’ve warned about this for over a decade now: when a single search can access more than 83,000 cameras across nearly the entire country, the potential for abuse is enormous. This makes it crystal clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it's being used.”
The documents highlight how Flock, whose cameras are installed in thousands of communities around the country, and which 404 Media has revealed police use on behalf of ICE, ultimately may not know what its customers are using the technology for. Flock declined to comment for this article.
According to the documents obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media, police came to the woman’s house to investigate the incident on May 9, after the woman’s partner called the police to report that she had an abortion on April 23, more than two weeks earlier. The arrest report states that they had opened a “death investigation case” regarding the fetus. The woman was not at the house at the time, though there is no indication in the arrest report that the man or the police were concerned about her whereabouts at the time.
“The incident of the abortion/miscarriage occurred on April 23, 2025,” an affidavit for the arrest of her partner says. The partner told police that he was “unaware” that the woman “had ordered a medication, off the internet, from California, that would cause her to abort or miscarry.” The woman “aborted/miscarried while he was outside and he came in and found blood in the bathroom with what he believed was the non-viable fetus,” it says. They “got into a verbal argument and she left and had not been back to [the house] since that day. [He] collected what he thought was the fetus and put it in the freezer. When [he] was asked why he waited so long to report the incident, his answer was he had to process the event and call his family attorney.”
“Detective [Calvin] Miller [a detective on the scene] was provided FedEx packaging the pill was sent in, photographs of what [the man] believed to be a fetus and the instructions on how to take the medication,” it adds.
Crucially, the affidavit notes “it was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s Office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.”
That same day, Johnson County Sheriff’s Department officials searched the national Flock network—consisting at the time of 88,345 cameras across the country—for the license plate belonging to a Land Rover. The stated reason was “had an abortion, search for female.” The documents do not say the time when the conversation with the District Attorney about possibly charging the woman took place, so it is unclear whether this happened before or after the Flock search. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment for this article sent via email, phone, and fax.
Several days later, on May 14, the woman went to the police and told them that she wanted to tell them her side of the story. According to the affidavit, she said that her partner assaulted her the day she took the pill, and she showed them text messages “where they discussed her ordering the pill and taking the pill.” At some point on April 23, the day she took the pill, the two began arguing. The woman said the man allegedly put a gun to her head in front of the couple’s toddler. She says that he hit her with the butt of the gun, threw her on the bed, choked her, put the gun to her head and demanded that she “beg for your life.” “Scream all you want, no one can hear you, no one is coming to help you,” he said, according to the arrest report. “I’ll kill you right now and take off with the baby.” The man was arrested and charged with assault on May 22.
On May 28, nearly a week after the woman’s partner was arrested for assault, 404 Media learned of the May 9 Flock search by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office using records that were obtained using a public records request. The documents showed thousands of Flock searches throughout the United States, and the reason police stated for doing a given search. We learned that Johnson County performed a search on a Land Rover for the reason of “had an abortion, search for female,” which was particularly notable because abortion rights experts have worried that police surveillance would be turned against women seeking abortions.
On May 29, we reached out to Flock for comment on the incident. Flock told us that the stated reason for the search was not the full story, and that we should call Johnson County Sheriff Adam King to learn more (we had already reached out to the sheriff’s office for comment). “According to the sheriff's office, the deputy did not search for a woman seeking an abortion. In fact, it appears as though the woman may have had self-induced wounds from an unsafe abortion, and the family called the sheriff's office looking for her because she went missing,” a Flock spokesperson said at the time.
404 Media called King, and had a nine-minute phone call with him, during which he asked multiple members of his staff for details about why the search was done and what happened. King told 404 Media that “I wanted to make sure y’all understood what that was: It wasn’t us trying to block a woman from having an abortion. It was a self-administered abortion she gave herself and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital. We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever. That wasn’t the case. We just wanted to get her some medical help and that’s why we did the query on Flock.”
“The family was worried she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention and we weren’t able to get her on the phone, they weren’t able to get her on the phone, that’s why we were checking Flock trying to find her, but it was for her safety,” he said. “That’s all it was about, her safety.”
The only family member mentioned in the court documents is the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her. The Flock search is also not mentioned in the court documents, but it makes clear that the police were told at the time they learned about the abortion that it had actually taken place more than two weeks prior. There is no mention of concern about the woman’s safety in the narrative of events in the arrest report, though there is discussion of police considering whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime.
On June 5, more than a week after 404 Media’s article was published and following subsequent national attention on the story, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office created a new “supplemental report” about the incident in which the officer who ran the Flock search retroactively explained that he was worried about the woman’s safety and used both Flock and another powerful surveillance tool, TLO, to look her up. This supplemental report was also obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media.
“Deputies started to ask communication’s [sic] about looking up the victim due to a large amount of blood being found in the residence,” it states. “I never made scene on this call, just was assisting with trying to locate the victim and her children to check their welfare. I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the [reporting person, the woman’s partner] due to the call and it not making sense […] I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay.”
The report, which does not mention the word “abortion” anywhere, then states that they found her license plate and an address in Dallas. The officer ran a Flock search as well as “a TLO report,” which gave him an additional address to search. TLO is a powerful lookup tool that uses information pulled from credit report header data. 404 Media has reported extensively on this tool in the past. The case supplemental report shows it was created only after our article was initially publishedFrom the case supplemental report, created June 5 “I entered the vehicle into FLOCK to see if we could see where the victim and her children might be at due to multiple different locations being given for the victim and her children. Deputies had attempted to try and contact the female, but were unsuccessful. The FLOCK hit showed the victim had been in Dallas prior but nothing recent. The reason for the FLOCK search was to find out what city the victim and her children might be in and give us an idea of where to look for them, due to the large area of where the victim and her children cold [sic] be at.”
On June 13, King separately told the Dallas Morning News that “There was no big conspiracy there to be the abortion police [...] That wasn’t our deal, it was all about her safety.” The Dallas Morning News cited a “partial report” that it obtained which appears to be this June 5 document, which notes the “large amount of blood.”
Since we first reported on this incident, Flock and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly stated that our reporting on the incident and an EFF blog post about it was “clickbait,” misleading, and that it oversold what happened in Johnson County. It is not clear if Flock has seen the arrest report or what Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told the company. But Flock and Langley have used King’s initial narrative of the incident to criticize media reporting of the company.
“In this case, it was an unfortunate example of where an activist journalist had a narrative in their mind and they didn’t want to look at the facts of the story, because the facts are, we have one of the most transparent systems one could build,” Langley told Forbes last month. “There was a single word ‘abortion,’ in the search. The natural conclusion is, ‘Oh, they’re searching for this woman because she had an abortion.’ But when you talk to the police department, it’s actually quite a more nuanced story, which is the family called the police department because they were worried for her well-being. It was a missing person’s case because she did administer a self-abortion. They found that woman not too far away eventually. And so when I look at this, I go ‘This is everything’s working as it should be.’”
“A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her when she could have been unwell. She was physically OK, which is great, but due to the current political climate, this was really good clickbait,” Langley said.
