404 Media

2026-04-20 19:40:33

Scientists Gave a Bunch of Salmon Cocaine. This Is What Happened Next

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Salmon exposed to cocaine swim farther and behave differently than unexposed fish, according to the first study to observe the effects of cocaine on fish in the wild rather than a laboratory setting.

Many waterways around the world are contaminated with a host of legal and illegal substances that are consumed by humans and then excreted into sewage systems. As global demand for cocaine skyrockets, traces of the drug—including its main metabolite, benzoylecgonine—are flowing into lakes and rivers where they can be absorbed by wildlife, such as Atlantic salmon.

Previous research in laboratory conditions has already linked cocaine exposure to behavioral changes in aquatic species, but this connection has never been explored in fish in the wild. Now, scientists have demonstrated that cocaine and benzoylecgonine “can accumulate in the brains of exposed Atlantic salmon—an ecologically and economically important species of high conservation concern—and disrupt the movement and space use of these fish in the wild,” according to a study published on Monday in Current Biology.

“We were motivated by a major gap in the scientific literature: almost everything that was known about the impacts of cocaine pollution on animal behaviour relies on data that has been collected in laboratory settings,” said Michael Bertram, an author of the study and an associate professor in the department of wildlife, fish, and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in an email to 404 Media.

“We wanted to know whether environmentally realistic exposure to cocaine and its major metabolite, benzoylecgonine, actually changes how fish move in the wild under real ecological and environmental conditions,” he continued.

To fill this knowledge gap, Bertram and his colleagues obtained more than a hundred Atlantic salmon “smolts”—the term for young fish—that were raised in a hatchery until they were two years old. The team divided them into three groups of 35 fish each and equipped every fish with an implant and tracking tags. The “cocaine group” received a slow-release chemical implant of cocaine, the “metabolite group” received a slow-release benzoylecgonine implant, and a third “control group” carried a dummy implant with no chemicals.
Graphical abstract outlining the team’s approach. Image: Brand, Jack et al.
The three groups were released simultaneously on April 12, 2022 at the same site on the south-western side of Lake Vättern in Sweden, alongside 200 other smolts that were not involved in this experiment. Over the course of roughly two months, the exposed groups moved much more than the control group, especially the metabolite group; they traveled 1.9 times farther per week than the unexposed smolts.

“We expected an effect of contaminant exposure on the movement of salmon, but the scale of the changes seen still surprised us,” Bertram said. “The strongest response was close to a two-fold increase in movement, and the most unexpected result was that benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine, produced the clearest effect rather than cocaine itself.”

Indeed, the study found that the metabolite group swam almost nine miles farther per week than the control week in the final two weeks of the 8-week experiment, whereas the control group was more settled down by that point.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that environmental levels of a cocaine metabolite that is commonly found in aquatic ecosystems can alter the space use and swimming activity of fish in the wild,” the team said in the study.
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It’s not clear why the metabolite group was so restless, given that benzoylecgonine is considered psychoactively inactive in humans. The compound is a long-lived byproduct of cocaine made by the liver and excreted in urine, which makes it the easiest biomarker to look for in a typical drug test. The possibility that this metabolite may have a greater impact on some species in the wild is disturbing, in part because it is frequently found in higher concentrations in natural environments than its parent compound (cocaine).

“The results suggest that benzoylecgonine may be more biologically important than it is often assumed to be,” Bertram said. “Our findings raise new questions about whether metabolites can sometimes be as disruptive as, or even more disruptive than, the parent compound in aquatic wildlife.”

The team emphasized that much more research is required to understand the pressures that cocaine and other substances might be introducing both to individual species and to whole ecosystems.

“The next steps are to work out the mechanisms by which cocaine and its metabolite disrupt behaviour and movement in fish in the wild, test how general this effect is across other species and systems, and use higher-resolution tracking to see whether these movement changes affect predation risk, migration, reproduction, or survival,” Bertram said. “That is really the key question now: not just whether behaviour changes, but what those changes mean ecologically.”

For example, this particular study focused on hatchery-raised smolts that were released into the wild, but future studies could test out the effects of these contaminants on fully wild populations as well, which have their own unique behavioral characteristics. Unraveling the effects of these human-sourced substances is even more urgent given that the global use of illicit drugs increased by roughly 20 percent over the last decade, suggesting that “the environmental impact of these substances is likely to grow,” according to the study.

“The behaviour and movement of wildlife underpin habitat use, feeding, predator exposure, and population connectivity, so altering these processes could have wider consequences for food webs and population dynamics,” Bertram concluded. “For species already under pressure, an added stressor like this could be highly detrimental, although the long-term effects on fisheries and ecosystems still need to be tested directly.”

Effects of chronic cocaine, morphine and methamphetamine on the mobility, immobility and stereotyped behaviors in crayfish - PubMed

The worth of crayfish as a model system for studies of addiction was not previously recognized because a drug-reward phenomenon had not been documented in this model system.

^PubMed

404 Media

2026-04-20 16:18:26

Forbes Prediction Market Gamifies Story About Mass Shooting of 8 Children

In another sign that the depravity economy has no bottom, Forbes published a story about a Louisiana man that killed 8 children over the weekend containing a box that asked readers to predict whether Congress would do anything about gun control. Citation Needed author Molly White first spotted the box and shared it on Bluesky.
Forbes.com screenshot.
On Sunday morning 31-year old Shamar Elkins killed eight children ages one to fourteen, including seven of his own kids, in a rampage across three locations in Shreveport, Louisiana. Police shot Elkins to death. The Forbes story summarized these events, aggregated the Associated Press and New York Times stories about the killings, and then asked readers to predict whether or not Congress will pass stricter gun laws.

“The New York Times reported his family members said he had mental health problems and had expressed suicidal thoughts,” Forbes said. And then, below that, a “ForbesPredict” box:

“Congress WILL/ WON’T pass new gun safety legislation before 31st December 2026?” The box said then asked readers to “make your prediction.” A green checkmark and red X pulsed in place. Sliding your cursor over each changes the construction of the sentence.
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Forbes launched ForbesPredict in January as part of an effort to reverse declining traffic from search engines and keep users on its website longer. It’s a prediction market like Kalshi or Polymarket, but unlike those sites there’s no money to be won. “AI is fundamentally changing how people access information, and that shift is already starkly visible in publisher's traffic,” Nina Gould, Forbes’ Chief Innovation Officer said in a press release announcing ForbesPredict. “Our response isn’t to chase scale, but to deepen engagement. ForbesPredict gives our audience a reason to return, participate and invest their thinking—not just consume headlines.”

ForbesPredict is an attempt to gamify news consumption and keep users scanning the website. Rather than cash, players earn tokens. “Tokens that have no cash value but matter within the ForbesPredict ecosystem as a signal of judgment over time. The tokens unlock greater status, gameplay advantages, and non-monetary rewards along the way,” Gould told Publishing Insider in an interview about the launch of ForbesPredict.

As a new user who had not signed into Forbes.com, I had 800 tokens. A story about the horrifying murder of children in Louisiana invited me to predict the legislative future of gun control. It cost 100 tokens for me to predict that Congress will pass new gun laws by the end of 2026, an outcome ForbesPredict gave an 18 percent chance of happening.
Forbes.com screenshot.
For 10 tokens I could get a “hint” about potential outcomes before spending 100 to make a prediction. The next question asked if Trump would pardon Ghislaine Maxwell before the end of his term. Paying 10 tokens for the hint revealed that ForbesPredict users say there’s a 61 percent chance Trump WILL pardon Maxwell. According to the hints this is because Trump said he’s allowed to do it. There’s a daily login bonus of 800 tokens for anyone willing to make an account.

Websites like Polymarket and Kalshi allow people to bet on the outcomes of world events including of war and death. ForbesPredict is an ersatz version of Polymarket where no money changes hands and users spend tokens for clout internally on Forbes. It’s hard for me to picture the person who is interested in prediction markets without real money visiting Forbes daily to read watered down reporting from the Associated Press and New York Times and then clicking a little boxy like they’re playing Candy Crush with the news cycle.

Forbes built ForbesPredict in partnership with a company called Axiom. It’s an attempt to solve the very real problem of AI devouring traffic and referrals. “AI platforms are answering the questions your journalism used to answer, permanently restructuring how information flows,” Axiom’s website said. “The quiet hope that this was a fluke. The data says otherwise. The trajectory is clear.”

The trajectory is, indeed, clear. AI does seem to be restructuring how information flows on the internet. Forbes is making a bet that it can keep its digital business afloat by serving as a low-stakes prediction market for news junkies. It’s offering gambling without the stakes and the payout and it’s offering news without first hand reporting or new information. It remains to be seen if this will help it retain readers and keep people on the site.

Forbes did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

'Unauthorized' Edit to Ukraine's Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket's War Betting

It looks like someone invented a fake Russia advance in Ukraine to manipulate online gambling markets.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-20 13:00:27

Why Journalists Are Going Indie (with Maddy Myers)

This week, Sam is joined by Maddy Myers, editor-in-chief of Mothership. She’s also a co-host of the video games podcast Triple Click.

Maddy launched Mothership with co-founder Zoë Hannah in January. It’s a queer and women-owned independent publication that focuses on gender and games. They discuss Maddy’s early days of games journalism at a (print!) alt-weekly in Boston and then at the Mary Sue, how she and Zoë decided it was time to quit their jobs and launch their own indie outlet, and the importance of owning your own work as a journalist.
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If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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Why I’m launching a feminist video games website in 2026 - The Guardian

Mothership and a History of Women in Games Media - the Post Games podcast

Mothership and a History of Women in Games Media

Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.

^{Post Games (YouTube)}

404 Media

2026-04-18 13:00:34

Babies Born from Dead Parents Will Increase with New Tech. Are We Ready?

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

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that peacefully passed the crown, predicted trouble on the horizon, gave life after death, and coastally shelved an idea.

First, scientists watch a succession story play out for years in a naked mole rat colony. Then: prediction markets as a public health threat, the thorny questions of posthumous reproduction, and a walk on the shores of an ancient alien seas.

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

Digging into the palace intrigue of a rodent realm

Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al. “Peaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat.” Science Advances.

Murderous queens. Bloody power struggles. Strictly enforced hierarchies. I’m speaking, of course, of naked mole rats, a bizarre species of rodent that becomes embroiled in violent conflicts over the succession of one breeding queen to the next.

Though aggression in succession is the norm for these animals, scientists now report a rare peaceful transition of power from one queen to her daughter in a captive colony.

The discovery suggests that “the less common peaceful trajectory to queen succession…is possible under some conditions” especially when “aggression-based enforcement may be insufficient or unnecessary and when the cost of a ‘war’ may be too high,” according to the new study.

As we’ve covered before on the Abstract, mole rats (both the naked kind and the non-naked kind) are the only mammals to live in eusocial colonies similar to bees or ants, meaning they are reigned over by one breeding queen and her subordinate workers. In addition to this unique social structure, mole rats display a number of fascinating behavioral and genetic adaptations, including long lifespans and low rates of cancer, which has made them a popular species for research.

Naked mole rats may not look all that intimidating, but when it’s time to anoint a new queen, the fur starts to fly (or it would, if these animals had any fur). If a queen dies or is deposed by rivals, subordinate females in the colony battle to take the throne.

But scientists co-led by Shanes Abeywardena and Alexandria M. Schraibman of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies observed a different succession story that unfolded over many years in the Amigos captive colony housed in San Diego.

Starting in 2019, a queen named Teré reigned over the colony and produced many healthy pups. Once the colony became crowded, with nearly 40 members, Queen Teré began delivering litters with no surviving pups. When the researchers removed half of the members, she began to produce surviving pups again, though not many. The team then deliberately introduced another stressor by moving the colony to a new facility in 2022, which ceased Queen Teré’s fertility.
Summary of the Amigos colony’s succession story. Image: Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al.
In response, Alexandria, one of Teré’s daughters, became pregnant in 2023 and 2024, but her litters also produced no survivors, and she had to be euthanized in 2024 due to a uterine torsion. Finally, the long reproductive hiatus was ended after three years by the ascension of Alexandria’s sister, Arwen, who became Queen Arwen upon her delivery of healthy pups in October 2025.

“Aside from a single incident on 6 February 2025 in which one animal was found with a superficial bite wound and dried blood around the face, an injury that resolved without recurrence, no aggression or dominance related conflict was observed,” the researchers said. “Instead, Queen Teré was reported to exhibit ‘guarding’ behavior of Arwen and her litter. No other signs of social instability, behavioral escalation, or colony-wide distress were documented.”

“Together, these observations indicate that following the decline of Queen Teré’s reproductive capacity and the loss of the intermediary breeder Alexandria, Arwen successfully assumed the reproductive role without eliciting aggression from the reigning queen or from other colony members,” the team concluded.

The study is an antidote to the story we covered last week about a lethal chimp “civil war,” demonstrating that animals with strict dominance structures choose peace over violence in some cases. My only note is that Teré’ be given the honorific Queen Mother for her service.

In other news…

The over/under on predication markets

Packin, Nizan Geslevich and Rabinovitz, Sharon. “Prediction markets as a public health threat.” Science.

Prediction markets (PMs) are exploding in popularity, but researchers warn that the “addictive design, vulnerable users, and permissive regulatory environments” that characterize these markets “are a well-established formula for population-level harm,” according to the Policy Forum section of the journal Science.

PMs operated by companies like Kalshi or Polymarket “pose underappreciated threats to democratic integrity” and are linked to “addictive behaviors,” according to authors Nizan Geslevich Packin of Baruch College Zicklin School of Business and Sharon Rabinovitz of the University of Haifa. For instance, PMs can enable insider trading about classified government information and expose millions of users to the risk of addiction and major financial losses.

“A public health approach reframes PM risks as predictable outcomes of environmental design, analogous to tobacco control’s success in treating smoking as population-level exposure rather than individual vice,” the team argued in the article.

“The window for precautionary action is closing,” the researchers emphasized. “Each week of billion-dollar PM activity…prolongs a large uncontrolled experiment on users.”

It remains to be seen whether this warning about the dangers of a wild new industry will materialize into meaningful regulatory action. Want to make a bet?

Creating new life after death

Bamford, Sandra Carol. “Spectral Connections: Anthropological Engagements with Posthumous Reproduction.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Posthumous children—children born after the death of one or both parents—are popular in myth and fiction, from the Greek Dionysus to more modern characters like John Connor or Daenerys Targaryen.

But this is also a real demographic of people that may evolve in interesting ways as reproductive technologies enable larger numbers of posthumous conceptions—in which the sperm and egg donors for an embryo may be deceased, such as the case of a boy born in 2018 whose mother and father had both died years earlier in a car crash.

In this way, “frozen sperm, eggs (or embryos) are, at one and the same time, both alive and dead,” said Sandra Bamford of the University of Toronto in a new anthropological study of the topic. “Through their frozen gametes and the potential of new kin connections in the future, the dead remain as active participants influencing the lives of the living.”

The study, which is part of a broader journal issue exploring kinship, pulls together many intriguing case studies, including the “Nuer ghost marriage” practices of Sudan, in which a deceased man can be considered the father of a kinsman’s children, or the case of William Kane, who bequeathed frozen sperm to his girlfriend, sparking a legal battle with his adult children after his death by suicide.

In other words, the legal, ethical, and practical implications of posthumous conception are still very much in flux, raising thorny questions about when, and how, the dead can produce new life. For instance: the ambiguities over judging the consent of a deceased person over the use of their posthumous gametes; the rights of posthumously conceived children to be named heirs of estates; and the possible emotional and psychological toll on posthumously conceived children, along with their family members.