The only adult “family member” of the woman who’s mentioned in police reports is her partner, who the woman left after he attacked her with a gun.
Flock and Langley also posted a blog in the aftermath of our reporting and the EFF’s own blog post about the incident in which he said the story was “clickbait-driven reporting and social media rumors,” about the case, and that the Texas abortion case “was purposefully misleading reporting.”
The EFF, he wrote, “is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected.”
“The Sheriff’s Office has reported that a local family called to ask for help–a relative had self-administered an abortion and subsequently ran away. Her family feared she was hurt and asked the Sheriff’s deputy to search for her to the best of their abilities. Deputies performed a nationwide search in Flock, the broadest search possible within the system, to try to locate her as quickly as they could,” Langley wrote. “Luckily, she was found safe and healthy in Dallas a couple of days later. No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”
King, the Johnson County Sheriff, previously told 404 Media Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding the woman.
Separately, King was arrested by his own deputies in August on charges of harassing multiple female members of his staff and threatening to arrest them after they reported the harassment. King allegedly made repeated comments about the women’s appearance. Last week, King was additionally charged with aggravated perjury after allegedly lying to a grand jury about what happened. As part of his bond agreement, he has been ordered by a court to not perform background checks on his alleged victims, is not allowed access to “Global Positioning System Data” from Johnson County, and is not allowed access to a video surveillance system owned by the county.
“This update is so disappointing,” a Flock source said when 404 Media told them about the new details of the case. 404 Media granted multiple current and former Flock employees anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press. “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”
The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
“Reproductive dragnets are not hypothetical concerns. These surveillance tactics open the door for overzealous, anti-abortion state actors to amass data to build cases against people for their abortion care and pregnancy outcomes,” Ashley Kurzweil, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media. “Law enforcement exploitation of mass surveillance infrastructure for reproductive health criminalization promises to be increasingly disruptive to the entire abortion access and pregnancy care landscape. The prevalence of these harmful data practices and risks of legal action drive real fear among abortion seekers and helpers—even intimidating people from getting the care they need,” she added.
“Given Flock's total failure to prevent abuses, law enforcement that have paid for this surveillance technology should immediately lock down their settings for which other agencies can access their data, and should seriously reconsider whether this technology should be installed in their communities in the first place,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “And Republican officials need to stop harassing and harming women.”
Libraries have shared their collections internationally for decades. Trump’s tariffs are throwing that system into chaos and can ‘hinder academic progress.’#News
Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs
The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation.
“There are libraries that have our books that we've lent to them before all of this happened, and now they can't ship them back to us because their carrier either is flat out refusing to ship anything to the U.S., or they're citing not being able to handle the tariff situation,” Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told me.
After Trump’s executive order ended the de minimis exemption, which allowed people to buy things internationally without paying tariffs if the items cost less than $800, we’ve written severalstoriesabout how the decision caused chaos over a wide variety of hobbies that rely on people buying things overseas, especially on Ebay, where many of those transactions take place.
Libraries that share their materials internationally are in a similar mess, partly because some countries’ mail services stopped shipments to and from the U.S. entirely, but the situation for them is arguably even more complicated because they’re not selling anything—they’re just lending books.
“It's not necessarily too expensive. It's that they don't have a mechanism in place to deal with the tariffs and how they're going to be applied,” Relevo said. “And I think that's true of U.S. shipping carriers as well. There’s a lot of confusion about how to handle this situation.”
“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries,” Heather Evans, a librarian at RMIT University in Australia, told me in an email. “It has largely depended on their different procedures as to how much they have been affected. Some who use AusPost [Australia’s postal service] to post internationally have been more impacted and I've seen many libraries put a halt on borrowing to or from the US at all.” (AusPost suspended all shipments to the United States but plans to renew them on October 7).
Relevo told me that in some cases books are held up in customs indefinitely, or are “lost in warehouses” where they are held for no clear reason.
As Relevo explains it, libraries often provide people in foreign institutions books in their collections by giving them access to digitized materials, but some books are still only available in physical copies. These are not necessarily super rare or valuable books, but books that are only in print in certain countries. For example, a university library might have a specialized collection on a niche subject because it’s the focus area of a faculty member, a French university will obviously have a deeper collection of French literature, and some textbooks might only be published in some languages.
A librarian’s job is to give their community access to information, and international interlibrary loans extend that mission to other countries by having libraries work together. In the past, if an academic in the U.S. wanted access to a French university’s deep collection of French literature, they’d have to travel there. Today, academics can often ask that library to ship them the books they want. Relevo said this type of lending has always been useful, but became especially popular and important during COVID lockdowns, when many libraries were closed and international travel was limited.
“Interlibrary loans has been something that libraries have been able to do for a really long time, even back in the early 1900s,” Relevo said. “If we can't do that anymore and we're limiting what our users can access, because maybe they're only limited to what we have in our collection, then ultimately could hinder academic progress. Scholars have enjoyed for decades now the ability to basically get whatever they need for their research, to be very comprehensive in their literature reviews or the references that they need, or past research that's been done on that topic, because most libraries, especially academic libraries, do offer this service [...] If we can't do that anymore, or at least there's a barrier to doing that internationally, then researchers have to go back to old ways of doing things.”
The American Library Association (ALA) has a group dedicated to international interlibrary lending, called the International Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Committee, which is nested in the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Since Trump’s executive order and tariffs regime, the RUSA STARS International ILL Committee has produced a site dedicated to helping librarians navigate the new, unpredictable landscape.
In addition to explaining the basic facts of the tariffs and de minimis, the site also shares resources and “Tips & Tricks in Uncertain Times,” which encourages librarians to talk to partner libraries before lending or borrowing books, and to “be transparent and set realistic expectations with patrons.” The page also links to an online form that asks librarians to share any information they have about how different libraries are handling the elimination of de minimis in an attempt to crowd source a better understanding of the new international landscape.
“Let's say this library in Germany wanted to ship something to us,” Relevo said. “It sounds like the postal carriers just don't know how to even do that. They don’t know how to pass that tariff on to the library that's getting the material, there's just so much confusion on what you would even do if you even wanted to. So they're just saying, ‘No, we're not shipping to the U.S.’”
Relevo told me that one thing the resource sharing community has talked about a lot is how to label packages so customs agents know they are not [selling] goods to another country. Relevo said that some libraries have marked the value of books they’re lending as $0. Others have used specific codes to indicate the package isn’t a good that’s being bought or sold. But there’s not one method that has worked consistently across the board.
“It does technically have value, because it's a tangible item, and pretty much any tangible item is going to have some sort of value, but we're not selling it,” she said. “We're just letting that library borrow it and then we're going to get it back. But the way customs and tariffs work, it's more to do with buying and selling goods and library stuff isn't really factored into those laws [...] it's kind of a weird concept, especially when you live in a highly capitalized country.”
Relevo said that the last 10-15 years have been a very tumultuous time for libraries, not just because of tariffs, but because AI-generated content, the pandemic, and conservative organizations pressuring libraries to remove certain books from their collections.
“At the end of the day, us librarians just want to help people, so we're just trying to find the best ways to do that right now with the resources we have,” she said.