The Rime of the Really Ancient Mariner

Zaki, Abdallah S. and Lamb, Michael P. “Identifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans.” Nature.

We’ll close, as all things should, with waves lapping on long-lost alien shores. The surface of Mars is etched with the memory of rivers, lakes, and perhaps even an expansive ocean that may have covered much of its northern hemisphere between three and four billion years ago.

Scientists have already mapped out the rough contours of what may be an ancient Martian shoreline, but a new study throws the seas into sharper relief by identifying topographic signs of a possible coastal shelf. The team argued in their study that these shelf features may be a better indicator of a past ocean than shoreline features, based on similar observations on Earth.
An illustration taken from orbiter data identifying the coastal shelf region on Mars. Image: A. Zaki
“Our results indicate that long-lived ancient oceans on presently arid planets may be best identified not only through discrete shorelines but also through…a global coastal shelf,” said researchers led by Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of Caltech University. The study supports “the presence of an ancient ocean on the northern plains of Mars that was bounded by a coastal shelf.”

While this ocean dried up long ago, its topographic remnants are a reminder of a time when Mars was warm, wet, and perhaps, wriggling with life.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Chinese baby born four years after parents' death

A surrogate mother gave birth as the biological parents had frozen embryos before they died in a car crash.

^{BBC News}

404 Media

2026-04-17 15:44:59

FAA Scraps Civil and Criminal Penalties for Flying Drones Near ICE Vehicles

On Wednesday the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded a temporary flight restriction (TFR) that created a no-fly zone within 3,000 feet of “Department of Homeland Security facilities and mobile assets.” The new restriction softened the language of the original and abandoned the threat of civil or criminal penalties but added the Department of Justice to the list of protected agencies.

A 2025 TFR restricted the presence of drones around Department of Energy and Pentagon assets. The FAA added ICE and CBP to the list of restricted agencies in January as ICE began operations in Minneapolis. The no-fly zone covered 3,000 feet around any ICE vehicle. Anyone who was caught violating it could be fined or jailed. Because ICE agents often drive through the city in unmarked vehicles it was impossible for drone operators to know if they were violating the order and local journalists who use drones to take pictures and monitor law enforcement activities were grounded.
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Earlier this month, Minnesota journalist Rob Levine sued the FAA over the TFR. In a motion filed earlier this week, Levine’s lawyers argued that the FAA had violated his rights and should rescind the restrictions. Core to their argument was the unmarked vehicles which they said created a “flotilla of invisible, moving bubbles,” according to court documents. “Under any standard, the TFR’s chilling sweep violates the First Amendment as applied to the Petitioner’s use of drones in photojournalism.”

The FAA replaced the TFR this week after Levine’s lawyers filed the motion. The new advisory lessened restrictions, including dropping the language around 3,000 feet and criminal penalties, but expanded the amount of protected assets.

“UAS operators are advised to avoid flying in proximity to: Department of War, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security covered mobile assets,” the new TFR said. “UAS operators who fly within this airspace are warned that…DOW, DOE, DOJ, or DHS may take action that results in the interference, disruption, seizure, damaging, or destruction of unamended [aircraft] deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to covered mobile assets.”

Despite the threat to shoot journalist’s drones out of the sky, Levine and his lawyers see the new TFR as a victory. “This is a big win. It was heartbreaking to have my drones grounded at a time of such importance to my community, but I'm looking forward to getting back up there and getting back to my journalism as soon as possible,” Levine said in a statement provided to 404 Media.

Grayson Clary, a lawyer with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who took on Levine’s case, said there is still work to do. “We're glad to see the FAA rescind its original order, which was an egregious overreach that had serious consequences for reporters nationwide. But this kind of arbitrary back-and-forth from the FAA is exactly the problem, and we intend to make clear to the D.C. Circuit that this restriction never should have been implemented in the first place,” he said.

Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming ICE

The FAA has altered a no fly zone designation that was originally created for US military bases to apply to DHS units.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-17 13:00:36

The Destroyed Remnants of a Lost World Are Falling to Earth, Scientists Discover

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The remnants of a bizarre long-lost world that fell apart before our planet was fully formed are falling to Earth in the form of meteorites, according to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

For decades, scientists have puzzled over the origin of angrites, a rare class of about 70 meteorites with unique volcanic compositions that suggest they were forged in a large ancient object with differentiated layers, including a metallic core and a magma ocean.

Scientists have long assumed that this object, the so-called angrite parent body (APB), was roughly a few hundred miles across, similar in size to the asteroid 4 Vesta. But researchers recently raised the tantalizing possibility that the APB might have been much larger, perhaps on the scale of Earth’s moon.

Now, a team led by Aaron Bell, an experimental petrologist and an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has discovered “the first unequivocal evidence supporting the large angrite parent body hypothesis, which posits that the angrites are samples derived from a protoplanet that was catastrophically disrupted during the earliest evolutionary stages of the inner solar system,” according to the new study.

“It probably got destroyed in the early solar system, so [angrites] are remnants of a lost protoplanet,” Bell said in a call with 404 Media. “A few pieces broke off and are now in the asteroid belt, and a few of them have come to Earth, and we’ve picked them up.”

Angrites date back about 4.56 billion years, making them among the oldest known volcanic rocks. They belong to a class of stony “achondritic” meteorites that contain the crystalized signatures of melted rock, such as basalts, hinting that they originate in larger bodies that underwent some degree of planetary processing and layered differentiation, even if those early planetary embryos never accreted into full planets.

“Angrites are interesting in that they don't have a known parent body,” Bell said. “It's never been definitively identified, and that's one of the mysteries.”

“There are a bunch of arguments about why angrites are so geochemically unusual,” he added. “They're kind of this oddity.”

Most models of early planetary accretion predict that relatively small objects formed within the first few million years of the solar system, which is why the APB was assumed to be an asteroid-sized object, rather than a much larger nascent planet.

While working on a previous study, Bell became interested in an aluminum-rich angrite from Northwest Africa, known as NWA 12,774, which was classified in 2019. The meteorite is one of a handful of unusual primitive angrites that appear to have been crystallized at high pressure within the APB, indicating that it formed deep under the surface and therefore might shed light on the size of this bygone world.

“Even among angrites, there's only four or five that have these primitive compositions,” Bell said, adding that the meteorite had “off-the-charts aluminum content, which is really very unusual.”

Bell and his colleagues developed a geobarometer—a tool that calculates the pressures at which rocks and minerals formed—-that estimated it would take at least 1.7 gigapascals to account for the rock’s special properties. This pressure corresponds to an object with a minimum radius of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), which is just under the size of Pluto. The APB may even have been as large as the Moon, which has a roughly 1000-mile radius.

“Clearly, within the first few million years of solar system evolution, you could grow planetary embryos that were 1,000-plus kilometers” in radius, Bell said. “We're talking within three million years of the condensation of the first solids in the solar system, so it’s right at the beginning.”

The discovery suggests that the APB may have been a first-generation protoplanet that coalesced and shattered millions of years before the familiar worlds of our solar system took full shape. Judging by the strange properties of angrites, the APB was also on track to be a very different kind of world than Earth and its neighbors, had it survived the chaotic environment of its infancy.

Angrites are “geochemically fundamentally different, and that's why people were interested in the first place—because they were odd,” Bell said. “They don't look like garden-variety

basalts you get from Mars or the Moon or Earth.”

“It's sort of this path not taken—or maybe it was, but we just have a couple pieces of it that tell us something we didn't know,” he concluded. “There were once large bodies that, maybe, didn’t look like the terrestrial planets.”

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404 Media

2026-04-17 13:00:29

Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

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 the Madonna-whore algorithm, reader tips, and jazz.

SAM: Yesterday morning I published a story I started working on weeks ago and only in the last week or so felt enough distance from the topic to be able to articulate it clearly: My year in the wedding planning social media abyss. The piece is a long, more sourced BTB, and I don’t have a ton to add to what’s said in it, but I do want to highlight some of the comments I’ve gotten so far that touch on things the story doesn’t elaborate on.

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Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-16 16:34:12

App Stores Push Users Toward Nudify Apps, New Research Shows

A new report from the nonprofit research group Tech Transparency Project (TTP) claims that Google and Apple’s app stores go beyond simply hosting harmful “nudify” and “undress” apps that remove women’s clothing in images, and actually encourage users to download those apps.

In January, TTP published research that showed how the app stores host dozens of “nudify” and undressing apps. This new research, released on Wednesday and first reported by Bloomberg, shows how the stores don’t just passively host those apps, but push them toward users through search and advertising.

💡
Do you have experience to share about nudify or undress apps being used in schools, or by teens? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

TTP conducted a series of searches in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, according to their writeup of the research, using terms like “nudify,” “undress,” and “deepnude.”

After testing the apps that appeared in the top 10 search results, they found that “roughly 40 percent of the apps that came up in both the Apple and Google Play search results could render women nude or scantily clad,” and that “Apple and Google ran ads for nudify apps in some of the search results—including, in Google’s case, a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation.” They also found that the stores can lead users to more and different nudify apps through autocomplete search queries.

“TTP found that ads for nudify apps came up as the top result in three of the Apple searches. Apple, which controls all of the advertising in its app store, is selling and placing these ads,” the researchers wrote. “Apple says it prohibits ad content that ‘promotes adult-oriented themes or graphic content.’ But TTP’s findings suggest Apple is not always enforcing that policy.” The first result for an App Store search for “deepfake,” they found, was for an app that easily replaces women’s clothed images with nude versions.

In 2024, 404 Media covered how Google surfaced apps through searches for “undress apps,” “best deepfake nudes,” and similar terms with promoted results, despite Google’s ad policies against this type of content.

Nudify apps became a popular market for years, but today, they’re extremely easy to access and are advertised on social media. In schools, children use nudify apps to bully classmates with disastrous results for both the bullies and the victims, and school administrators are often unprepared for how to deal with students using these wildly popular apps.

Google spokesperson Dan Jackson told TTP many of the apps identified by TTP have been suspended. "When violations of our policies are reported to us, we investigate and take appropriate action," he said.

Jackson gave a similar response to 404 Media when reached for comment on this story. "Google Play does not allow apps that contain sexual content," he said. "Our investigation and enforcement process is ongoing."

Update with comment from Google.

Schools Are Failing to Protect Students From Non-Consensual Deepfakes, Report Shows

A survey of teachers, students and parents showed that schools are unprepared for non-consensual imagery, AI generated or otherwise, spreading throughout communities of young people.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-16 13:00:34

I Almost Lost My Mind in the Bridal Algorithm

I thought I would be a “cool” bride. I believed this because I never dreamed of my own wedding. When other girls daydreamed aloud about riding down the aisle on a pony, or gracefully officiated the union of a Princess Diana Beanie Baby and a Hot Wheels truck, I came up blank. Despite a constant stream of ‘90s media featuring transformative white dresses, there was nothing my imagination could conjure for it. I was busy scheduling meetings on my toy Palm Pilot. This was fine until 30 years later, when my now-husband asked me what I wanted for our own wedding, and I had nothing. After years of watching friends plan weddings, I only had one preference for the day: I didn’t want to feel stressed out.

There are a few industries that prey on emotion particularly brazenly. The funeral industry is one. The wedding industry is another. I knew this going in. I thought I could defeat hundreds of years of socially ingrained pressure backed by a multi-billion dollar consumer machine. No problem.

What I did not account for—shamefully, considering how much time I spend thinking and writing about technology in my professional life—was that in the more than three decades I’d spent building a resistance to deeply gendered expectations on my existence, that machine was perfecting the art of making me feel weird, broke, and ugly, and I wouldn’t recognize what was happening until I was deep in it. I’m talking about the wedding planning algorithm.

When Lillie and her fiance Morgan got engaged, Lillie told me she saw the difference in her social media feeds the moment she texted her friends the news. (They’re using first names only in this story for their privacy.) “Immediately, all of my social media was just flooded,” she told me in a phone call. “And I think at the beginning it was all just so shiny and new. I was like, ‘This is so awesome.’ So I did kind of consume a lot of bridal media pretty strongly out of the gate, because I didn't quite realize yet how much it was going to take over every single one of my social media apps.”

We talk a lot here on 404 Media about “the algorithm.” Usually we're referring to either Instagram Reels or Tiktok. Part of the reason we discuss and dissect it so frequently is because if you're not careful, the algorithm—the spew of content these apps automatically show you based on your past viewing habits, data from other apps, or what the app thinks you’re interested in—becomes a mirror of your mind; this is dangerous territory considering it's easy to manipulate by people, brands, networks and corporations with perverse incentives.

Some of this actually seems, and sometimes is, helpful at first. The design pattern of infinite scrolling relies on a variable reward system to be effective and truly endless. The next thing you see in your feed might be the exact nugget of wisdom, life hack, or listicle you needed to make your life better, or, in this case, your wedding flawless. But you’ll never know unless you keep scrolling through the next hundred useless or actively brainrotting videos.

Like Lillie, the moment I got engaged and started Googling wedding dresses and venues was the moment my entire social media experience shifted into the Bride Algo. Every Reel and Tiktok, and I do mean every single post, contained something new I needed to change about myself:

• “Everything I did to ‘lock in’ for my wedding & lose 34 lbs in 5 months without missing out on living life.”
• “If you spend $150k on a wedding and stay married for 40 years, that's only about $10 a day. Not bad for one of the best days of your life.”
• “What I will NOT be doing as a 2026 bride.”
• “Bridal Breakdown PSA to 2026 Brides.”
• “POV: You’re not fat, you’re just puffy.”
• “25 Things Guests Secretly Hate About Weddings”
• “LEAVE THAT MAN AT THE ALTAR”

Journalist CT Jones calls the effect this content has on even the most level-headed people “wedding brain.” They recently wrote: “There’s this fog around my head that I can’t seem to shake when it comes to this event. My TikTok algorithm tells me every three swipes about the ‘biggest mistakes people make that ruin their special days.’”

Today's authority on weddings is Vogue, and in January 2020, Vogue correctly identified that social media was changing everything about how couples plan weddings. “Women of the 2010s became a lot more knowledgeable thanks to social media,” designer Danielle Frankel told the magazine. “They began seeing not just their friends getting married, but aspirational brides they follow on Instagram. There’s something kind of cool about researching through real people and their experiences, and the ability to share stories through a social platform.” In the six years that followed, this chipper assessment of there being “something kind of cool” about literal celebrity weddings does not age well. Being an influencer or content creator became one of the dwindling few ways for anyone in a creative field to make a living, a situation solidified by a tanked economy, a never-ending housing crisis, widespread unemployment, and AI gutting of a variety of fields.

Fast forward to earlier this month, New York magazine published a story about the behind-the-scenes process that decides whose wedding makes it into Vogue, and what happens when they don’t. “One woman in the fashion industry had a breakdown after Vogue turned her down,” journalist Charlotte Klein wrote, adding that the jilted bride went to trauma rehab after. But the real crux of the issue—how multi-million dollar Vogue weddings, most of which are not celebrities but are parties thrown by total unknowns, are perceived, consumed, and rely on real, normal people’s attention—comes at the very end of the story, in a quote from a mysteriously anonymous fashion editor: “A wedding is a lot of work. It’s a full production and you’re spending months on it and you’re designing it—it’s a creative achievement in a way. If someone puts on a play or does an art installation, they get press and attention for it. And it’s like, Well, I did all this stuff for my wedding. Where is my round of applause?”

That editor is talking about the Beckhams of the world, and the reality TV stars, and the old, old money Beltway normies. But they’re also talking to, and about, the rest of us.