“What I would like the public to know about the situation is that their librarians as a group are very committed to doing the best we can for them and to finding the best options and ways to fulfill their requests and access needs. Please continue to ask us for what you need,” Evans said. “At the moment we would ask for a little extra patience, and perhaps understanding that we might not be able to get things as urgently for them if it involves the U.S., but we will do as we have always done and search for the fastest and most helpful way to obtain access to what they require.”
Etched from death-defying ledges 12 stories high, vast rock panels of camels and horses preserve the talents of Ice-Age artists in the Arabian desert.#TheAbstract
The Case for Alien Life on Saturn’s Moon Just Got a Boost
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied death, cooked out, bulked up, and capped it off with an extraterrestrial spit-take.
First, prehistoric peoples risked their lives to make art—and it was totally worth it. Then, what’s the best cut of a two-ton armadillo? Next, a funerary procession for a whale, a glow-up for a rogue planet, and a swim in an alien ocean.
Finally, I am so excited that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is now officially out! If you are curious about aliens of the Hellenistic world, centuries-old UFO sightings, a guide to the most promising systems for alien life, and the creepiest solutions to the Fermi Paradox (and more), this book is for you.
Some 12,000 years ago, a group of desert artists tiptoed out onto dangerous cliff ledges to engrave the rock with enchanting depictions of camels, gazelles, ibex, wild horses, and other animals living in the shifting sands around them. One wrong step could have led to their deaths, but the artists persisted in an act of creative courage.
Now, archaeologists have discovered the monumental rock art left by this bygone culture in the Nafud desert of northern Saudi Arabia. One particularly dramatic scene was engraved from a tiny sloped ledge 12 storeys off the ground, and depicts 23 life-sized camels and horses in a line that stretches horizontally across 75 feet.
Rock art panels at Jebel Arnaan. Image: Maria Guagnin “Some of these panels were etched onto cliff surfaces in inaccessible but highly visible locations,” said researchers led by Maria Gaugnin of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. “The difficulty in getting to and engraving these rock surfaces, and their enhanced visibility by height, were clearly attractive for the engravers.”
Though archeologists typically distinguish between rock art and modern graffiti as distinct traditions, there may be overlaps in their intent and execution—including, in this case, possible attraction to the challenges of accessing a dangerous site.
“The precarious nature of the engraving process is particularly evident in the largest recorded panel,” the team said, referring to the 75-footer described above. “This panel would have been accessed by climbing up a cliff and then engraved while standing on a downward sloping ledge, only ~30-50 centimeters in width,” which is roughly a foot across.
“Today the sandstone is too degraded to reach the ledge safely, and the panel was documented using a drone,” they added.” The friable nature of the substrate and the slope of the narrow ledges suggest the engravers likely risked their lives to create this art.” The rock ledge where the main panel was engraved. Image: Monumental rock art panel at Jebel Misma (JMI18) Talk about commitment to the craft. Given the high stakes and the spectacular scale of the panels, this art must have been a cherished touchstone to these early desert peoples. During the ice age, this region was extremely arid and virtually impenetrable, but as the glacial cover receded, oases and other pockets of habitability had opened up to nomads.
The rock art proves that these wanderers were not only navigating the terrain, but imprinting their culture and worldview onto it. For countless generations, these grand visions welcomed peoples passing through the desert, serving as a landmark and a cultural heirloom, before they faded into obscurity.
“Freshly engraved against the varnish, the images would have had considerable visual impact,” the team concluded. “The engravings, which may have been created over a time span of millennia, would have reminded people of ancient symbolisms and beliefs of their group, which likely structured their highly seasonal lives and thus enhanced their ability to thrive in these marginal landscapes.”
At the same time that the desert artists were engraving cliff walls, people in South America were devouring giant sloths, giant armadillos, mastodons, and other megafauna that have since gone extinct—potentially because they were so tasty.
That’s the upshot of a new study of archaeological sites in Argentina and Chile that date back some 12,000 years to the late Pleistocene period. The results revealed a preference for mega-big game—like beefy ground sloths and car-sized armadillos—bolstering the case that humans may have played a significant role in their extinction. Megafaunal species were preferred prey for humans in Southern South America. Image: Luciano Prates et al. Megafaunal reconstructions in the figure were provided and authorized by Megafauna 3D Project (megafauna3d.org) “The late Pleistocene extinction of terrestrial megafauna… is one of the most spectacular changes in American mammal history, and its cause is one of the most hotly debated issues in archaeology and paleoecology,” said researchers led by Luciano Prates of Universidad Nacional de la Plata.
“Here, we have shown… that extinct megafauna—at the apex of the prey ranking—were the main prey of early foragers, particularly in regions with high abundance and diversity, such as the Pampas, Patagonia, and central Chile,” the team concluded.
While climate and other factors certainly played a role in these extinctions, there may well be a more obvious culprit [looks at humanity; humanity belches; the belch smells like Pleistocene megafauna].
“How do animals react to dead or dying conspecifics? Do they comprehend death? Do they grieve? These are the fundamental questions asked in the field of comparative thanatology, which focuses on how animals respond to death.”
Phew, what a heavy lead-in to a study. Nonetheless, a team has now explored these questions with drone observations of beluga whales responding to a dead beluga calf in Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba. The baby may have been a stillborn or perhaps died shortly after birth, as there were no signs of trauma on its body. Drone footage of the calf. Image: Hudson, Justine M. and Watt, Cortney A. “We documented 15 instances where belugas from outside of the video frame swam directly towards the dead calf, including 4 mother-calf pairs and 11 individuals,” said Justine Hudson and Cortney Watt of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “The dead calf was surrounded by free-swimming belugas for the entire duration of the video.”
“The dead calf and surrounding belugas were recorded for ~4 min and 17 s before the depleted drone battery required us to land, and we were unable to relocate the calf after changing the batteries,” they added.
Even the battery was too bummed out to endure. But while loss of life is sad, it’s all in a day’s work for a comparative thanatologist.
The record for most epic bulk-up has been broken by a rogue planet that is gaining an astonishing six billion tonnes of mass per second—an unprecedented rate of swole. The planet, named Cha 1107-7626, is about five to 10 times as massive as Jupiter and does not orbit any star. And why should it? Who needs a star when you’re radiant all by yourself?
Indeed, scientists discovered the world thanks to the light generated by its record growth-spurt, which peaked for at least two months this summer and was still glowing strong when observations stopped in August 2025, showing “the strongest accretion rates measured” in a planet, according to the study. Artist concept of Cha 1107-7626. Image: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser “These kinds of accretion bursts are key events in the early evolution of stars,” said researchers led by Victor Almendros-Abad of the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy. “Our target is the lowest mass object observed thus far that is going through an accretion burst” and provides “a glimpse into the nature of accretion in planetary-mass objects.”
Shout out to the Enceladus-heads: Scientists have discovered new chemicals in the sea spray of this Saturnian moon that hint at organic processes and hydrothermal activity within its interior ocean, boosting the case that it may be habitable.