This is all so much insidious than it used to be. While the lifestyles of the rich and famous used to be reserved for magazines and Hollywood, we’re all swimming in the same algorithmic ocean now. “Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding-like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 book of essays Trick Mirror. “It has become common for people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they were famous all the time. Under these circumstances, the vision of the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation.”

I know that I’m not alone in the Weddingtok and the Bridal Algo because people have started making videos mocking the content that’s stressing us all out. “If you feel calm, it’s probably because you’re forgetting something,” one planner says in a satirical video. The comments on these send-up videos reveal hundreds of women saying they’re stressed beyond belief, losing their minds, or otherwise crashing out. A comment on another such video: “Me locking in because I’m getting married next month and I fucking hate myself is literally my entire personality.” On another: “Pulling my hair out and screaming and can’t wait to disappear.”

Looking back, the moment I first heard the phrase “cake inspo board” feels like foreshadowing. I'd emailed a handful of bakeries and filled out a dozen inquiry forms at that point in the planning process. Because of competitiveness among vendors about rates and offerings (or possibly because some evil McKinsey for Weddings-type MBA entity decided this is a useful lead generation sales flow), every piece of information has to come directly from a vendor these days and is almost never listed on their websites publicly. It’s acquired by prospective clients, who blast 400 inquiries to their contact forms, some of them requiring multiple choice quizzes about the budget, timeline, “wedding day vibe” and personal social media handles. A few bakers got back to me with quotes for simple cakes. One asked for my mood board. For a cake? Like... flavors? I felt like I’d missed a step going down the stairs. I didn't have a vision board for the cake. I needed a vision board for the cake.

Prior to planning a wedding, I hadn’t used Pinterest since 2008. When I started using it again after several vendors asked me for it, I felt a sugary thrill at pinning a disjointed collage of flowers, dresses, and other things I’d only describe as moon-landing-aspirational boards. Pinterest, meanwhile, is increasingly a minefield of AI slop, and has been for a while, with AI-generated makeup inspiration photos and dresses, which makes the process feel more confusing and unachievable.

Alongside the thickly-iced and piped “vintage” triple-layer cakes is “thinspo” content, in the form of viral walking routines, the Gabby George arm workouts, and ads for ordering a GLP-1 online. “Thinspo” content is all over Pinterest and other social media platforms.

“On Pinterest, every single photo is bones. Like, I can see clavicles. I can see sternums. I can see collarbones,” Lillie said. “Especially with the bridal outfits.” Once she starts feeling herself spending too much time looking through this kind of content, she takes a break.

"I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”

I asked my friend Kelli Sullivan, whose objectively stunning wedding I attended in 2025, if she’d felt any of these anxieties while planning hers. “I feel like social media especially in recent years has gone so overboard with talking about and showcasing weddings, and particularly in a super influencer and curated style, that even subliminally influenced my own decisions when planning,” she said.

“I don’t feel like social media gave me direct pressure when it came to planning and decision making, but it definitely influenced my wedding,” Kelli said. But it wasn’t all bad for her, necessarily. “I really loved immersing myself in that niche of social media and was inspired by Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok wedding ideas that helped shape many of my decisions and ideas I never would have really even considered as a possibility otherwise,” she said. “I also really appreciated insights from other brides and hearing their horror stories and similar struggles made me feel less alone when things felt heavy in planning.”

Lillie said the same. “That is just the beauty of social media, sometimes, to just not feel alone. That has been really, really helpful for me,” she said. “But I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”

Attending Kelli’s wedding, and all the other beautiful but vastly different weddings my friends have planned over the years, felt essential to understanding the many unspoken rules around ceremony, etiquette, and tradition, and all the ways these rules should be broken. But Lillie is the first of her friends to have a wedding. “I will kind of be the guinea pig for all of my friends, I guess, to look at my wedding and be like, ‘this is how Lillie did it,’” she said. “That’s also kind of been a lot of pressure. It's hard.”

Adding to that pressure, she and Morgan are navigating these expectations as a lesbian couple in Idaho, and where they live skews heavily Mormon, conservative, and Christian. They use social media to vet vendors’ friendliness toward queer couples before contacting them, scanning Facebook and Instagram pages for signs of intolerance or hate. Lillie calls this being “on the lookout.”

“Are these people that I want to interact with? How are they going to treat me? Am I going to be treated differently? I have to get some stuff altered for the boys suits, and we’d gotten in contact with a local seamstress up here, and I'm like, scrolling through her Facebook to see how she feels about me. And that's just a tiring thing to do. But it’s for my own safety. I don't want to go into these people's houses if it’s not going to be somewhere safe for me. That sometimes sounds really dramatic, but it's not. It just kind of casts a sort of shadow over everything,” Lillie explained. “This is supposed to be just such a joyous time of our life.”

Almost all of the most viral wedding planning content on social media is aggressively heteronormative—a reflection of an industry struggling to keep up, and attitudes toward queer relationships and marriage in this country that are painfully, dangerously outdated. Lillie tells vendors that she and her fiancée are both women, and they still ask her who the groom is. They routinely ask her, “Who’s going to be the boy?” Meanwhile, Tiktok tells us a silk scarf basque waist dress and a sparkler exit is the real sin.

During my own planning, guests and vendors frequently asked me what our “colors” were. I didn't want to have specific colors, but the algorithm told me that even multicolor weddings are on-trend (derogatory), part of a “wildflower” fad of eclecticism. The algo also told me, over and over, that no matter what else I did, there was one combination to avoid lest I become a cringe dated chopped unc chud of a bride: chartreuse and burgundy.

One of the planning tasks I truly enjoyed was picking out and arranging my own (minimal) florals. If the wedding you’re planning is at a venue that’s not all-inclusive—meaning, it’s on you to supply everything from the chairs and linens to the sound system, florals, food, dessert, on and on—a lot of the process is emails and payment portals. I wanted to choose and assemble my own flowers for this reason: I needed to do something with my hands, finally, that brings me joy.

My fiancé and I went to a wholesale flower market two days before our wedding and picked bunches. And ultimately, when I got to the flower market with no plan for my bouquet other than to choose what called to me, I ended up with a swaggy handful of hanging burgundy amaranthus stems and bright lime Bells-of-Ireland. Now everyone would know I got married sometime between 2025-2026.

This fear of being dated is a real joy killer, and a heavily-pushed narrative on the bridal algo right now. I love Basque waisted dresses and find them reliably flattering for my body shape, but #2026Bride influencers deemed them inexplicably cringe at some point in the last year, so my attraction to them soured, and finding a dress became a nightmare of rush shipping, returns and restocking fees. (While writing this story, InStyle published a piece that could only be made in that lab: a series of collage illustrations imagining Taylor Swift in wedding dresses, including one captioned “If you’re on #WeddingTok in 2026 like I am, you’ll know that the patron saint of basic bitches, Taylor Swift, is a basque-waist dress, burgundy-and-chartreuse color palette girl.”)

The fact that I can be swayed at all by what an internet person thinks, as a 36 year old with decades of being socially weird under my belt, disturbs me. I know that everything about what we do, wear, say, and choose is destined to be dated someday because we exist in a specific time. And yet, realizing when I got back with my bouquet and 15 pounds of freshly cut florals that I’d still somehow broken the year’s biggest, most made up mean-girl rule made me feel like an uncool little kid again.

In the car on the way back from the flower market, I bemoaned all of these things to my fiancé, who endured our apartment transforming into a shipping warehouse for weeks. He asked if it's a “comparison is the thief of joy” type-thing. It is that, but the comparison is no longer with some girl you went to high school with. Rather, it's an entire universe of options, budgets, opinions, and salespeople. In the scroll, it’s hard to tell the difference between a wedding real people got married at, and a photo spread that's meant to highlight a set of vendors or brands. Twenty years ago, an average couple might have had a wedding in their backyard or at the firehouse with catering, but surely they weren’t this stressed about tablescapes or cake inspo Pinterest boards.

"Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions."

People are getting wise to this. And there’s one type of wedding that I scrolled past over and over again before I realized they were all entirely staged: styled shoots. “Styled shoots are a common cheat. It’s kind of unethical imo. Once you know what to look out for, it’s pretty obvious,” Lana Dubkova, a documentary-style event and brand photographer, recently posted on X. Lana’s been a photographer for a decade but started doing weddings full-time in 2023. In a styled shoot, photographers, confectioners, designers, florists, venues, stylists, and the rest of the wedding vendor galaxy come together, often with professional models to serve as the bride, groom and guests, to display their wares in an editorial setting. These aren’t real weddings, but are meant to advertise their work to real couples and planners. And they are impacting real couples’ wedding day wants.

Lana told me in an email that although her clients typically come to her for her own candid style, she often needs to “gently recalibrate” their expectations. “A common tension is that couples want both a highly immersive experience and an extensive set of posed, editorial images... without realizing those require time! A wedding day is finite, and every decision is a tradeoff: more time spent on photos often means less time spent with guests,” she said. “Most of these expectations come from social media, where timelines, budgets, and logistics are invisible. What’s presented as effortless is usually highly produced, and that disconnect can create unnecessary pressure.”

She doesn’t believe styled shoots are all bad. They do serve a purpose for vendors’ portfolios. “There's a case to be made that maybe you're not getting hired for the type of weddings you would like to photograph and so you invest the money into a styled shoot to be able to display the style of wedding you want to be hired for in your portfolio,” she said. “Takes money to make money etc. But let's say you're a client looking to hire a photographer for a wedding. How would you feel if you found out the photographer you hired had ONLY styled shoots in their portfolio and had never actually shot a real wedding before? I imagine you'd want to know that ahead of time.”
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Styled shoots “become problematic when they’re presented without context,” she said. “A styled shoot is, by definition, a controlled environment: professional models, ideal lighting, high-end venues, curated florals, and unlimited time. Real weddings are the opposite: dynamic, time-constrained, and emotionally complex. Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions. A photographer’s ability to work quickly, adapt to changing light, and make people feel comfortable matters far more than their ability to create a perfect image in a controlled setting.”

If you’re not planning a wedding or haven’t in the last three years or so, you might not be familiar with any of the content I’ve described so far. But this is the insidious nature of “the algorithm.” No one else is seeing yours. No one attending my wedding (except for others who were also recently married and are online) knew or cared that chartreuse and burgundy have been deemed cliche. They just liked the bouquet and thought it was pretty. And if they knew, they didn’t say it to my face, because talking about the internet in real life is absurd.

“If social media didn’t exist or especially exist in the way it does with the curation (for weddings in particular) I probably would have done things way differently and maybe simpler,” Kelli told me. “Having a universe of options shown constantly online did give decision fatigue and also a pressure to have everything be aesthetic, especially with the knowledge that what we will share from the wedding will be perceived by others on social media.”

“If I knew then what I know now, would I have planned a smaller wedding? Would I have probably eloped? Yes,” Lillie told me. “Do I still have, like, $8,000 in nonrefundable deposits down? Yes.”

The things I remember about my friends’ weddings are not their tablescapes or whether they featured some forbidden color combination, and I didn’t make lists of things that made me secretly hate them. I remember, most of all, the moments around the weddings: meeting at a cobblestone street cafe the night before for warm Kronenbourgs, pouring mimosas on a moving bus in the morning, gluing an eyelash back on in a beach bathroom, fireworks shows both planned and unplanned, watching my newlywed friends sing and dance and feeling grateful to witness it all. The million tiny moments I remember from my own wedding are part of a different galaxy than all the shit my algorithm told me to worry about.

In the end, I didn’t make a cake vision board. I picked up cakes at the grocery store two days before the wedding, and in the heat of the evening, they melted into piles of buttercream goo before we could cut them fast enough. While we struggled to light candles, they toppled into heaps of pink and white icing and we just laughed.

Now that I’m several weeks beyond my own wedding, my algorithm has moved on, almost entirely free of bridal content of any kind. It has realized, or decided, that I have no need for it anymore, and must push me on my way to the next Arbitrary Human Milestone. It’s the exact same type of pseudo-authority influencers and ragebait disguised as wisdom, just for another industry the profit-making machine has been waiting eons to target me with: babies.

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Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop

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2026-04-16 00:09:26

Thomson Reuters Shareholders Demand Investigation into ICE Contracts

On Wednesday shareholders in Thomson Reuters demanded the company’s board launch an investigation into whether its products have contributed to human rights violations, specifically with regards to Thomson Reuters’ ongoing sale of peoples’ personal data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Thomson Reuters sells access to the CLEAR investigative database, which can include peoples’ names, addresses, car registration information, Social Security numbers, and details on someone’s ethnicity. 404 Media has repeatedly shown how CLEAR is integrated with ICE tools, including one ICE uses to find neighborhoods to target.

The move is the latest piece of growing pressure against the company concerning its contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It follows an internal protest in which more than 200 Thomson Reuters employees sent leadership a letter expressing their concern with those contracts. As 404 Media reported on Tuesday, Thomson Reuters fired the worker who led that effort, according to a newly filed lawsuit.

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Do you work at Thomson Reuters or know anything else about CLEAR? 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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2026-04-15 17:43:17

Ukraine Says Russians are Surrendering to Robots

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy praised robots as the future of war in a Defense Industry Worker Day address on Monday. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms—ground systems and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy didn’t specify which ground operation he was referring to, but Ukraine’s 13th National Guard Brigade Khartiya conducted an operation north of Kharkiv in December last year that fits the bill. The Wall Street Journal reported on the operation which it said involved 50 aerial drones and an unspecified number of land drones.

The Journal watched footage of the assault provided by Ukraine. “The robot wars began,” it said. “Russian FPV drones appeared, launching themselves at the land vehicles, according to the footage. One came close to destroying a land drone, which fired back at the Russian line with a mounted machine gun.”
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Ukraine won the fight and took the position, but the Journal didn’t report that any Russians surrendered. A spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade Khartiya told the Journal that they found Russian corpses when they sent humans into the position to secure it.

According to Zelenskyy’s Defense Industry Worker Day speech, ground based robots have conducted 22,000 missions on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine in the past three months. “In other words, lives were saved more than 22,000 times when a robot went into the most dangerous areas instead of a warrior. This is about high technology protecting the highest value—human life,” Zelenskyy said.
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It’s unclear which of the 22,000 missions included the surrender. It may seem like a stretch to imagine a soldier surrendering to an unmanned ground vehicle with an assault rifle and a camera strapped to it, but similar things have happened over the past four years of war. The conflict has become defined by the use of drones on both sides and there’s lots of footage of Russian soldiers surrendering to flying drones.

One of the most famous incidents occurred in 2022 but it became so common that Ukraine established a program called “I Want to Live” that used drones to facilitate surrenders. Ukraine’s armed forces released video instructions about how to surrender to a drone. Russian soldiers could text ahead of time, make an appointment to flee the frontline, wait for a Ukrainian drone, and follow it out of combat with their hands in the air. It’s possible the world will see similar footage in the future, but the drones will be on the ground instead.

The War in Ukraine has ground on for years now and become a war of attrition and inches. The loss of life on both sides is devastating and the proliferation of flying drones has created vast no-man’s lands between Russian and Ukrainian positions. Despite Zelenskyy’s praise of Ukraine’s robotics industry, it’s unclear if embracing UGV as a replacement for infantry will change that reality.

But the world is watching and taking notes. The Pentagon is working on its own ground drones, some of them controlled by AI systems. The U.S. Army is testing one system, called the ULTRA, in Vaziani, Georgia near the country’s border with Russia. Ukraine also helped the US soldiers counter Shahed drones during the recent war with Iran.

On stage, Zelenskyy’s Defense Industry Worker Day speech stressed the importance of Ukraine to Europe and the rest of the world. “We are not building new cooperation with partners on weapons the way it was done in the 1990s or early 2000s, when Ukrainian weapons and strength were sold off like a Black Friday sale,” he said. “We are not making fairs of our weapons, nor are we emptying our stockpiles. We are offering security partnerships.”

The U.S. Army Is Testing AI Controlled Ground Drones Near a Border with Russia

The OverDrive is made to let ground vehicles navigate tough terrain with minimal input from humans.

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404 Media

2026-04-15 13:29:56

Emails Reveal Space Force’s Hardest Mission Is Writing a Song

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

In May 2022, the Chief of Space Operations (CSO) at the U.S. Space Force (USSF) “slapped the table on a final melody” for the agency’s new theme song. The goal was to have the song all done by mid- to late-August. Every branch of the armed forces has its own song, and the Space Force being a relatively new agency needed one too.

The result, if you remember, was this song:
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At the time, the CSO had only approved the melody and words. So that meant the USSF now had to work with a composer on harmonies and everything else. The goal was to provide the CSO “with 3(ish) options for Official Version of the USSF Song,” according to internal Space Force emails 404 Media obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The emails show in a very humdrum sort of way the painful bureaucracy behind a U.S. military agency making a song. The meetings, the catchups, the deadlines. The legal approvals. And even the suggestion that the agency start writing the song all over again.

“I do think that Quarter3 s/would be a safe bet. We are hoping that we are at the end of the road. The only thing that scares me (every time I brief him...) is, ‘Yeah... let's just start over on this.’,” one March 2022 email says, referring to the CSO. At the time, the CSO was General John W. Raymond.

The point of the song, the Space Force said in a September 2022 press release, was “to capture the esprit de corps of both current and future Guardians, and intends to bring together service members by giving them a sense of pride.” Guardians are how the Space Force refers to its personnel. The release said James Teachenor was the singer/songwriter who created the lyrics and melody.
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It was a long road to get there, and by the time of the May 2022 emails the song was already late. Another email says the song was due on 30 June the previous year.

Many of the emails are to schedule meetings to then talk about the song. An October 2021 email mentioned scheduling a meeting with a general to “discuss the focus group results and develop some recommendations for a way forward in the process of the Space Force song.” Another from that month said:

For the L2 Council meeting the goal would be to provide the L2s and FC with information on:

• What work has been done on the song
• Where they are going with the song
• What follow on actions are going to occur.

Essentially, the goal is to help manage expectations for the CSO. If the song is ready to be played for them, that might also be worthwhile.

Some screenshots of the emails. 404 Media hasn't uploaded the full set because some appear to include some personal information.

The officials planned to discuss the song for up to 30 minutes in that meeting, the email says.

By the following year, the CSO had approved the song but the Space Force still needed approval from the Secretary of the Air Force, one email says.

“What we do not have is a roll-out plan. If your system is asking for date of roll-out. I believe only CSO could tell you that and he has been hesitant to commit to cultural initiative timelines. We haven't started thinking about that here,” another says.

Several of the emails include or are signed off with the phrase Semper Supra, Latin for “Always Above,” which is also what the song is called.

Finally to give you an idea of the bureaucracy involved, here is a larger email section:

“I've got some milestones from here to there. The next big one is NLT 10 June provide CSO with 3(ish) options for Official Version of the USSF Song. Fin working with some composer/arrangers for that task. (TLDR: The version he picked was only melody and words. The writer and I are putting together options that include accompaniment. harmonies, countemelodies... a marching band version that all other arrangements will be based upon. I already have 2 solid version that are approved by the composer of the melody and we are waiting for a 3rd.),” one official wrote in a May 2022 email. Their name is redacted in the emails so their role and rank are not clear.

The Space Force did not respond to a request for comment.

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404 Media

2026-04-15 12:50:19

Podcast: How the FBI Extracted Deleted Signal Messages

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel tells us all about Marathon and its player numbers.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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⁠FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database⁠

26:01 - ⁠Maine Is Close to Passing a Moratorium on New Datacenters⁠

33:21 - ⁠Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight⁠

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2026-04-14 19:50:35

Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says

Thomson Reuters, the technology and content conglomerate that owns the Reuters media agency but also owns and operates the investigative CLEAR database, fired a longstanding employee after they spoke out about the company selling data products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

The lawsuit and firing come after more than 200 employees wrote a letter to Thomson Reuters leadership about the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says

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404 Media

2026-04-14 14:39:02

Airbnb Hosts Don't Want to Talk to Guests Anymore, Are Outsourcing Messages to AI

An industry of tech companies is now selling AI-powered chatbot services to Airbnb hosts which reply to guests on their behalf. 404 Media started looking into the companies after one Airbnb host used AI to communicate with their guests, and when the guests seemingly realized, they tricked the chatbot into instead providing a fairly detailed recipe for French toast.

Airbnb told 404 Media it does allow certain hosts to use tools that can reply on their behalf outside of a host’s typical hours, and 404 Media found several companies offering the tech, suggesting this host’s use of AI to talk to guests is not an outlier.

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Airbnb Hosts Don't Want to Talk to Guests Anymore, Are Outsourcing Messages to AI

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-14 13:13:34

Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit

An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There’s a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. “Googleʼs failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Googleʼs servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code ‘sec-gpc: 1.’ This means Google should not return cookies,” the audit said. “However, when Googleʼs server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the ‘set-cookie’ command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta’s failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. “Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals—it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumerʼs privacy preferences,” the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta’s tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

webXray is an independent technology company that runs a search engine that lets people look for privacy violations on the internet. Its founder Timothy Libert is the former lead of cookie policy and compliance at Google. Libert told 404 Media he felt his job at Google was to protect its users but that his bosses didn’t agree. He left the company in 2023 and started webXray.

“Shortly before I left my boss told me, direct quote, my job is to protect the company. There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.
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Microsoft, Meta, and Google have collectively paid billions in fees for previous privacy violations similar to the ones Libert and webXray found during the audit. According to Libert, the big tech companies don’t fear these fines. “In many ways fines have come to replace taxes,” he said. “What I’m trying to show here is, ‘How is enforcement failing?’ What we’re trying to do here is put people in the regulatory and legal community who work on these issues to have an understanding of what’s actually going on under the hood.”

One of the things going on under the hood revealed in the audit is how cookie banners work. Anyone who uses the internet has seen these annoying pop-ups that ask users how they want to handle cookies issued from the site. These are called consent management platforms (CPM). Google, one of the premier purveyors of cookies, runs a service called “Cookiebot” that certifies CPMs.

“This clear conflict of interest led us to ask: do these CMPs actually work?” the audit said. “By measuring what happens when an opt-out signal is sent to a website, we were able to find out, and the findings are clear: no Google-certified CMP we evaluated works 100% of the time, and all of them are often found to fail to prevent Google from setting cookies despite opt-out signals being present.”

webXray said it tested three CMP companies and found opt-out failure rates of 77 percent, 91 percent, and 90 percent. “It does not work. It fails. It lets Google, specifically the party who said that this will work, it lets them set cookies,” Libert said.

Google, Meta, and Microsoft all disputed the audit. “This report is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our products work. We honor opt-out provided by advertisers and publishers as required by law,” a Google spokesperson told 404 Media.

“This is a marketing ploy that mischaracterizes how GPC works and Meta's role," Meta told 404 Media. “GPC only restricts certain uses of third-party data and allows website operators to override GPC signals, and we offer the Limited Data Use feature to help websites indicate what permissions they have. When data is transmitted to us with the LDU flag, we restrict the use of that data, as specified in our State-Specific Terms.”

“Consumer privacy is a top priority for us, and we remain committed to transparency and compliance with applicable privacy requirements. As outlined in our Privacy Statement, when we receive a GPC signal, we opt the user out of sharing personal data with third parties for personalized advertising, and our advertising systems are designed to reflect that choice,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Certain Microsoft cookies are necessary for operational purposes, and may therefore be placed and read even when a GPC signal is detected.”

“In my view this stuff isn’t complicated. You say, ‘don’t set the cookie.’ They set the cookie,” Libert said. “The regulators see a fox going into the henhouse and the fox says, ‘I’m just here to count the eggs, not to eat any chickens.’ And they take them at their word. They don’t make them produce any public record.”

When caught, governments levy fines against companies and the companies pay. Libert said that isn’t enough. “They can just pay fines forever,” he said.

Key to the audit is that Libert and his team provided a simple solution to the violations. According to webXray, it’s as easy as adding one line of code. “When Microsoftʼs ad server receives traffic with Sec-GPC: 1, all it has to do is return a 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons status code to indicate the content cannot be served due to the consumerʼs legally defined opt-out. No cookie is set in this condition,” the audit said.

“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture,” Libert said.

webXray | Be the First to Know

Top US class-action law firms and Fortune 100 privacy compliance teams use WebXray to find digital privacy violations and act first.

^webXray

404 Media

2026-04-13 16:11:30

Hacker Compromises a16z-Backed Phone Farm, Tries to Post Memes Calling a16z the ‘Antichrist’

A hacker has compromised a backend system for Doublespeed, an a16z-funded startup that uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated TikTok accounts, and attempted to have those accounts post memes calling a16z the “antichrist,” according to screenshots seen by 404 Media.

The hack is at least the second time Doublespeed has been compromised. The startup uses AI to create fake influencers, generate videos, and post comments.

“a16z is the antichrist. sponsored by doublespeed.ai,” the meme says. It includes images of a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen; a woman pole dancing; and occult symbol Baphomet.

💡
Do you know anything else about this breach or Doublespeed? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or Emanuel on emanuel.404.

The screenshots show the meme queued up for publication in Doublespeed customers’ dashboard, seemingly to post to their associated social media accounts. A caption indicates the hacker stole some other data and may tried to post content from hundreds of accounts.

“47MB exfiltrated. 573 accounts postable. 413 phones dumped. A16z portfolio security built different,” the caption reads.
A screenshot of the meme. Image: 404 Media.
It appears the meme was ultimately not posted on Doublespeed customers’ social media accounts. One screenshot included the social media handle of an impacted Doublespeed account; as of Monday, the meme was not available on that account.

Zuhair Lakhani, a co-founder of Doublespeed, told 404 Media in an email “We’re aware of the unauthorized access attempt and addressed it quickly. This involved an older system for queuing posts that had remained in place for compatibility with existing customer workflows, and we have since secured it.”

“Importantly, no unauthorized posts were successfully published, and we have not seen evidence that this attempt resulted in broader impact to customers,” he added.
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404 Media first reported about Doublespeed last year, after the startup raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program, “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.” Doublespeed markets its use of phone farms as a way to evade social media platforms’ policies against removing inauthentic behavior. Doublespeed customers get access to a dashboard that allows them to operate multiple AI-generated influencers. At the moment Doublespeed focuses on operating TikTok accounts, but also plans to give customers the ability to operate accounts on X and Instagram.

Doublespeed was previously hacked in December of 2025. The data from that hack revealed at least 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates and that at least 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing that they are ads or not real people. Some of the products promoted by these AI-generated accounts included supplements, massagers, and dating apps.

As we’ve noted last year, Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, also sits on Meta’s board of directors. Meta did not respond to our question about one of its board members backing a company that blatantly aims to violate its policy on “authentic identity representation.”

a16z Is Funding a 'Speedrun' to AI-Generated Hell on Earth

Do you want ‘AI-powered social orbits,’ ‘autonomous recruiting firms,’ and an ‘AI-powered credit card?’ Too bad, you’re getting them anyway.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-13 14:48:19

How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips)

Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important to occasionally zoom out and ask the big questions.

That’s why this week on the podcast I’m joined by Whitney Phillips. Phillips is the author of several books about internet culture and ethics, including This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and The Ambivalent Internet. She’s a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, and also one of my favorite people to talk to and listen to because she’s a genius when it comes to the kind of internet culture and platform dynamics we report on every day at 404 Media.

I wanted to talk to Whitney today because it’s been a few years since we talked in depth about the state of the internet and so much has changed in that time, sadly for the worst, and I really wanted some help in understanding the current state of things, as bad as they are. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about her upcoming book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.
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404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

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

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-04-13 13:15:01

WebinarTV Secretly Scraped Zoom Meetings of Anonymous Recovery Programs

WebinarTV, a site that scrapes Zoom webinars without permission, has downloaded and posted Zoom Webinars for anonymous addiction recovery meetings, support groups for caregivers and people who suffer from chronic illness, and a meeting of nudists.

WebinarTV’s Michael Robertson told me that the company asks every single person for permission to “promote” their webinars, but these specific examples show that WebinarTV scrapes and shares the videos on its site before asking for permission and that some people are not aware that this is happening to them.

“As with all of our support group meetings, this meeting was not intended to be recorded, but rather to be a private discussion among participants,” Kimberly Dorris, executive director at the Graves’ Disease & Thyroid Foundation (GDATF), which hosted a Zoom session which vetted participants, and which still ended up on WebinarTV, wrote in a post about the meeting being uploaded to WebinarTV. That post was titled “A Warning For Patient Communities Connecting on Zoom.”

I first reported about WebinarTV in March, after a teacher told me that a sensitive meeting he held on Zoom for educators who wanted to protect their students from ICE raids ended up on the site. The teacher found out about the video when a someone calling themselvesSarah Blair, which appears to be an AI-generated persona, sent him an email letting him know that the meeting was posted to WebinarTV and also turned into an AI-generated podcast. The teacher asked WebinarTV to take down the meeting because it could put some of the participants in danger, and WebinarTV removed it shortly after.

WebinarTV claims it hosts more than 200,000 Zoom webinars it scraped this way.

After I published the story, several people who use Zoom regularly for meetings or webinars they consider private checked to see if their Zoom videos were posted to WebinarTV and got in touch with me.

Gillian Brockwell, a journalist and 404 Media reader who goes to addiction recovery meetings on Zoom searched WebinarTV for her own meeting after seeing my story. She didn’t find her own meetings, but flagged several other meetings that were clearly meant to be for people who want to preserve their anonymity.

One meeting posted to WebinarTV for “panic anonymous,” or people who suffer from panic and high anxiety, was described as a “a confidential group that bridges decades of clinical biofeedback practice with modern wearable technology.” The recording of the webinar posted to WebinarTV included participants’ full names and shows their faces.

A 12 steps and faith-based recovery meeting for people with substance abuse issues also shows participants full names and faces.

"If I found out I was in one of these meetings captured by WebinarTV, I would feel terrified and betrayed, especially if I were in early recovery," Brockwell told me. "These meetings are clearly meant to be confidential and anonymous, and anonymity is a key component of mutual-support and 12-step recovery models. It allows people a pathway through the stigma that so often prevents them from seeking help, and members sharing openly about some of the most humiliating moments in their lives – things they might never say in public – is a key part of 'identifying in.'"

“I hosted a meeting last night that was intended to be for family members of patients with Graves' disease, thyroid eye disease, and Hashimoto's thyroiditis,” Dorris from the GDATF told me in an email in March. “The link to *register* was public, but in order to receive the joining link, you had to fill out a questionnaire.”

The description for the Zoom meeting was: “Has a loved one been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, thyroid eye disease, or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis? Join us for a short presentation followed by an interactive discussion with people who understand what your family is going through! This meeting is intended for family members and caregivers only. If you are a researcher, industry representative, etc. please contact GDATF at info@gdatf.org to discuss how we can better assist you.”

The registration form specifically asked potential participants whether they were attending in support of or on behalf of someone impacted by these conditions, and were admitted to the meeting one at a time from a Zoom waiting room. Dorris said that no visible AI and transcription tools were running.