In 2008, the NASA-ESA Cassini orbiter gulped some alien seawater as it flew through plumes that erupt from Enceladus’s south pole. Now, scientists have reanalyzed data from one particularly speedy run through the moon sprinkler—during which Cassini reached 40,000 miles per hour—exposing “previously unobserved molecular fragments,” according to a study.
The “freshly ejected” compounds included organic molecules like ethers, ethyls, and partial remnants of what might be larger compounds bearing nitrogen and oxygen, said researchers led by Nozair Khawaja of the University of Berlin. These chemicals hint at “a hydrothermal origin” and “the synthesis and evolution of organics.”
In other words, Enceladus likely has seafloor environments similar to hydrothermal vent systems on Earth, which are hotspots for life. Whether the moon’s vents also have weird creepy crawlies on them is a question that is keeping many of us up at night, so could someone please just send a scuba team there already?
With that, may you enter your weekend with a spritz of fresh organic moon mist.
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...
The move comes as Apple removed ICEBlock after direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials and signals a broader crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.#News
Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’
Both Google and Apple recently removed Red Dot, an app people can use to report sightings of ICE officials, from their respective app stores, 404 Media has found. The move comes after Apple removed ICEBlock, a much more prominent app, from its App Store on Thursday following direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials. Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.
The move signals a broader crackdown on apps that are designed to keep communities safe by crowdsourcing the location of ICE officials. Authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September and who killed a detainee, searched his phone for various tracking apps. A long-running immigration support group on the ground in Chicago, where ICE is currently focused, told 404 Media some of its members use Red Dot.
💡 Do you know anything else about these apps and their removal? Do you work at Google, Apple, or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
“Ready to Protect Your Community?” the website for Red Dot reads. “Download Red Dot and help build a stronger protection network.”
The site provides links to the app’s page on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. As of at least Friday, both of those links return errors. “This app is currently not available in your country or region,” says the Apple one, and “We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server,” says the Google one.
The app allows people to report ICE presence or activity, along with details such as the location and time, according to Red Dot’s website. The app then notifies nearby community members, and users can receive alerts about ICE activity in their area, the website says.
Google confirmed to 404 Media that it removed Red Dot. Google said it did not receive any outreach from the Department of Justice about this issue and that it bans apps with a high risk of abuse. Without talking about the shooting at the ICE facility specifically, the company said it removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app. Google said apps that have user generated content must also conduct content moderation. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Google added in a statement that “ICEBlock was never available on Google Play, but we removed similar apps for violations of our policies.”
Google’s Play Store policies say the platform does not allow apps that “promote violence” against “groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, immigration status, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” but its published policies do not include information about how it defines what types of groups are protected.
Red Dot did not respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday Apple told 404 Media it removed multiple ICE-spotting apps, but did not name Red Dot. Apple did not respond to another request for comment on Friday.
On Thursday Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” referring to Apple removing his own app. ICEBlock rose to prominence in June when CNN covered the app. That app was only available on iOS, while Red Dot was available on both iOS and Android.
“ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution,” Aaron continued. “We are determined to fight this with everything we have. Our mission has always been to protect our neighbors from the terror this administration continues to reign down on the people of this nation. We will not be deterred. We will not stop. #resist.”
That move from Apple came after pressure from Department of Justice officials on behalf of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe,” Bondi told Fox. The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond Bondi's earlier comments.
The current flashpoint for ICE’s mass deportation effort is Chicago. This week ICE raided an apartment building and removed everyone from the building only to ask questions later, according to local media reports. “They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," one neighbor, Eboni Watson, told ABC7. “That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'f*** them kids.’”
Brandon Lee, communications lead at Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told 404 Media some of the organization’s teams have used Red Dot and similar apps as a way of taking tips. But the organization recommends people call its hotline to report ICE activity. That hotline has been around since 2011, Lee said. “The thing that takes time is the infrastructure of trust and training that goes into follow-up, confirmation, and legal and community support for impacted families, which we in Illinois have been building up over time,” he added.
“But I will say that at the end of the day it's important for all people of conscience to use their skills to shine some light on ICE's operations, given the agency's lack of transparency and overall lack of accountability,” he said, referring to ICE-spotting apps.
In ICEBlock’s case, people who already downloaded the app will be able to continue using but will be unable to re-download it from the Apple App Store, according to an email from Apple Aaron shared with 404 Media. Because Red Dot is available on Android, users can likely sideload the app—that is, install it themselves by downloading the APK file rather than from the Play Store.
The last message to Red Dot’s Facebook page was on September 24 announcing a new update that fixed various bugs.
Update: this piece has been updated to include a response from the Department of Justice.
Behind the Blog: Open-Source Drama and Saudi-Approved Humor
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss characters in open source, that Saudi comedy festival, and asking ourselves if we're haters.
EMANUEL: I swear I try my best not to use Behind the Blogs to pat myself on the back, but I’m very happy with how my piece about the recent Ruby Drama turned out. I got a lot of interesting responses to the the article, some of which I hope will result in new articles soon, but mostly I was happy that it appears I didn’t fuck up any of the details in what was a highly complicated, technical, and controversial story for people who care about this stuff.
That is not to say that I didn’t get any constructive criticism, some of which I’d like to address here. One piece of feedback I got from multiple people in the camp that is angry with Ruby Central’s ousting of contributors is their view that the article underplays the role David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) played in this saga, and the political views he’s expressed on social media over the years.
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Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.
Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Applex27;s actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.#News
ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’
The developer of ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, has said he is determined to fight back after Apple removed the app from its App Store on Thursday. The removal came after pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox which first reported the removal. Apple told 404 Media it has removed other similar apps too.
“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”
💡 Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Apple or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
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Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now
Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.
For decades, scientists assumed that symmetry between the reflectivity of Earth’s hemispheres was a “fundamental property” of our planet. Now, that’s changed.#News
Earth Is Getting Darker, Literally, and Scientists Are Trying To Find Out Why
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
It’s not the vibes; Earth is literally getting darker. Scientists have discovered that our planet has been reflecting less light in both hemispheres, with a more pronounced darkening in the Northern hemisphere, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new trend upends longstanding symmetry in the surface albedo, or reflectivity, of the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In other words, clouds circulate in a way that equalizes hemispheric differences, such as the uneven distribution of land, so that the albedos roughly match—though nobody knows why.
“There are all kinds of things that people have noticed in observations and simulations that tend to suggest that you have this hemispheric symmetry as a kind of fundamental property of the climate system, but nobody's really come up with a theoretical framework or explanation for it,” said Norman Loeb, a physical scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, who led the new study. “It's always been something that we've observed, but we haven't really explained it fully.”
To study this mystery, Loeb and his colleagues analyzed 24 years of observations captured since 2000 by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), a network of instruments placed on several NOAA and NASA satellites. Instead of an explanation for the strange symmetry, the results revealed an emerging asymmetry in hemispheric albedo; though both hemispheres are darkening, the Northern hemisphere shows more pronounced changes which challenges “the hypothesis that hemispheric symmetry in albedo is a fundamental property of Earth,” according to the study.
Loeb and his colleagues suggest that asymmetry is primarily driven by the effects of climate change, reductions in aerosol pollution, and natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and wildfires. Since snow and ice are highly reflective, the thinking goes, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets due to anthropogenic gas emissions is causing a reduction in albedo, especially in the Northern hemisphere.