One meeting of nudists, or “naturists,” also featured every participant’s face and name, and some appeared shirtless on camera. It’s not clear if this meeting was designed to be private nor if the participants know the meeting was recorded and posted on WebinarTV.

Robertson told me that WebinarTV is not violating these people’s privacy because the site only scrapes Zoom webinars as opposed to Zoom meetings. Zoom webinars work similarly to a regular Zoom meeting, but are intended for larger audiences with features like polling, breakout rooms, and EventBrite integrations.

“Webinars are no different than Facebook Live, X broadcast, or Youtube Live. They are broadcast to the public. This is why we have 200,000 webinars and zero issues to date,” Robertson told me. “We contact every host, twice to make sure they want the promotion. We're the only search engine that does this. Also we make it one click easy to remove. Go try and get something removed from any other search engine.” Robertson is of course ignoring the fact that many people organizing or joining these sessions, even if they are technically webinars, expect them to be private or limited to just the participants.

When I reached out to Zoom in March it said that based on its review WebinarTV accesses meetings using links that have been shared publicly, then records the sessions using browser extension or “other tools.”

“Because these recordings occur on the participant’s device and outside of Zoom’s environment, no platform—including Zoom—has the technical ability to fully prevent third-party screen recording,” the spokesperson said.

“While it is true that our meeting wasn’t infiltrated due to a technical flaw from Zoom, as a customer, I would still like to see Zoom speak out against companies like WebinarTV that send bots with fake identities to infiltrate meetings and covertly record participants who had a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Dorris told me.

A Warning For Patient Communities Connecting on Zoom | Graves' Disease and Thyroid Foundation

^{Kimberly Dorris (Graves' Disease and Thyroid Foundation)}

404 Media

2026-04-11 13:00:06

The Oldest Octopus Fossil Ever Isn’t An Octopus At All, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were ritually sacrificed, kicked out of the galaxy, taxonomically revised, and wore many hats.

First, scientists shed light on human sacrifice and cousin sex using ancient DNA from the bones of people who lived in fifth-century Korea. Then: the yeeting of a star, an octopus imposter, and the indignities of a bare head.

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

All in the Family (this time with human sacrifice)

Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al. “Ancient genomes reveal an extensive kinship network and endogamy in a Three-Kingdoms period society in Korea.” Science Advances.

Ready or not, it’s time to visit an ancient burial ground packed with the bones of sacrificed families. Welcome to the Imdang-Joyeong site in Korea, which contains a cluster of 1,500-year-old tombs from the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period.

As the name suggests, this era was dominated by a trio of warring dynastic factions called the Goguryeo, Baekjae, and Silla. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Silla kingdom followed unique customs, including the practice of “Sunjang,” a coburial of sacrificed people with an elite grave owner, as well as consanguineous marriages—marriages between close blood relatives.

Now, researchers have now sequenced ancient DNA from 78 deceased individuals to corroborate the findings with confirmed lineages. The results revealed that consanguineous marriages were indeed common, and that adult women were often buried together with their own kin, which is a rarity in ancient graveyards around the world.
The three main geographical locations of the tombs consisting of the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex with separate zoom-in panels (i to iii). The green gradient represents elevation, and the green circles represent the position of dirt mounds of the tombs. Image: Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al.
“Silla is thought to have practiced different marital customs from that of its neighbors, such as Goguryeo,” said researchers co-led by Hyoungmin Moon of Seoul National University and Daewook Kim of Yeungnam University. “Most notably, Silla royal elites are documented to have practiced consanguineous marriage, which is rarely observed in Goguryeo and Baekjae records. Historical accounts of consanguineous marriage are thought to be related to the consolidation of the rank and social status within Silla royals and local elites.”

“However, because of limited ancient genome studies in Korea, no corroborating genomic evidence so far has been reported regarding the marriage customs of the Three-Kingdoms period Koreans,” the team added. “Our research is the first to analyze the genome-wide composition of closely related individuals from an ancient Three-Kingdoms period of Korea.”
From left to right, a Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla envoy depicted in a 6th-century painting.
Many tombs at this site include separate chambers for elite grave owners, and for sacrificed people, which often included entire families that may have been ritually sacrificed and buried alongside their masters. Both elites and sacrificed individuals were often born from unions between first or second cousins, suggesting that consanguineous marriages were common across class lines.

“We found decisive evidence of three cases of families in which parents and their offspring were sacrificed together in the same grave,” the team said. “Our genetic findings are the first to confirm the acts of Sunjang of an entire household and suggest that these practices might be common for sacrificial burials of the Three-Kingdoms period.”

In addition, some adult women were buried alongside their parents and grandparents, a pattern that is rare in most other ancient burial grounds in which women tend to be buried alongside their husbands and in-laws. The study offers a rare glimpse of a society with idiosyncratic customs that is ready-made to be the setting of a new HBO prestige series.

In other news…

♩ It’s a shooting star leaping through the sky ♩

Bhat, Aakash et al. “Discovery of a runaway star likely ejected by a Type Iax supernova.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some space explosions go so hard that they can kick a star right out of a galaxy. Scientists report the serendipitous discovery of one of these so-called “runaway stars” that was likely ejected from the galaxy approximately 2.8 million years ago “with an ejection velocity exceeding 600 kilometers per second”—or about 1.3 million miles per hour—according to a new study.

This cosmic sprinter is a white dwarf, the collapsed remains of a star, that was accelerated to ludicrous speed by a “Type Iax” supernovae, a type of stellar kablooey that occurs in some binary star systems.

This runaway star “is notably hotter than previously studied members of this class,” said researchers led by Aakash Bhat of the University of Potsdam. “Kinematic analysis indicates that the star has a high probability of being unbound from the Galaxy.”

So long, runaway star, and safe travels through intergalactic space.

A 300-million-year-old case of mistaken identity

Clements, Thomas et al. “Synchrotron data reveal nautiloid characters in Pohlsepia mazonensis, refuting a Palaeozoic origin for octobrachians.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Prepare to be ink-pilled, because it turns out that the oldest known octopus fossil ever found—a 300-million-year old species called Pohlsepia mazonensis—is not an octopus at all. It is a member of the nautilus family that just ended up looking sort of like an octopus in part because its shell fell off during the decomposition process.
Concept art of dead Pohlsepia mazonensis with its shell off. Image: Dr Thomas Clements, University of Reading
“We present the first comprehensive reassessment of this enigmatic fossil, alongside multiple new specimens, using a suite of advanced analytical techniques,” said researchers led by Thomas Clements of the University of Reading. During this process, the team discovered a special “radula”—a feeding organ lined with rows of teeth—that matched the nautilus family.

As a result, P. mazonensis “represents the oldest known fossil soft tissue nautiloid (albeit without its shell),” the team concluded. The finding is a boon to octopus scientists (a.k.a. Doc Ocks) who have been perplexed for years by this specimen, given that the fossil record otherwise suggests that octopuses emerged much later in time, during the age of dinosaurs.

It just proves the old adage: Don’t believe everything you hear about the evolutionary origins of octopuses.

We’re all mad hatters here

Capp, Bernard. “The Cultural, Social, and Ideological Role of the Hat in Early Modern England.” The Historical Journal.

We’ll cap off with a hat tip to a study that chronicles hat etiquette across early modern England, roughly spanning the 1400s to 1700s.

Authored by the aptly-named Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick, the work is packed with madcap anecdotes about hats as signifiers of identity, instruments of shame, tools for salutations, and even makeshift toilets in the most ribald tales.

“The ‘Pleasant History’ of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated,” Capp noted in the study. “Such behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival’s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim’s head.”
Roundhead and cavalier soldiers, wearing partisan hats, face each other and urge their dogs to attack each other. Image: John Taylor (attributed), A dialogue, or, Rather a parley betweene Prince Ruperts dogge whose name is Puddle, and Tobies dog whose name is Pepper (1643).
Other highlights include the Cap Act of 1571, which allowed offenders “to be prosecuted for wearing hats to church;” jokes about fine ladies wearing towering ribboned hats that spooked local livestock; and a man named Thomas Ellwood who was rendered unable to leave his house for months in 1659 because his father confiscated all his hats, because who would dare, in his words, to “run about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man”?

Hats off to this heady historical work, and beware the bareheaded Mad-Men.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-04-10 16:07:51

Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

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 gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.

EMANUEL: It takes a lot for a post to shock me these days, especially if it’s from a known shitposter like the president of the United States, but I’ll confess that I was shocked by Trump posting a video of a woman getting beaten to death with a hammer last night.

I’m not a big believer in the “Trump is doing X because he doesn’t want you to think about Y” theory, but it’s hard not to read as at least an intuitive desire to change the subject away from the conclusion (?) to his disastrous adventure in Iran. It’s not going to work either way, and that’s not going to be the legacy of his posting style either. What’s sticking with me at the moment is not the graphic nature of the post itself or the attempt to demonize certain minorities—unfortunately none of that is surprising at this point—but that I don’t know if it’s possible to roll back this level of acceptance of even embrace of depravity in our culture.

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Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-09 18:00:46

World’s Largest Group of Chimps Waging Deadly ‘Civil War,’ Scientists Discover

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Scientists have observed an extremely rare chimpanzee “civil war,” a conflict that has killed at least seven adults and 17 infants, and which sheds new light on the nature of warfare in humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Male chimpanzees are often aggressive to outsiders, but it is unusual for chimps to kill former members of their own social groups. Though Jane Goodall and her colleagues observed one famous example—the Gombe Chimpanzee War of the 1970s, which resulted in seven adult deaths—it’s estimated that these violent episodes occur only once every 500 years, based on genetic analyses of chimpanzee lineages.

Now, a team led by Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, has reported a far more deadly “group fissure” among the Ngogo chimpanzees of Uganda. This population exceeded 200 individuals at one point, making it the largest group of chimpanzees ever observed in the wild. But over the past decade, the chimps have fractured into two factions, one of which has staged multiple lethal raids on the other.

“Certainly, these are not strangers,” said Sandel in a call with 404 Media. “These are chimps that once knew each other, and we know that for certain.”

The Ngogo group has been studied since the 1970s by primatologists like Thomas Struhsaker, and have been intensively observed since 1995 as part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project set up by David Watts and John Mitani. For more than three decades, researchers from around the world have convened to watch the group during summer field expeditions, while Ugandan research assistants have maintained a continuous presence at the site.

Because of this longstanding observation, Sandel said, researchers were able to be on the ground “witnessing every moment” as the deadly chimp war unfolded.

Chimpanzees from different clusters socialized together before the group fissure in 2015. Image: Aaron Sandel

This group has always had distinct subpopulations that spent more time together, including the Western and Central clusters. Even so, before the fissure, the clusters regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding.

Sandel vividly remembers the exact day that this dynamic had noticeably shifted: June 24, 2015. He was following the Western cluster, which was at the center of its “neighborhood” territory, he said.

0:00
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Video credit: Aaron Sandel

“They hear chimps from the Central neighborhood nearby, and they go quiet,” he recalled. “They seem nervous. They're touching each other with this reassurance that they typically do when they hear the outsider chimps, but I was just alone with them. I remember, just in that moment, being really puzzled and focused, like ‘what’s going on?’”

“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”

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Video credit: Aaron Sandel

What started as a weird vibe transformed into a weeks-long chill between the groups, followed by a temporary thaw. Ultimately, the tension spiraled into bloody conflicts.

“You act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “It seemed like that planted the seed of polarization.”

Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.

The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.

Sandel and his colleagues proposed a few possible causes of this “civil war,” a term that specifically refers to human conflicts, but that may have parallels in other species. First, the unusually large size of the group may have amplified feeding competition among individuals, even in their lush forest habitat. Social networks within the group may have also been disrupted by a wave of six deaths in 2014—five adult males and one adult female—some of whom likely died from disease.

The beginning of the fissure also coincides with the rise of a new alpha male, Jackson, who replaced the previous alpha, Miles. Sandel recalled Miles grunting in submission to Jackson on the same day that the Western cluster ran away from the Central cluster. Such transitions between alphas can introduce social instabilities as the dominance hierarchy is upended, a process that can take several months.

Indeed, Miles reacted violently toward other members of the group in the wake of his displacement. Jackson, who led the Central cluster, ended up as one the casualties of the conflict; he died from injuries inflicted by the Western cluster in 2022.

Whatever the cause of the rupture, this group of former kin have now become hostile enemies. It’s always dicey to draw broad comparisons between the behavior of humans and other animals, but the team speculates in the study that one possible takeaway is that "it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”

“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.

“If chimps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” he concluded. “They're stripped away of those cultural dimensions. It must be their interpersonal social bonds and daily conflicts, reconciliations, and avoidances—all those dynamics. If that's the case with chimps, to what extent is it the case in humans? It’s a hypothesis to be tested.”

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Gombe Chimpanzee War - Wikipedia

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

404 Media

2026-04-09 13:27:50

FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database

The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas in July, and one shooting a police officer in the neck.

The news shows how forensic extraction—when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.

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FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-08 14:31:59

Podcast: Wildlife Cops Are Searching AI Cameras for ICE

This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of information through pretty unexpected ways. After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the AI ban at Wikipedia. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down a set of vulnerabilities in the ‘secure’ chat app TeleGuard.
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/YrHYwCb5aM8?…
0:00 - Intro

1:03 - ⁠Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE⁠

27:55 - ⁠Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content⁠

34:33 - ⁠An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned⁠

Subscriber's Story - ⁠A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-04-08 14:18:44

A 'Self-Doxing' Rave Helps Trans People Stay Safe Online

It’s Trans Day of Visibility, and I’m at an event space in the heart of New York City’s Commie Corridor to learn how to become less visible online.

The crowd gathered at the aptly-named Trans Pecos in Ridgewood, Queens is here for “404: Deadname Not Found,” a digital self-defense workshop which promises to teach trans people how to find and remove their sensitive personal information from the internet (and which also has no relation to this website). The vibe is giving OpSec rave happy hour—attendees sip colorful drinks, groove to DJ sets, and huddle around laptops using online tools to track down their own digital footprints.

The goal of the exercise is to find holes in your digital defenses, a practice cybersecurity folks call “red-teaming.” A slide deck guides participants through this “self-doxing” ritual, instructing them to use websites like IntelBase, PimEyes, and haveibeenpwned to find addresses, selfies, passwords, old names and aliases, and other personal info that might have been left sitting around on the open internet.

It makes for great cocktail party banter. One participant raises their arms in triumph upon receiving a clean bill of health while checking if their information was leaked in a data breach. Others swivel laptop screens and compare notes on the various places their digital detritus had cropped up. In my case, I was lucky: I mostly found data brokers with incorrect information, a long-forgotten MySpace page, and a woman whose spam calls I’ve been receiving for the past 10 years. Finally, participants are directed to various pages where they can request data to be removed, or sign up for discounted services like Kanary and DeleteMe that do the removals on your behalf.

Behind the fun and light atmosphere, everyone here knows the unspoken reality that drives tonight’s activities: an unrelenting wave of discriminatory bills and executive orders that are rapidly demolishing trans rights across the US. “Trans Visibility” is a nice idea, but it turns out it really sucks to be visible in a fascist surveillance state where the highest levels of government are obsessively trying to destroy your ability to live.

“In this world of hyper-surveillance, I want to make sure all my stuff is safe and that no one is trying to harvest my data for anything,” Anna, a workshop participant, told 404 Media. Anna asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, which is not surprising given that the goal of the workshop is to make it harder to be doxed. “Especially now that there’s lots of incentives for the federal government to get into that business, I just wanna make sure all of that is under wraps.”

Like the event’s name suggests, many attendees are looking for traces of their “deadnames,” which is how some trans folks refer to the names they were given pre-transition. Trans people face a disproportionatelyhigh risk of being doxed online, and deadnames and other sensitive info are frequently dug up on right-wing hate forums like KiwiFarms and social media sites like Elon Musk’s X, where harassment campaigns and hate speech are allowed and even encouraged.

“We have to protect ourselves,” said Ryan, who also used a pseudonym. “It’s great to know how to find stuff like this, because you never know what’s still out there.”

Imani Thompson, a digital security trainer who organized the event as part of her series Cache Me Outside, says she started hosting the free workshops at queer bars in Brooklyn a year ago, after noticing trans and intersex friends who were noticeably shaken by the opening salvos of the second Trump administration.

“I hadn't seen cybersecurity events that looked like they would attract or resonate with the crowds I felt needed this information the most,” she told 404 Media. “I wanted to make this fun and un-intimidating and doing digital security training at the bar is kind of silly and fun and gives us a built-in VPN and protection from sensitive convos being recorded.”
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There are specific reasons many trans people are anxious about their personal data and online presence these days. For one, trans identities often don’t fit neatly into government boxes, and the name and gender they are assigned at birth may or may not match their government-issued IDs. Recently, a new law in Kansas resulted in hundreds of trans people being told that theirdrivers licenses and IDs had been invalidated overnight, forcing them to obtain new documents that revert to the sex marker assigned at birth. JournalistMarissa Kabas later reported that the 300 trans IDs in question had been flagged and not immediately invalidated, but the goal of the law and its ensuing chaos was clear: requiring trans people to have IDs that don’t match their appearance or lived reality, forcing them to out themselves and introducing friction and discrimination into their everyday lives.

The same Kansas law also implemented the first state-level “bathroom bounty,” making it a crime for trans people to use appropriate bathrooms and changing rooms and promising rewards to random passersby who feel “aggrieved” by someone they think might be trans. Lawmakers in Idaho have passed an even harsher bill, which would charge repeat trans bathroom-users with a felony and up to 5 years of jail time. These bills threaten not only trans people, but anyone whose appearance might fall outside of someone’s normative expectations of “male” and “female.” And they are especially dangerous at a time when facial recognition can near-instantly identify someone with a quick search.

Thompson also worries about the information that queer folks can reveal while asking for help online. Trans people experienceunemployment,housing insecurity, andviolence at exponentially higher rates than cis people, and it’s not uncommon to see Gofundme pages and Venmo accounts flooding social media feeds. These posts will sometimes include personal details like a person’s name, face, transition status, location, immigration status, and even how much they have in their bank account—great for getting donations, but not so great for the doxable breadcrumbs they leave behind.

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism
Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.
404 MediaJanus Rose

“I think the risk is tenfold for the dolls and Black trans siblings because of disproportionate scrutiny in light of these bathroom bills and also how we do mutual aid,” said Thompson. “Whenever I see a mutual aid request being reposted or processed it makes me nervous, because we're basically doxing our most vulnerable friends.” To reduce risk, she recommends people take down mutual aid posts as soon as needs are met and set their Venmo activity to private. “I feel like the intention in listing off how all these systems of oppression impact our friends are meant to create a sense of urgency and care, but then months later it's still floating around and is a goldmine for someone who wants to claim they were made to feel unsafe in a bathroom so they can claim $3k or further an agenda.”

The privacy attitudes on display at the event contrast with the dominant media narratives about trans communities a decade ago. Fresh off the Supreme Court victory in Obergefell vs. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage, many at that time were convinced that trans visibility would pave the way to equality, as glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox declared a “Trans Tipping Point.” But while conditions for some trans people marginally improved, we all know what happened next: a wave of reactionary anti-trans state laws, culminating in the re-election of Donald Trump and a series of executive orders aimed at destroying trans peoples’ access to healthcare, sports, bathrooms—essentially the ability to live a normal life.

At the same time, protection can’t be a retreat back into the closet. “It’s still important for trans voices to be heard in online spaces,” said Anna. “It’s not like I wanna go into the shadows or anything. I just don’t want people to know my personal data, my personal records, any of that.”

“Being Black, I also understand the distinction between visibility and hypervisibility and the precarity and lack of agency that hypervisibility creates,” said Thompson. “It's tricky to find language around digital security that doesn't imply queerness is something to hide or a shameful thing, because of course it's not. I think having agency and purpose in how we can show up online and interact with tech as well as literacy around how technology and surveillance operates makes us better equipped.”

Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.

10 years since the ‘transgender tipping point’ | Xtra Magazine

ANALYSIS: Ten years after the iconic ‘TIME’ cover, trans people are subject to even more widespread hatred and legalized bigotry. If we’ve ‘tipped’ in any direction, it’s backward

^{Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Xtra Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-04-08 14:08:37

I Wish I Didn’t Care About 'Marathon' Player Numbers, But I Do

For the last month Joseph and I have been playing as much Marathon as we can fit into our busy lives. During the pandemic, we bonded over playing Call of Duty: Warzone, and we’ve been chasing that high for years with little success. Bungie’s new extraction shooter finally gave it to us.

We should be happy, and we are as long as we’re focused on the game we’re playing and not the industry that’s collapsing around it. Marathon’s commercial success, measured by outsiders mostly by the number of people Steam shows is actively playing the game at any given moment, has no bearing on our enjoyment. But I can’t help but follow those numbers because they are a reminder of how brutal the video game industry is right now, where it might be headed, and how viable Marathon and games like it are in the future.

We don’t know how much Marathon cost to develop or what Sony Interactive Entertainment, which owns Bungie and is publishing the game, wants from it. The game has been a critical success, has reportedly sold 1.2 million copies, and players who have latched onto it like myself love how Bungie has been updating and balancing it after release. People are making horny fan art of Marathon characters.

At the same time, I watch the number of concurrent players on Steam, currently hovering at between 20,000 and 30,000, and fret. Is that enough for Sony to support Marathon for the long haul, and is it enough for the rest of the industry that’s watching this unfold to decide that the kind of player who enjoys a game like Marathon is still worth catering to?

Whether 20,000-30,000 concurrent players is a good number or not is relative and ultimately a decision only Sony can make. More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 and only 6,000 of them earned more than $100,000. With at least tens of millions of dollars worth of sales on Steam alone, Marathon is one of the highest earning games on that platform. Marathon’s numbers are also considerably higher than Sony’s other big competitive shooter, Concord, which barely cracked 700 concurrent players on Steam before it was shuttered in 2024, barely a month after it was released. Highguard, another multiplayer shooter that was unveiled at the end of 2025’s Game Awards, also shuttered just a bit over a month after it launched. It peaked at almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but it was free to play.

One might naively assume that the basic math at Sony would be to see how much Marathon cost to develop and maintain, see how much money it’s making after launch, and to keep the party going as long as it’s turning a profit. The reality is probably a bit more cynical and complicated than that. Bungie is a big studio that employees hundreds of developers that Sony acquired for $3.7 billion. One line item on Marathon’s budget that’s extremely hard to calculate is the opportunity cost of Bungie making Marathon as opposed to the next Fortnite, now that it’s becoming increasingly clear that Marathon will not be doing Fortnite numbers.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tremendously profitable business to be had there, given some patience and care. Ubisoft launched Rainbow Six Siege in 2015 to a tepid response, but has turned it into a decade-old cash cow with consistent support, updates, and a devious loot box-based monetization scheme. It essentially did the same thing for For Honor, a melee multiplayer game that I bet you forgot existed but that’s been going since 2017.

But Sony is a publicly traded company that wants to show quarter over quarter growth, and a modestly healthy profit that also happens to keep hundreds of game developers employed is not what shareholders are salivating over. Sony wants to do Fortnite numbers, which is a very tall order considering that even Fortnite isn’t doing Fortnite numbers anymore.

Our friends at Remap Radio have spoken at length about why discussions about player numbers teach us little about games and are often toxic. Part of the reason that games like Concord and Highguard can crash and burn so quickly is that the numbers become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s skepticism about the game before it launches, and when it fails to go viral, people write it off because why would they invest their time in an online game with player numbers that signal imminent and unceremonious execution by its financial backers, which only leads to even lower player numbers. It also shifts the conversation entirely away from what the game is, what people like about it, and why, and to its business model, infecting players with the quarterly earnings report view of the world. Games and players become expressions and subjects of business models, and the part where we play games because we enjoy them are reduced to a curious byproduct of Sony’s Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Games from major publishers become either mega hits or are quickly slapped with the “dead game” label before they’re taken offline. What the game actually was is barely relevant.

Everyone I’m playing Marathon with is aware of the player numbers anxiety but is responding to it in different ways. Most of us are doing armchair video game industry analysis, while others are actively trying to enjoy Marathon’s popularity while we can precisely because it may be fleeting and eventually unavailable to play. Some of us are buying in-game cosmetic items not because we want them that bad, but as a signal to Sony that there’s money to be made here.

Adding to this player count anxiety is the fact that the video game industry appears to be going through what is increasingly looking like a proper crash. I don’t think we’ll ever have another near extinction event like the video game crash of 1983, where for a moment it didn’t seem like video games would even continue to be a thing, but a full one third of game developers in the U.S. were laid off last year, and the huge layoffs just keep on coming.

The question of whether Marathon is a viable business for Sony naturally leads us to the question: What business does Sony even want to be in going forward? Is it a business that’s in continuity with the games we grew up playing on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, or will the market force it to chase something like Roblox or other free-to-play models? Can this continuity even exist when a PlayStation 5 Pro now costs $899 and a PlayStation 6 will cost more? Those are prices for 30 and 40 year-olds with disposable income, not the younger audiences game publishers need to be winning over now for their future business. Sony and other video game publishers are already losing them to different kinds of games and forms of entertainment.

“Marathon's low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief's graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It's got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding—and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age,” Morgan Park wrote in his excellent review in PC Gamer. “Those qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It's fairly easy to track targets, but you're still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game?”

pic.twitter.com/WgxIBEHd3g
— 定 (@de3dsoul) March 19, 2026

To answer Park’s rhetorical question for him, yes, Marathon is in fact an unc game, which explains both why I like it so much and why I’m worried about its future. As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people. As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called “unc slop,” or, in other words, games that old people say are very good. Some of the games in this collage of video game box art includes Half-Life 2, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Or, many of my favorite games of all time.

Marathon could easily fit in that collage. It’s excellent, and, I worry, catering to a dwindling audience of uncs who are having a great time while the culture and business of video games is largely moving on and eventually leaving them behind.

2034661177653923848

pic.twitter.com/WgxIBEHd3g— 定 (@de3dsoul) 19 marzo 2026

^{定 (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-04-08 13:59:46

Microsoft Abruptly Terminates VeraCrypt Account, Halting Windows Updates

Microsoft has terminated an account associated with VeraCrypt, a popular and long-running piece of encryption software, throwing future Windows updates of the tool into doubt, VeraCrypt’s developer told 404 Media.

The move highlights the sometimes delicate supply chain involved in the publication of open source software, especially software that relies on big tech companies even tangentially.

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Microsoft Abruptly Terminates VeraCrypt Account, Halting Windows Updates

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-07 15:56:48

Maine Is Close to Passing a Moratorium on New Datacenters

Maine is getting closer to passing a moratorium on the construction of new datacenters, one of the first in the country. The State’s House and Senate have both passed LD 307, a bill that would pause construction on new datacenters until November 1, 2027. The Senate approved LD 307 by a vote of 19-13 on Monday night and now it will go to both chambers for a final vote. LD 307 specifically targets datacenters of 20 megawatts or more and calls for the creation of a Maine Data Center Coordination Council to better plan and facilitate the massive construction projects.

“We can’t afford health care for our constituents. School funding is a nightmare. School construction is entirely underfunded, but we can afford … $2 million out of the general fund for the richest—the richest corporations in the world, Amazon, Google, you name them—we’re going to give them money,” state Sen. Tim Nangle said during debate about the vote, according to the Maine Morning Star.
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Maine’s vote comes days after journalists at The Maine Monitor and Maine Focus revealed a secretive plan to construct a datacenter in the town of Lewiston in the southern part of the state. In Lewiston, city councilors didn’t learn about the proposed $300 million datacenter until six days before they were supposed to vote on it. Discussions about the datacenter occurred behind closed doors and the city administrator said the developer had asked for confidentiality. In Wiscasset, the city killed a $5 billion proposed datacenter after residents learned the city had signed nondisclosure agreements with the developer.

As part of the moratorium, Maine’s Data Center Coordination Council would study and oversee the environmental impact and electricity bill increases datacenters often bring to local residents and “consider data-sharing requirements and processes for proposed datacenters.”

Anger against datacenters is mounting across the country. The massive complexes aren’t good neighbors. They use public land, increase the electricity rates of everyone near them, and have negative effects on water quality and noise levels. The deals to construct them are sometimes cut in secret and local communities have little to no say in what’s being built near them. In Texas, a 6,000 acre datacenter plans to consume water from a dwindling aquifer to power nuclear power plants in the desert. In Michigan, a township is pushing back against a $1.2 billion AI datacenter meant to service America’s nuclear weapons scientists.

In Port Washington, Wisconsin, citizens will vote directly on the issue this week. The town of 13,000 is voting directly on whether or not to allow an OpenAI “Stargate” datacenter project. Similar ballot measures are slated in Monterey Park, California, Augusta Township, Michigan, and Janesville, Wisconsin.

In communities with no ballot measures, citizens are letting politicians know they hate datacenters in other ways. Early Monday morning, someone fired a gun at the home of Indianapolis City-County Councilor Ron Gibson and left a note on his front porch that read “NO DATA CENTERS.” A week earlier, Indianapolis city leaders had approved the construction of a datacenter in Gibson’s district.

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

"They're being told that this is inevitable," a member of the 806 Data Center Resistance told 404 Media. "But Texas is this other beast."

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-07 13:56:41

Data Center Tech Lobbyists Fearmonger in Attempt to Retroactively Roll Back Right to Repair Law

Lobbyists for major tech firms like Cisco and IBM are trying to push through legislation in Colorado that would drastically roll back a groundbreaking right to repair law under the guise of protecting national security and data centers.

The legislation, which passed through a Colorado state senate committee on Thursday, would exempt hardware from the existing right to repair law if that hardware “is considered critical infrastructure.” One of the issues with this is that “critical infrastructure” is very broadly defined, and could include essentially anything. In practice, the law could essentially repeal huge parts of one of the most important right to repair laws in the United States.

“It relies on a broad, vague definition that allows the manufacturer themselves to self-designate whether their equipment is for critical infrastructure,” Louis Rossmann, a right to repair expert and popular YouTuber, testified at a hearing on the bill Thursday. “So if a laptop manufacturer knows the Pentagon buys their laptops, they can declare that line exempt. If a networking company sells a $20 switch to a federal building, they can claim that hardware is critical infrastructure. It’s a blank check for manufacturers to exempt themselves.”

Ever since consumer rights advocates began pushing for right to repair legislation roughly a decade ago, hardware manufacturers have been fear mongering to lawmakers by telling them that right to repair would introduce security threats by requiring them to reveal proprietary information about their products. In practice, the exact opposite has happened, because greater access to repair parts, tools, diagnostic software, and repair guides means that broken equipment that could potentially be more vulnerable to hacking attempts can be fixed more quickly.

“When we talk about critical infrastructure and fixing things, we often do not have time to wait for an official fix from a company that may not be motivated to fix things,” Andrew Brandt, a security researcher and cofounder of the nonprofit Elect More Hackers, testified Thursday. “What ends up happening is that with smaller companies, where they may have spent most of their budget buying some firewall or router that they can no longer afford, they end up in a situation where they’re just going to keep running that device in an unsafe state and leave themselves vulnerable to cyber attack.”