Meanwhile, aerosols—which stimulate the formation of clouds—are causing uneven regional albedo changes. For example, the international effort to remove harmful commercial aerosols from the atmosphere has resulted in a drop in these substances over the Northern hemisphere, and therefore cloud cover, exacerbating the darkening effect. In the Southern hemisphere, aerosol-heavy clouds generated just over the past few years by disasters like the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires and the 2021 to 2022 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption may have brightened the albedo relative to the Northern hemisphere.
“The amount of aerosols has been increasing in the Southern hemisphere, and they've been decreasing in the Northern hemisphere,” explained Loeb. “Since aerosols reflect solar radiation, that would give you this asymmetry where you're seeing darkening in the Northern hemisphere compared to the southern Hemisphere.”
“All of these pieces added together give you this trend,” he continued. “But what was mysterious to me was that the clouds weren't compensating. If this hemispheric symmetry is a fundamental property of the system, the clouds should be giving you more reflection in the Northern hemisphere to compensate for the non-cloud properties. And I don’t see that—at least, not yet.”
Loeb’s team was able to spot this trend thanks to the long-term observations collected by CERES, a program that dates back to the late 1990s. The program has monitored the evolution of albedo in high resolution over decades, enabling the scientists to spot the new divergence from the normal symmetry.
“CERES has really opened up a new avenue of research that we couldn't do before,” Loeb said. “We had some measurements of Earth's radiation budget, but we struggled to have the same level of quality of the data.”
“Right now it's wonderful because we have very precise measurements over 25 years from CERES,” he continued. “It’s a unique opportunity for us to study things like this symmetry in a new light.”
To that end, Loeb and his colleagues plan to continue monitoring the asymmetry with CERES and probing its possible causes with more sophisticated climate models. The researchers are watching for signs that the symmetry might reemerge in the future, or if asymmetry is perhaps the new normal.
The overall darkening of Earth’s albedo is already accelerating the effects of climate change, and an asymmetric hemispheric darkening could produce its own complex impacts, including disruptive shifts in precipitation.
It’s very difficult to tease out the individual components that merge to create such complicated dynamics (Loeb calls it “unscrambling the egg”). To make matters worse, NASA is facing major cuts from the Trump administration, especially to its Earth observation satellites. CERES is due for one more launch in 2027, but these instruments are getting “long in the tooth,” Loeb said, and another program will eventually have to take up the mantle. Until then, researchers across disciplines will puzzle over why Earth is anomalously darkening, and what it might mean if this asymmetry is here to stay.
“We'll keep measuring and keep studying it, and I think this study should open the avenue for others to look at it,” Loeb concluded.
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
A hacking group called the Crimson Collective says it pulled data from private GitHub repositories connected to Red Hat's consulting business. Red Hat has confirmed it is investigating the compromise.
A hacking group called the Crimson Collective says it pulled data from private GitHub repositories connected to Red Hatx27;s consulting business. Red Hat has confirmed it is investigating the compromise.#News #Hacking
Some services needed for immigration applications, like H-1B and E3 visas, no longer have funding, while others are still operational — for now.#Immigration #shutdown #visas
Government Shutdown Causes Even More Confusion for U.S. Visa Applicants
Amid the government shutdown, visa applicants are facing more confusion and are worried about potential delays, as some services essential to their application processes are “under maintenance” due to lapses in funding.
The Foreign Labor Application Gateway website, which employers use for labor certification and immigration applicants use to access documentation for their applications, is down due to the shutdown, with an “Under Maintenance” notice on the site in place of the portal.
The federal government shut down on Wednesday, as Republican legislators refuse to budge on their desired cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act healthcare subsidies. The last government shutdown was in 2018, also under President Donald Trump, and lasted 35 days.
“Due to a lapse in funding, all foreign labor certification activities administered by the Department’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) have been suspended,” the site currently says. “During this suspension, access to the Foreign Labor Application Gateway (FLAG), will be disabled and will not permit system users to prepare and submit new applications as well as submit any information associated with applications pending a final determination.” Screenshot of flag.dol.gov as of Oct. 2 A notice on the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs site says consular operations domestically and abroad will remain operational, however, including passports, visas, and assisting American citizens abroad. Consular services, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), are almost entirely fee-funded and only a small part of their funding is reliant on congress. The American Immigration Council notes that for this reason, application interviews, naturalization ceremonies, biometrics processing, and other parts of the immigration system should continue as usual, and past reports have shown that only one percent of the USCIS would likely need to be furloughed during a shutdown, but that backlogs and increased immigration enforcement from the Trump administration could mean even that one percent could create more delays.
The Office of Foreign Labor Certification website shows a notice about a lapse in appropriations: “This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services,” the site says. “The last update to the site was 10/1/2025. Updates to the site will start again when the Federal government resumes operations.”
An Australian applicant for an E3 visa — a specific type of temporary, non-immigrant work visa for Australian citizens — told 404 Media that not being able to access the FLAG website means she can’t access or download the Department of Labor-certified Labor Condition Application she needs for her visa appointment in two weeks.
“If the shutdown is lifted prior to my visa appointment, I’ll download the LCA and be on my way. If however the shutdown goes on past my appointment date, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said.
The immigration and visa application process, overhauled by the Trump administration since taking office, has already caused chaos and confusion for applicants. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that adds a $100,000 fee for applicants to the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. US-based workers visiting abroad during the announcement rushed to travel back to the US after Trump’s announcement left them only hours before Trump’s deadline at midnight on Sunday, while some employers, especially small startups, scrambled to pay the fees for their workers. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.#OpenAI #Sora2 #Sora
People Are Farming and Selling Sora 2 Invite Codes on eBay
People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the new account and repeat the process.
On eBay, there are about 20 active listings for Sora 2 invite codes and 30 completed listings in which invite codes have sold. I bought a code from a seller for $12, and received a working code a few minutes later. The moment I activated my account, I was given four new codes for Sora 2. When I went into the histories of some of the sellers, many of them had sold a handful of codes previously, suggesting they were able to get their hands on more than four invites. It’s possible to do this just by cycling through accounts; each invite code is good for four invites, so it is possible to use one invite code for a new account for yourself, sell three of them, and repeat the process.
There are also dozens of people claiming to be selling or giving away codes on Reddit and X; some are asking for money via Cash App or Venmo, while others are asking for crypto. One guy has even created a website in which he has generated all 2.1 billion six-digit hexadecimal combinations to allow people to randomly guess / brute force the app (the site is a joke).
The fact that the invite codes are being sold across the internet is an indication that OpenAI has been able to capture some initial hype with the release of the app (which we’ll have much more to say about soon), but does not necessarily mean that it’s going to be some huge success or have sustained attention. Code and app invite sales are very common on eBay, even for apps and concert tickets (or game consoles, or other items) that eventually aren’t very popular or are mostly just a flash in the pan. But much of my timeline today is talking about Sora 2, which suggests that we may be crossing some sort of AI slop creation rubicon.