The groups pushing for this legislative rollback appear to be legacy enterprise hardware manufacturers, who highlighted during the hearing the fact that their technology is increasingly being used in data centers, which seem to be one of the only things the current American economy seems capable of building. Lobbyists for the Consumer Technology Association, which represents many large manufacturers, testified in support of the bill, as did Joseph Lee, who works for Cisco.

“While Cisco appreciates the arguments offered in favor of right to repair devices, not all digital technology devices are equal. A router used in a home is fundamentally different from the infrastructure equipment used to manage a power grid or secure confidential state agency data,” Lee said.

Chris Bresee, a lobbyist with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, also highlighted the fact that, broadly, there is IT equipment that will need repairs at data centers.

“A growing number of products in data centers with connection to our electric grid as well. It is of the utmost importance to safeguard these critical systems,” he said. “This is not an argument against repair or against consumers rights, it is a recognition that fixing a smartphone is not the same as modifying systems that keep the lights on for our country.”

The argument being made by these lobbyists and major tech companies is that only the manufacturers or their authorized representatives should be allowed to fix these types of electronics. But, again, the definition of “critical infrastructure” is so broad that it can be applied to almost any type of electronic, and there is nothing fundamentally different between a router used at a data center and a router used in a school, business, or home.

“You look at who is backing this bill, it is large firms like Cisco and IBM. They sell information technology equipment to tens of thousands of Colorado businesses, and they are looking to create a de facto monopoly on that service, which exists in the states that have denied this business to business right to repair,” Paul Roberts, a cybersecurity expert and founder of SecuRepairs testified. “The big tech companies backing the bill are using a very real concern about cybersecurity and resilience of US critical infrastructure to pad their bottom line, locking in a monopoly on service and repair. Cyber attacks on US critical infrastructure are rampant and have nothing to do with information covered by Colorado’s right to repair law.”

404 Media

2026-04-06 17:36:44

Multiple Hackers Warned Anti-Porn App Quittr About Security Issue for Months

At least three people warned Quittr, an app that wants to help men stop masturbating, about serious security issues for months, but the creators of the app didn’t fix them until weeks after 404 Media reached out for comment multiple times.

“I emailed the founders and explained the vulnerability. A developer responded, said he was ‘looking into ways to make our security better,’ and asked how I found it. I walked him through it step by step, even explained that the API key being client-sided is normal for Firebase and that they just needed to implement security rules,” an independent researcher who goes by Kaeden, said on her personal blog. “Then nothing. I followed up. No response. I followed up again. Nothing.”

I first wrote about Quittr’s security vulnerability in January after hearing about the app’s security problems from a different independent security researcher. At the time, I did not name the app because Quittr did not fix the issue despite reaching out to the developers about it multiple times. That security researcher found that Quittr had a misconfiguration issue in its use of the mobile development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an “authenticated” user who can access the app’s backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

That researcher originally contacted Quittr about the issue in September. Quittr’s founder, Alex Slater, acknowledged the issue, thanked the researcher, and said he would fix it in a matter of hours. When the researcher saw the issue still wasn’t fixed months later, they contacted 404 Media. I reached out to Slater and Quittr multiple times. Slater initially denied there was a security vulnerability, but then fixed the issue sometime before March 10. After this, I saw Quittr finally fixed the vulnerability and published another story naming the app.

Slater was also recently profiled in New York Magazine, which detailed the opulent lifestyle the success of Quittr has afforded them, including driving exotic super cars and living in a Miami mansion. Slater shares videos about his lifestyle on his personal YouTube channel as well.

Some of the data the researcher could access included users’ age, how often they said they watched porn, and written confessions about their porn watching habits. Many of the users self-identified as minors, according to the data.

In March, Kaeden provided me with emails showing she contacted Quittr about the same vulnerability on July 3, 2025.

“Your firebase (Database) is misconfigured its possible to read/write to anything, one of the things its possible to do for example is list all users and their info, which is pretty bad for an app of this nature,” Kaeden said in her email to Quitter. Kaeden also told Quittr exactly how to fix the issue and said that a bug bounty “would be highly appreciated” but she never received one.

A Quittr developer who identified as Caio emailed Kaeden asking for more information and thanked her for responsibly disclosing the issue. Kaeden provided that information, but never heard back.

Since publishing my story about Quittr in March, yet another independent security researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted me to say they also notified Quittr about a similar vulnerability in August 2025. Altogether, three different security researchers told Quittr it was jeopardizing sensitive user data before 404 Media reached out to the app for comment about the issue not being fixed.

a week in my life as an app founder in miami

Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.

^{Alex Slater (YouTube)}

404 Media

2026-04-06 15:30:47

Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill

Across most of the U.S., if you want to watch porn online, you have to hand over a government ID or submit to a biometric scan to determine you’re over 18 years of age. But people in Wisconsin can keep freely accessing porn sites—and any other website that hosts more than one third adult content—after Governor Tony Evers vetoed the state’s age verification bill on Friday.

A copycat of the dozens of bills that have passed in the U.S. since 2022, Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 105 would have forced sites with more than one third “material harmful to minors,” defined as “depictions of actual or simulated sexual acts or body parts including pubic areas, genitals, buttocks, and female nipples,” to verify visitors’ ages by “using any commercially reasonable method that uses public or private transactional data gathered about the individual.” This means uploading an ID, showing their face for a biometric scan, uploading their credit card information, or combinations of these.

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to this bill's intrusion into the personal privacy of Wisconsin residents,” Evers wrote in a letter to the members of the assembly, dated April 3. “While I agree that we should protect children from harmful material, this bill imposes an intrusive burden on adults who are trying to access constitutionally protected materials.”

Evers wrote that the bill doesn’t prevent platforms from giving collected personal data to third parties, such as the government or data brokers. “This is a violation of personal privacy,” he wrote.

“Additionally, I am concerned about data security and the potential for misuse of personally identifiable information. Identifiable information could be intercepted by or transmitted to a third party and used as the basis for blackmail or identity theft. Further, although the bill includes penalties for a business entity who violates the prohibition on retention of personal information, those penalties cannot undo the harm that may occur to an individual who is the victim of actions like blackmail or identity theft as a result of a bad actor obtaining their identity.”

Last year, after the UK’s Online Safety Act started requiring websites and platforms to verify users’ ages, Discord users’ age verification data—including selfies and identity documents—was exposed in a security breach. The hack was just one instance where users’ personal data has been required by a platform and then exposed to the whole internet: also last year, similar data was exposed by the Tea app, which made users provide selfies and identity documents to prove they’re women.

An earlier version of the bill attempted to ban Wisconsinites from accessing sites using virtual private networks (VPNs); lawmakers are increasingly pushing to restrict VPNs, but so far have faced pushback from citizens and civil liberties groups. Wisconsin state Sen. Van Wanggaard moved to delete that provision in the legislation, and the state assembly agreed to remove the VPN ban in February.

The adult advocacy group Free Speech Coalition wrote following the veto that Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile flew to Madison “to meet with legislators to discuss the legal and technological issues with the bill, including a ban on VPN traffic, and to advocate for device-based verification solutions.”

“Put simply, AB-105 raises significant concerns around privacy, surveillance, and the First Amendment,” the ACLU of Wisconsin wrote in testimony submitted in March. “While the ACLU of Wisconsin is sympathetic to the overarching goal of this legislation, we do not believe an appropriate trade-off is compromising the civil liberties of all Wisconsinites.”

Wisconsin is now one of only a handful of states left that allows access to porn without requiring users jump through invasive age verification hoops. “We can and should work to prevent minors from accessing adult content, but there are better solutions than the one offered by this bill,” Evers wrote in his veto letter. “For example, we can work with tech companies to implement device-based age verification that takes place on a user's phone or computer, which can be a more secure and effective method. Other states have been moving toward device-based solutions, and major tech companies are adopting these options as well.”

Wisconsin Governor Vetoes Age-Verification Bill — Free Speech Coalition

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has vetoed AB 105 , the state age-verification bill that passed the Wisconsin legislature in early March, despite strong opposition from Free Speech Coalition and other civil liberties groups.

^{Free Speech Coalition}

404 Media

2026-04-06 13:53:56

Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE

Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) police are performing dozens of license plate lookups on Flock cameras for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to public records that show details of the searches.

The practice highlights how ICE, which does not have a contract with Flock, continues to get access to Flock’s AI-powered license plate scanning cameras through local and state police, and often in ways that are unusual, unexpected, and difficult for the public to track or hold the agency accountable for. In this case, ICE has gained access to Flock data through a law enforcement agency that is nominally supposed to be focused on conservation, protecting endangered species, and investigating boating and maritime issues. 404 Media initially reported on how ICE was getting side-door access to Flock data via local police in May 2025.

That reporting led to a series of reforms and safeguards that are supposed to make it easier for law enforcement agencies that use Flock to opt out of having their surveillance camera data passed to federal agencies; a blog post by Flock called “Does Flock Share Data With ICE?” now states plainly “No. Flock does not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or any other sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security.” But in practice, the public records show that as of the end of January (the most recent data available) thousands of agencies around the country were sharing their camera data with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police, which was then regularly performing lookups for ICE.

Flock cameras continually scan the license plate, brand, and color of every vehicle that drives by. Law enforcement can then search the Flock system to see where else a vehicle has travelled. Crucially, Flock maintains a national lookup tool where agencies in one state can search data generated by cameras in another, even if those cameras are on the other side of the country. Law enforcement typically do this without a warrant.

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

A January Flock network audit for Ball State University, a public university in Indiana that has a contract with Flock, shows that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police performed 38 different Flock searches for reasons that were listed as “immigration.”

Flock network audits are spreadsheets that have a separate entry for each time a police department’s Flock data is queried by another agency. Each entry contains information about how many different networks and cameras were searched, the time of the search, and the stated “reason” for the search. The searches performed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had reasons that ranged from “Immigration (civil/administrative) - I.C.E.” to “Immigration (criminal) - General Criminal Investigation” to “Immigration (criminal) - I.C.E.” The network audit indicated that more than 5,000 different Flock networks were searched in each case, indicating that, as of January, thousands of towns and cities were still sharing data with agencies that ultimately work with ICE despite new safeguards put in place by Flock.

“This highlights when you do mass surveillance, you really can’t control the data,” Jay Stanley, a senior analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media. “I doubt there were many cities that were debating the Florida Fish and Wildlife Services doing searches for ICE when they were talking about whether they should get Flock. It shows these searches can come from really any direction.”

The records in question were obtained from Ball State University by the journalist David Covucci, who covers college sports for his website FOIABall. Covucci shared the documents with 404 Media. The documents showed that, beyond the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police, the Texas Department of Public Safety, Grant County Indiana Sheriff's Office, Lake County Indiana police, Sarasota County Florida police, Brevard County Florida Sheriff's Office, Nebraska State Patrol, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Fort Pierce Florida Police Department, and Mississippi Department of Public Safety had all done immigration-related Flock searches in January. This means that all of these agencies ultimately searched Flock cameras on Ball State’s campus (and thousands of others across the country) for immigration-related purposes.

Police with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are able to do these lookups for ICE because in August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis enrolled nearly 800 of its officers in 287(g), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that gives state and local police certain immigration enforcement powers. DeSantis has essentially turned many state police into an extension of ICE: “Florida is setting the example for states in combating illegal immigration and working with the Trump Administration to restore the rule of law,” DeSantis said in a press release announcing the move. “By allowing our state agents and law enforcement officers to be trained and approved by ICE, Florida will now have more enforcement personnel deputized to assist federal partners. That means deportations can be carried out more efficiently, making our communities safer as illegal aliens are removed.”

The ACLU published a report in February about how the expansion of the 287(g) program has vastly increased the Trump administration’s deportation force. “While in recent months the nation’s attention has rightly focused on the violence and abuse perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol agents in places like Minneapolis, in Florida and around the country, communities are experiencing another kind of terror: Their own law enforcement agencies, working hand in glove with the Trump administration, are the perpetrators of blatant racial profiling, harassment, and even violence,” the report says.

The report specifically notes that “Florida appears to have devoted more state and local law enforcement resources to immigration enforcement than any other state, resulting in numerous cases of harassment and profiling of U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike, a climate of extreme fear in communities, and reports of serious civil rights violations.”

The ACLU’s Stanley said that the expansion of 287(g) has made a lot of the debates that communities are having about federal access to Flock data feel outdated, because they may fail to grapple with the fact that local police around the country are now doing work on behalf of federal authorities. “A lot of the focus in communities and elsewhere where Flock is controversial have focused on this question of ‘Will the feds be able to access this data?,’” Stanley said. “This is a reminder that the sharp expansion of 287(g) has made that almost moot because a lot of local authorities are working so closely with ICE.”

Flock has in recent months attempted to distance itself from ICE, in part with the “Does Flock Share Data With ICE?” blog post and with numerous media appearances and LinkedIn posts by its executives. Flock has repeatedly leaned on the idea that its customers own and control their data, and that Flock has made numerous changes to comply with several states’ laws that forbid the use of license plate reader data for immigration or abortion enforcement, or which ban the transfer of license plate camera data out of the state altogether.

“As we've shared with your organization many times, all our customers own their data and choose how to use it, provided it complies with local laws and statutes,” a spokesperson for Flock told 404 Media. “In cities and states where cooperating with federal immigration is against the law, we block that from happening within the product itself. In states where cooperation is legal, customers and their local values determine how they choose to enforce the law.”

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Gov. DeSantis’s office, however, told 404 Media that the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission continues to work with ICE. “Please note that it is NOT out of the ordinary for FWC to work alongside ICE as they have a 287 (g) agreement with them-as do all State of Florida law enforcement agencies,” they said.

404 Media, other reporters, and transparency advocates have been reporting on the use of Flock cameras primarily by obtaining network audits through public records requests. But the utility of those network audits is rapidly deteriorating; as we reported earlier this year, Flock has made changes to its network audits that makes each individual entry more vague, and authorities have warned police to be “as vague as permissible” about the reasons why they are using Flock. Many Flock search reasons simply say “investigation” or another blanket term, making it impossible to know why the system was really used. Because of this change, it may become harder to track which agencies are working with ICE, and how often it’s happening.

“I think everybody using Flock knows you can get away with putting something like a generic descriptor that won’t tip off communities to what’s going on,” Stanley said. “This window of visibility is closing, even this very limited flawed, manipulable window of visibility is closing.”

Police Told to Be ‘as Vague as Permissible’ About Why They Use Flock

The documents show law enforcement sees themselves as being consistently and universally under threat from the people it is supposed to protect.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-04 13:00:42

Gambling Is Thousands of Years Older Than We Thought, Rewriting Human Evolution

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that rolled with it, went out on a limb, gravitationally waved, and spotted relics in our midst.

First, hundreds of prehistoric dice sets shed light on the dawn of gambling. Then: these disembodied arms are horny, the forbidden fruits of supernovae, and baby food for the Milky Way.

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

Rolling the dice in the Ice Age

Madden, Robert J. “Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling.” American Antiquity.

Thousands of years before prediction markets, sports betting, and poker nights, Native Americans were playing the odds with dice and other games of chance.

An analysis of nearly 300 ancient artifacts related to gambling—especially two-sided dice known as “binary lots”—has revealed that Native Americans have played games of chance for at least 12,000 years, many millennia before any other known cultures in the world.

“Historians of mathematics frequently identify the invention of dice and games of chance as a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe,” said study author Robert Madden of Colorado State University.