Kodak announced two new types of film that it will sell directly to photography stores, sidestepping a bizarre distribution agreement that has been in place since its bankruptcy.#Photography #FilmCameras #film
Both organizations are seeking a copy of a data sharing agreement that is giving the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients to ICE.#Announcements
404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation Sue DHS
Last week Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed a lawsuit against the multiple parts of the U.S. government demanding they hand over a copy of an agreement that shares the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients with ICE. The data sharing marked a watershed moment for ICE and its access to highly sensitive data that is ordinarily siloed off from the agency. We believe it’s important for the public to see this unprecedented data sharing agreement for themselves.
As the Associated Press wrote when it first reported on the data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agreement will give ICE the ability to find “the location of aliens.” The data shared includes home addresses and ethnicities, according to the Associated Press.
💡 Do you know anything else about this data sharing agreement? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Both Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed similar Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with DHS and CMS seeking a copy of the agreement. Neither agency provided the requested records in time, so we have now filed the lawsuit. In 404 Media’s case, CMS acknowledged the request but has not provided the records, and DHS did not even acknowledge the request at all.
404 Media’s request asked for a copy of the specific agreement, and if the agencies were unable to locate it, to alternatively provide copies of all agreements between DHS and CMS from this year.
“Despite having received the FOIA requests, and despite their obligations under the law, Defendants have failed to notify Plaintiffs of the scope of documents that they will produce or the scope of documents that they plan to withhold in response to the FOIA requests,” the lawsuit reads. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Freedom of the Press Foundation is a non-profit organization that monitors press freedom issues in the U.S. and trains journalists on how to keep themselves and their sources safe. It regularly sues the U.S. government for access to records.
The data sharing agreement is just one of a growing list of ways that ICE is sourcing highly sensitive, and sometimes legally protected, information as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. ProPublica reported on the vast system the IRS is building to share millions of taxpayers’ data with ICE. 404 Media previously reported ICE has gained access to ISO Claimsearch, a massive insurance and medical bill database to find deportation targets. The database is nearly all encompassing and contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills.
Separately, 404 Media filed a lawsuit against ICE in September for access to the agency’s $2 million spyware contract.
How companies working for landlords are scraping data inside corporate environments; lawyers explain why they used AI (after getting caught); and all the Ruby drama.#Podcast
Podcast: Landlords Demand Your Workplace Logins to Scrape Paystubs
We start this week with Joseph’s article about landlords and income verification companies demanding login details from potential renters so the companies can log in and scrape their paystubs. That has some potential legal issues for everyone involved! After the break, 18 lawyers tell us why they used AI. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel breaks down the massive drama around Ruby. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA4… Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player. youtube.com/embed/KtvSBb6rtHE?…
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 …
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.
“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… “The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.
Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.
This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.
“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”
Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.
Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoplesx27; phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.#News
ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
Surveillance contractors around the world create massive datasets of phones’, and by extension people’s movements, and then sell access to the data to government agencies. In turn, U.S. agencies have used these tools without a warrant or court order.
“The Biden Administration shut down DHS’s location data purchases after an inspector general found that DHS had broken the law. Every American should be concerned that Trump's hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
💡 Do you know anything else about this contract or others? Do you work at Penlink or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
The ICE document is redacted but says a product made by a contractor called Penlink “leverages a proprietary data platform to compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing both forensic and predictive analytics.” The products the document is discussing are Tangles and Webloc.
Forbes previously reported that ICE spent more than $5 million on these products, including $2 million for Tangles specifically. Tangles and Webloc used to be run by an Israeli company called Cobwebs. Cobwebs joined Penlink in July 2023.
The new documents provide much more detail about the sort of location data ICE will now have access to, and why ICE chose to buy access to this vast dataset from Penlink specifically.
“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” the document reads. The agency said that the issue with other companies was that they required analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources,” which increased the chance of missing “connections between online behaviors and physical movements.” A screenshot from the document. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) conducted market research in May and June, according to the document. The document lists two other companies, Babel Street and Venntel, which also sell location data but which the agency decided not to partner with.
404 Media and a group of other media outlets previously obtained detailed demonstration videos of Babel Street in action. They showed it was possible for users to track phones visiting and leaving abortion clinics, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. Venntel, meanwhile, was for some years a popular choice among U.S. government agencies looking to monitor the location of mobile phones. Its clients have included ICE, CBP, and the FBI. Its contracts with U.S. law enforcement have dried up in more recent years, with ICE closing out its work with the company in August, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.
Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.
The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.
Penlink did not respond to a request for comment on how it gathers or sources its location data. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Regardless, the documents say that “HSI INTEL requires Penlink's Tangles and Weblocas [sic] an integral part of their investigations mission.” Although HSI has historically been focused on criminal investigations, 90 percent of HSI have been diverted to carry out immigration enforcement, according to data published by the Cato Institute. Meaning it is unclear whether use of the data will be limited to criminal investigations or not.
After this article was published, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told 404 Media in a statement “DHS is not going to confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods. The fact of the matter is the media is more concerned with peddling narratives to demonize ICE agents who are keeping Americans safe than they are with reporting on the criminals who have victimized our communities.” This is a boilerplate statement that DHS has repeatedly provided 404 Media when asked about public documents detailing the agency’s surveillance capabilities, and which inaccurately attacks the media.
In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General published a report that found ICE, CBP, and the Secret Service all broke the law when using location data harvested from phones. The oversight body found that those DHS components did not have sufficient policies and procedures in place to ensure that the location data was used appropriately. In one case, a CBP official used the technology to track the location of coworkers, the report said.
The report recommended that CBP stop its use of such data; CBP said at the time it did not intend to renew its contracts anyway. The Inspector General also recommended that ICE stop using such data until it obtained the necessary approvals. But ICE’s response in the report said it would continue to use the data. “CTD is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden. Accordingly, continued use of CTD enables ICE HSI to successfully accomplish its law enforcement mission,” the response at the time said.
In January 2024, ICE said it had stopped the purchase of such “commercial telemetry data,” or CTD, which is how DHS refers to location data.
Update: this piece has been updated with a statement from DHS.
Spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement tells FedScoop that the agency is no longer using commercial telemetry data, but regulations are still scant.
Ahead of the European Union's Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising, Google's Ad Transparency Center no longer shows political ads from any countries in the EU.
Ahead of the European Unionx27;s Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising, Googlex27;s Ad Transparency Center no longer shows political ads from any countries in the EU.#advertising #Google
18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It
Earlier this month, an appeals court in California issued a blistering decision and record $10,000 fine against a lawyer who submitted a brief in which “nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff’s opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff’s reply brief, are fabricated” through the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The court said it was publishing its opinion “as a warning” to California lawyers that they will be held responsible if they do not catch AI hallucinations in their briefs.
In that case, the lawyer in question “asserted that he had not been aware that generative AI frequently fabricates or hallucinates legal sources and, thus, he did not ‘manually verify [the quotations] against more reliable sources.’ He accepted responsibility for the fabrications and said he had since taken measures to educate himself so that he does not repeat such errors in the future.”
As the judges remark in their opinion, the use of generative AI by lawyers is now everywhere, and when it is used in ways that introduce fake citations or fake evidence, it is bogging down courts all over America (and the world). For the last few months, 404 Media has been analyzing dozens of court cases around the country in which lawyers have been caught using generative AI to craft their arguments, generate fictitious citations, generate false evidence, cite real cases but misinterpret them, or otherwise take shortcuts that has introduced inaccuracies into their cases. Our main goal was to learn more about why lawyers were using AI to write their briefs, especially when so many lawyers have been caught making errors that lead to sanctions and that ultimately threaten their careers and their standings in the profession.
To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any individual case and the sanctions against lawyers, rather than the often elaborate excuses that lawyers told the court when they were caught. Using Charlotin’s database as a starting point, we then pulled court records from around the country for dozens of cases where a lawyer offered a formal explanation or apology. Pulling this information required navigating clunky federal and state court record systems and finding and purchasing the specific record where the lawyer in question tried to explain themselves (these were often called “responses to order to show cause.”) We also reached out to lawyers who were sanctioned for using AI to ask them why they did it. Very few of them responded, but we have included explanations from the few who did.
What we found was incredibly fascinating, and reveals a mix of lawyers blaming IT issues, personal and family emergencies, their own poor judgment and carelessness, and demands from their firms and the industry to be more productive and take on more casework. But most often, they simply blame their assistants.
Few dispute that the legal industry is under great pressure to use AI. Legal giants like Westlaw and LexisNexis have pitched bespoke tools to law firms that are now regularly being used, but Charlotin’s database makes clear that lawyers are regularly using off-the-shelf generalized tools like ChatGPT and Gemini as well. There’s a seemingly endless number of startups selling AI legal tools that do research, write briefs, and perform other legal tasks. While working on this article, it became nearly impossible to keep up with new cases of lawyers being sanctioned for using AI. Charlotin has documented 11 new cases within the last week alone.
This article is the first of several 404 Media will write exploring the use of AI in the legal profession. If you’re a lawyer and have thoughts or firsthand experiences, please get in touch. Some of the following anecdotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
💡 Are you a lawyer or do you work in the legal industry? We want to know how AI is impacting the industry, your firm, and your job. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.
A lawyer in Indiana blames the court (Fake case cited)
A judge stated that the lawyer “took the position that the main reason for the errors in his brief was the short deadline (three days) he was given to file it. He explained that, due to the short timeframe and his busy schedule, he asked his paralegal (who once was, but is not currently, a licensed attorney) to draft the brief, and did not have time to carefully review the paralegal's draft before filing it.”
A lawyer in New York blamed vertigo, head colds, and malware
"He acknowledges that he used Westlaw supported by Google Co-Pilot which is an artificial intelligence-based tool as preliminary research aid." The lawyer “goes on to state that he had no idea that such tools could fabricate cases but acknowledges that he later came to find out the limitation of such tools. He apologized for his failure to identify the errors in his affirmation, but partly blames ‘a serious health challenge since the beginning of this year which has proven very persistent which most of the time leaves me internally cold, and unable to maintain a steady body temperature which causes me to be dizzy and experience bouts of vertigo and confusion.’ The lawyer then indicates that after finding about the ‘citation errors’ in his affirmation, he conducted a review of his office computer system and found out that his system was ‘affected by malware and unauthorized remote access.’ He says that he compared the affirmation he prepared on April 9, 2025, to the affirmation he filed to [the court] on April 21, 2025, and ‘was shocked that the cases I cited were substantially different.’”
A lawyer in Florida blames a paralegal and the fact they were doing the case pro bono (Fake cases and hallucinated quotes)
The lawyer “explained that he was handling this appeal pro bono and that as he began preparing the brief, he recognized that he lacked experience in appellate law. He stated that at his own expense, he hired ‘an independent contractor paralegal to assist in drafting the answer brief.’ He further explained that upon receipt of a draft brief from the paralegal, he read it, finalized it, and filed it with this court. He admitted that he ‘did not review the authority cited within the draft answer brief prior to filing’ and did not realize it contained AI generated content.
A lawyer in South Carolina said he was rushing (Fake cases generated by Microsoft CoPilot)
“Out of haste and a naïve understanding of the technology, he did not independently verify the sources were real before including the citations in the motion filed with the Court seeking a preliminary injunction”
A lawyer in Hawaii blames a New Yorker they hired
This lawyer was sanctioned $100 by a court for one AI-generated case, as well as quoting multiple real cases and misattributing them to that fake case. They said they had hired a per-diem attorney—“someone I had previously worked with and trusted,” they told the court—to draft the case, and though they “did not personally use AI in this case, I failed to ensure every citation was accurate before filing the brief.” The Honolulu Civil Beat reported that the per-diem attorney they hired was from New York, and that they weren’t sure if that attorney had used AI or not.
The lawyer told us over the phone that the news of their $100 sanction had blown up in their district thanks to that article. “ I was in court yesterday, and of course the [opposing] attorney somehow brought this up,” they said in a call. According to them, that attorney has also used AI in at least seven cases. Nearly every lawyer is using AI to some degree, they said; it’s just a problem if they get caught. “The judges here have seen it extensively. I know for a fact other attorneys have been sanctioned. It’s public, but unless you know what to search for, you’re not going to find it anywhere. It’s just that for some stupid reason, my matter caught the attention of a news outlet. It doesn’t help with business.”
A lawyer in Arizona blames someone they hired
A judge wrote “this is a case where the majority of authorities cited were either fabricated, misleading, or unsupported. That is egregious … this entire litigation has been derailed by Counsel’s actions. The Opening Brief was replete with citation-related deficiencies, including those consistent with artificial intelligence generated hallucinations.”
The attorney claimed “Neither I nor the supervising staff attorney knowingly submitted false or non-existent citations to the Court. The brief writer in question was experienced and credentialed, and we relied on her professionalism and prior performance. At no point did we intend to mislead the Court or submit citations not grounded in valid legal authority.”
A lawyer in Louisiana blames Westlaw (a legal research tool)
The lawyer “acknowledge[d] the cited authorities were inaccurate and mistakenly verified using Westlaw Precision, an AI-assisted research tool, rather than Westlaw’s standalone legal database.” The lawyer further wrote that she “now understands that Westlaw Precision incorporates AI-assisted research, which can generate fictitious legal authority if not independently verified. She testified she was unable to provide the Court with this research history because the lawyer who produced the AI-generated citations is currently suspended from the practice of law in Louisiana:
“In the interest of transparency and candor, counsel apologizes to the Court and opposing counsel and accepts full responsibility for the oversight. Undersigned counsel now understands that Westlaw Precision incorporates AI-assisted research, which can generate fictitious legal authority if not independently verified. Since discovering the error, all citations in this memorandum have been independently confirmed, and a Motion for Leave to amend the Motion to Transfer has been filed to withdraw the erroneous citations. Counsel has also implemented new safeguards, including manual cross-checking in non AI-assisted databases, to prevent future mistakes.”
“At the time, undersigned counsel understood these authorities to be accurate and reliable. Undersigned counsel made edits and finalized the pleading but failed to independently verify every citation before filing it. Undersigned counsel takes responsibility for this oversight.
Undersigned counsel wants the Court to know that she takes this matter extremely seriously. Undersigned counsel holds the ethical obligations of our profession in the highest regard and apologizes to opposing counsel and the Court for this mistake. Undersigned counsel remains fully committed to the ethical obligations as an officer of the court and the standards expected by this Court going forward, which is evidenced by requesting leave to strike the inaccurate citations. Most importantly, undersigned counsel has taken steps to ensure this oversight does not happen again.”
A lawyer in New York says the death of their spouse distracted them
“We understand the grave implications of misreporting case law to the Court. It is not our intention to do so, and the issue is being investigated internally in our office,” the lawyer in the case wrote.
“The Opposition was drafted by a clerk. The clerk reports that she used Google for research on the issue,” they wrote. “The Opposition was then sent to me for review and filing. I reviewed the draft Opposition but did not check the citations. I take full responsibility for failing to check the citations in the Opposition. I believe the main reason for my failure is due to the recent death of my spouse … My husband’s recent death has affected my ability to attend to the practice of law with the same focus and attention as before.”
A lawyer in California says it was ‘a legal experiment’
This is a weird one, and has to do with an AI-generated petition filed three times in an antitrust lawsuit brought against Apple by the Coronavirus Reporter Corporation. The lawyer in the case explained that he created the document as a “legal experiment.” He wrote:
“I also ‘approved for distribution’ a Petition which Apple now seeks to strike. Apple calls the Petition a ‘manifesto,’ consistent with their five year efforts to deride us. But the Court should be aware that no human ever authored the Petition for Tim Cook’s resignation, nor did any human spend more than about fifteen minutes on it. I am quite weary of Artificial Intelligence, as I am weary of Big Tech, as the Court knows. We have never done such a test before, but we thought there was an interesting computational legal experiment here.
Apple has recently published controversial research that AI LLM's are, in short, not true intelligence. We asked the most powerful commercially available AI, ChatGPT o3 Pro ‘Deep Research’ mode, a simple question: ‘Did Judge Gonzales Rogers’ rebuke of Tim Cook’s Epic conduct create a legally grounded impetus for his termination as CEO, and if so, write a petition explaining such basis, providing contextual background on critics’ views of Apple’s demise since Steve Jobs’ death.’ Ten minutes later, the Petition was created by AI. I don't have the knowledge to know whether it is indeed 'intelligent,' but I was surprised at the quality of the work—so much so that (after making several minor corrections) I approved it for distribution and public input, to promote conversation on the complex implications herein. This is a matter ripe for discussion, and I request the motion be granted.”
Lawyers in Michigan blame an internet outage
“Unfortunately, difficulties were encountered on the evening of April 4 in assembling, sorting and preparation of PDFs for the approximately 1,500 pages of exhibits due to be electronically filed by Midnight. We do use artificial intelligence to supplement their research, along with strict verification and compliance checks before filing.
AI is incorporated into all of the major research tools available, including West and Lexis, and platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity. [We] do not rely on AI to write our briefs. We do include AI in their basic research and memorandums, and for checking spelling, syntax, and grammar. As Midnight approached on April 4, our computer system experienced a sudden and unexplainable loss of internet connection and loss of connection with the ECF [e-court filing] system … In the midst of experiencing these technical issues, we erred in our standard verification process and missed identifying incorrect text AI put in parentheticals in four cases in footnote 3, and one case on page 12, of the Opposition.”
Lawyers in Washington DC blame Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and an IT error
“After twenty years of using Westlaw, last summer I started using Lexis and its protege AI product as a natural language search engine for general legal propositions or to help formulate arguments in areas of the law where the courts have not spoken directly on an issue. I have never had a problem or issue using this tool and prior to recent events I would have highly recommended it. I failed to heed the warning provided by Lexis and did not double check the citations provided. Instead, I inserted the quotes, caselaw and uploaded the document to ProWritingAid. I used that tool to edit the brief and at one point used it to replace all the square brackets ( [ ) with parentheses.
In preparing and finalizing the brief, I used the following software tools: Pages with Grammarly and ProWritingAid ... through inadvertence or oversight, I was unaware quotes had been added or that I had included a case that did not actually exist … I immediately started trying to figure out what had happened. I spent all day with IT trying to figure out what went wrong.”
A lawyer in Texas blames their email, their temper, and their legal assistant
“Throughout May 2025, Counsel's office experienced substantial technology related problems with its computer and e-mail systems. As a result, a number of emails were either delayed or not received by Counsel at all. Counsel also possesses limited technological capabilities and relies on his legal assistant for filing documents and transcription - Counsel still uses a dictation phone. However, Counsel's legal assistant was out of the office on the date Plaintiffs Response was filed, so Counsel's law clerk had to take over her duties on that day (her first time filing). Counsel's law clerk had been regularly assisting Counsel with the present case and expressed that this was the first case she truly felt passionate about … While completing these items, Counsel's law clerk had various issues, including with sending opposing counsel the Joint Case Management Plan which required a phone conference to rectify. Additionally, Counsel's law clerk believed that Plaintiff’s Response to Defendant's Motion to Dismiss was also due that day when it was not.
In midst of these issues, Counsel - already missing his legal assistant - became frustrated. However, Counsel's law clerk said she had already completed Plaintiff's Response and Counsel immediately read the draft but did not thoroughly examine the cases cited therein … unbeknownst to Counsel and to his dismay, Counsel's law clerk did use artificial intelligence in drafting Plaintiff's Response. Counsel immediately instituted a strict policy prohibiting his staff from using artificial intelligence without exception - Counsel doesn't use artificial intelligence, so neither shall his staff.
Second, Counsel now requires any staff assisting in drafting documents to provide Counsel with a printout of each case cited therein with the passage(s) being relied on highlighted or marked.”
The lawyer also submitted an invoice from a company called Mainframe Computers for $480 which include line items for “Install office,” “printer not working and computer restarting,” “fixes with email and monitors and default fonts,” and “computer errors, change theme, resolution, background, and brightness.”
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404 MediaSamantha Cole
A screenshot of the Canadian Beer Awards' Instagram post.
Different chambers in the experiment. Image: Yamakawa, Masanori et al.
A bull terrier during tug-of-war play. Image: Alja Mazzini
The wreck of Endurance. Image: © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
A screenshot from the documents.
PublicAffairsLearn more about this author
A screenshot from the documents.
The case supplemental report shows it was created only after our article was initially published
From the case supplemental report, created June 5
Rock art panels at Jebel Arnaan. Image: Maria Guagnin
The rock ledge where the main panel was engraved. Image: Monumental rock art panel at Jebel Misma (JMI18)
Megafaunal species were preferred prey for humans in Southern South America. Image: Luciano Prates et al. Megafaunal reconstructions in the figure were provided and authorized by Megafauna 3D Project (megafauna3d.org)
Drone footage of the calf. Image: Hudson, Justine M. and Watt, Cortney A.
Artist concept of Cha 1107-7626. Image: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser
Screenshot of flag.dol.gov as of Oct. 2
A screenshot from the document.