“The findings presented here suggest that some of the earliest steps on this intellectual journey were taken not by complex societies in the Near East and Eastern Europe around 5,500 years ago but rather by Native American hunter-gatherers in western North America in the waning centuries of the Pleistocene, no later than 12,000 years ago,” he continued.
Examples of prehistoric Native American dice. Image: Courtesy of Robert Madden
Scholars have marveled at the prevalence of Native American games of chance for more than a century, but Madden is the first to systematically trace their origins. He set out to study prehistoric dice in museum collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which were documented in a landmark compendium called Games of the North American Indians published in 1907 by the ethnographer Stewart Culin.

The most common dice games involved players taking turns throwing sets of binary lots, with a score that was assigned based on a count of the “up”-facing side thrown by each player on their turn. Cumulative scores were tracked with counting sticks; the first to reach a predesignated number were the winners.

Madden identified dice at 57 archaeological sites across 12 states, with the oldest appearing in the territories of western Great Plains cultures. The finds clearly indicate a complex understanding of probability, which played a role not only in social cohesion, but also in cosmologies.

“Numerous ethnographic accounts of Native American traditions depict dice playing as a sacred activity that was inherently pleasing to the gods and celestial powers (who were themselves dice players), with ceremonial and secular dice games being played at festivals and seasonal events,” Madden said.

The study chronicles many fascinating myths and legends about gods playing dice on the surface of Earth and the creation of humans as the outcome of a cosmic dice game. Albert Einstein famously remarked that god “does not throw dice” in response to the probabilistic realm of quantum physics. It would seem these prehistoric cultures were way ahead of the game on this point.

In other news…

Eight-armed and ready

Villar, Pablo S., Jiang, Hao et al. “A sensory system for mating in octopus.” Science.

Male octopuses are real suckers for sex, reports a new study about the “hectocotylus,” which is a special arm that serves a dual purpose as both sensory and mating organ.

During copulation, males use the hectocotylus to probe the female’s intricate oviducts in order to deposit sperm, but the mechanisms behind this strategy have been shrouded in tentacled mystery. To get a better handle on the process, scientists coated tubes with different substances and discovered that octopuses only released sperm when sucker cups on the hectocotylus made contact with progesterone, a female hormone produced in the ovaries.

“Whereas nonmating arms are used for chemotactile exploration and predation, the hectocotylus is almost exclusively used for mating and often even protected during hunting,” said researchers co-led by Pablo S. Villar of Harvard University and Hao Jiang of the University of California San Diego.

In a wild twist, the hectocotylus can even work its magic when it is entirely severed from the male’s body, allowing detached arms to autonomously inseminate females! It’s proof that romance is not dead, it’s just occasionally dismembered.

Mind the black hole gap

Tong, Hui et al. “Evidence of the pair-instability gap from black-hole masses.” Nature.

You’ve heard of forbidden planets, but what about forbidden black holes? For years, scientists have theorized that black holes with masses between approximately 50 and 130 times the mass of the Sun fall into a “forbidden range” that cannot exist.

The reason is that colossal stars that are 100 to 260 times more massive than the Sun experience a special kind of stellar death known as “pair‑instability supernovae” in which they completely self-destruct, preventing the formation of black holes. Stars that are both bigger and smaller than this range, in contrast, explode in supernovae that do collapse into black holes.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence for this gap using dozens of gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime formed by cataclysmic events such as mergers of black holes. In binary black holes—systems where two of these massive objects orbit each other—the smaller objects never fell into this range. Some of the larger black holes had forbidden masses, but that’s likely because they had merged with other black holes in the past, not because they were initially at that mass after the deaths of their progenitor stars.

“We interpret these findings as evidence for a subpopulation of hierarchical mergers: binaries in which the primary component is the product of a previous black-hole merger and thus populates the gap,” said researchers led by Hui Tong of Monash University. “As the number of detections increases, it will be possible to gain new insights into the pair-instability gap.”

From my perspective, all black holes are forbidden, because they are terrifying cosmic death traps. But it’s nice to know that the universe has limits, too.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a galaxy

Sestito, Federico et al. “An ancient system hidden in the Galactic plane?” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Last, it’s time to pay respect to our stellar elders. A new study reveals that a weird population of 20 stars orbiting within a few thousand light years of the Sun have basically no metals, the astronomical term for elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. Since new generations of stars become more enriched with metals over time, these stars must be extremely ancient relics. So where did they come from?

Scientists think they have the answer: These metal-light Methusalehs are the last remnants of an ancient dwarf galaxy, which the team dubs “Loki.” Despite its powerful Norse namesake, Loki appears to have been swallowed by the Milky Way early on in our galaxy’s 13-billion-year history. While it is common to find very metal-poor (VMP) stars orbiting all around our galaxy’s core, it’s much rarer to find them all the way out here in the galactic exurbs, hidden in the “plane” (the flattened disk of a galaxy).

“This work provides, for the very first time, a dedicated detailed chemical abundance analysis of a sample of VMP stars with orbits close to the Milky Way plane,” said researchers led by Federico Sestito of the University of Hertfordshire. “A plausible scenario, supported by cosmological zoom-in simulations, is the early accretion of a single system.”

It goes without saying that eating a whole galaxy is pretty metal, even if the stars within it are not.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-04-03 16:55:57

Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

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 crypto, journalists using AI, and a cool photo of Earth.

JOSEPH: I can’t talk about the story just yet, but recently I had to acquire some cryptocurrency quickly for research purposes. I was not anticipating quite how dramatically the world of cryptocurrency and getting it has changed.

I first became aware of cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin, when I was an intern at VICE. Someone on my table (they put all the unpaid interns on a medium sized table in the London office) was talking about it. They were pretty deep into it as I recall, and covered it a fair bit. I then was asked to work on a collaborative documentary between VICE, Raw, and the BBC about the Silk Road drug marketplace because I already knew more than most about message encryption. I then had to learn more about Bitcoin.

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Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-02 15:04:11

Journalist Sues FAA Over Drone No Fly Zone Designed to Prevent Filming ICE

Minnesota photojournalist Rob Levine and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are suing the Federal Aviation Administration over a recently issued restriction that prevents drones from flying within 3,000 feet of Department of Homeland Security buildings and vehicles, an amorphous no-fly zone that encompasses Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents.

The FAA issued the temporary flight restriction (TFR) in January as ICE agents flooded the streets of Minneapolis. The rule established a no fly zone of 3,000 feet around “Department of Homeland Security facilities and mobile assets,” a restriction that Levine and his lawyers argue is impossible to follow and is aimed at curtailing the First Amendment rights of journalists.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“Because there is no means of verifying in advance whether DHS vehicles—such as unmarked cars driven by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—are operating in a given location, the practical consequence is that drone pilots nationwide cannot know whether a flight will expose them to liability,” Levine’s lawyers argued in a court document.

Levine lives in Minneapolis and spent the early days of Operation Metro Surge using his drone to capture footage of protests and ICE agents. Then the TFR hit. “It sent a shiver down my spine,” he told 404 Media. “I’m like ‘Oh my god.’ In a city like Minneapolis at the time with, I don’t know, three or four thousand DHS agents in various stages of uniform or undercoverness or civilian cars that they had switched license plates on? Masquerading as delivery men? They were everywhere here. I immediately grounded myself because there was no way you could know in advance whether or not you were violating that [flight restriction]. And when you’re flying they could drive by and you might not even know it.”

Grayson Clary, a lawyer with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who is representing Levine, told 404 Media that the FAA has previously used flight restrictions in ways that seem designed to prevent newsgathering. “The FAA has a long history of imposing these temporary flight restrictions over newsworthy events in ways that frustrate journalists' ability to cover protests, law enforcement's response to protests, you name it, and this is sort of the newest escalation in that story,” he said.

This new no fly zone is a modification of an old TFR from 2025 that restricted drone pilots from operating within 3,000 feet of Department of Defense and Department of Energy bases.

“When you think about the old restriction, it’s essentially don’t fly within 3,000 feet of an enormous Naval vessel or a Department of Energy convoy that’s ferrying nuclear weapons around,” Clary said. “They just sort of added DHS to the end of that without taking stock of just how much more difficult it is to know whether you’re within 3,000 feet of a DHS ground vehicle as opposed to within 3,000 feet of a destroyer sitting in a Naval base.”

DHS isn’t forthcoming about the number of ICE agents in a given city or where they are operating. They often wear plainclothes, patrol cities in unmarked vehicles, and don’t announce themselves to people in the neighborhoods they patrol. Clary and Levine argued that the secretive nature of DHS has made it impossible for journalists to comply with the FAA’s no fly zone.

The penalties for violating the FAA restriction are severe. “They can take your drone and destroy it. They could shoot it down if they wanted to. They can arrest you and throw you in jail…and they can also make it so you can never fly a drone again,” Levine said. “It seems purely to prevent photo journalism and to chill photo journalists because the rule is so vague they could even charge you after the fact if they determined that you were somewhere and they had been near there.” The FAA has a history of trying to enforce drone restrictions against operators after the fact, based on footage or images posted on YouTube or social media sites.

Clary agreed. “That’s part of what makes this such a First Amendment problem is that it has a real chilling effect. When you don't know where exactly the line is, you're going to play it more carefully to make sure that you don't accidentally cross it,” he said.

Levine has fought the FAA before on this issue and won. In 2016, just as he was first learning how to pilot drones for his photojournalism work, he traveled to North Dakota to cover the anti-oil pipeline protests at Standing Rock. At the time, the FAA had issued a TFR over the area but Levine was able to push the agency into granting him a waiver on First Amendment grounds.

DHS operates its own drones to aid its surveillance efforts. Last year it flew Predator drones above protests in Los Angeles and Minneapolis residents have taken a lot of footage capturing drones flying above homes in Minnesota.

DHS Flew Predator Drones Over LA Protests, Audio Shows

Air traffic control (ATC) audio unearthed by an aviation tracking enthusiast then reviewed by 404 Media shows two Predator drones leaving, and heading towards, Los Angeles.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-02 13:47:24

A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’

TeleGuard, an app that markets itself as a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform which has been downloaded more than a million times, implements its encryption so poorly that an attacker can trivially access a user’s private key and decrypt their messages, multiple security researchers told 404 Media. TeleGuard also uploads users’ private keys to a company server, meaning TeleGuard itself could decrypt its users’ messages, and the key can also at least partially be derived from simply intercepting a user’s traffic, the researchers found.

The news highlights something of the wild west of encrypted messaging apps, where not all are created equal.

💡
Do you know anything else about this app or other security issues? 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.

“No storage of data. Highly encrypted. Swiss made,” the website for TeleGuard reads. The site also says, “The chats as well as voice and video calls are end-to-end encrypted.”

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A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-01 13:10:17

I Tried to Find the ‘Arousal Intelligence’ In An Animated, Augmented Reality Porn Star

Sometimes people—especially those in the field of public relations doing a pray-and-spray campaign, but also small-time developers, the occasional delusional vibe-coder, and local dipshits—deliver messages to my inbox like a cat dropping a dead mouse on my doorstep. For the most part, I resist the bait: often, bad press is still press to these people, or I’m just too busy to really look at the pitch or try the product.

This week, I’m coming back from a week of being entirely offline. I didn’t look at the news or my inboxes for seven straight days. I’m feeling properly healed, and also like I need to retraumatize myself back into the swing of things. Lucky me, on Monday morning, someone representing EnjoyMeNow emailed me about “a mobile website that places a photorealistic 3D character in your real room using augmented reality” using something called “Arousal Intelligence” and “real-time physics,” which streams “in a full engine from a global delivery network.” This press release, sent from “a globally focused media and entertainment holding company pioneering technology-driven innovation across digital platforms worldwide” called DCBG Group which represents EnjoyMeNow, was very thrilling to read as someone who appreciates the art of a good word salad. I dropped what I was doing (deleting hundreds of other emails) to try it out.

Once on the EnjoyMeNow.com mobile site, after agreeing that you’re over 18, you’re asked to choose a “Pleasurette™,” a gender neutral term for a series of 3D characters and a trademark filed two weeks ago. These include five women wearing sex toy store package lingerie, and one dude, Adrian.

“Every character—called a Pleasurette™—is a photorealistic digital human built from scratch with realistic skin shading, multi-pass rendered hair, and soft-body physics. No real performers are filmed, recorded, or motion-captured. The characters are created entirely in 3D software.” Presented without comment are the Pleasurettes™:

I choose Adrian first because I’m always curious how AR and VR porn copes with the fact that hovering pecs and an immobile penis are difficult to make sexy in this format, real or not. A lot of porn made for a VR or AR experience is shot from the penile point of view: It’s just easier to strap a 180 degree HD camera to a man’s face and tell him to hold still while a female performer is free to writhe around on top than vice-versa. Knowing this, and also knowing that the market for AR/VR porn caters heavily toward men (save for a few beacons of light, such as director Anna Lee, who a few years ago said of the proliferation of male-gaze VR porn: “You’re making the same stereotypical porn you made with a fucking camcorder. It’s the same MILF bending over in the kitchen to bake cookies”), I still went in hopeful. After all, they pitched me.

But it became clear almost immediately that Adrian is not playing for my team, so to speak, and getting the full EnjoyMeNow experience as intended requires equipment I don’t have. To get your chosen Pleasurette™ into your camera’s view, you have to hold your phone at an angle toward your crotch and stroke your penis. Helpfully, since I don’t have one of those, the app overlays a semi-transparent image of a penis at the bottom of the camera. It waits for you to put your hand in frame near the penis-guide to let the show begin. Moving my hand across the camera unlocks the start button. It’s not doing this to make sure you’re choked up on it before starting; It’s calibrating the position of the 3D model to your hand’s location and size, because that’s what controls its interactive aspects.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Without getting too graphic in a blog that’s already pretty explicit so far, this is what I encountered: Adrian walks into view totally nude, leading with his 3D dick at a 90 degree angle, and says “look up, here I come.” Tearing my eyes away from this perfectly straight tree branch and pointing the phone camera up as commanded, with more than a little trepidation, I see the jiggliest pair of male titties I’ve ever seen on screen, nipples wobbling independently of the rest of him. “Stroke back and forth your big dick,” he says, grammatically confounding me on top of already freaking me out with a thousand yard stare. When I make a jerkoff motion in his general direction, he squats up and down like he’s teabagging me in Halo. Bizarrely, when I do this, his entire body shrinks, my hand now a monstrous size in comparison to his penis. No judgement, but he moans in a woman’s voice. “Come on my back soon,” he says, before a screen interrupts the session saying I need to pay $2.99 to unlock more features, such as making my Pleasurette™ orgasm. (For the record, I tried two payment methods to fork over this low low price, both rejected.) The experience is the same with the other characters, just in different skins: the female characters crawl around and squat over my ghost penis, and I use my imagination to jerk it off, which ends up looking like I’m fistbumping tiny 3D women in the vagina. Sometimes, I clip through their hollow bodies and can see straight up into their heads or down through their labia.

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EnjoyMeNow’s PR rep claims that this interactivity is a world first. “Existing AR adult content is pre-rendered video or static models you look at,” they told me. “EnjoyMeNow is interactive, where the character responds to your hand in real-time, placed in your actual room through your phone camera. And it runs entirely in the mobile browser. No app, no download, no account. That combination doesn't exist anywhere else from our research over the past year of creating this.”

Companies like SexLikeReal and Naughty America have been doing AR and VR content for years, often featuring real porn performers. But this hand-tracking thing EnjoyMeNow is doing is different than that, they claim. And I’ll concede, yes, moving your hand up and down definitely makes the 3D model move around a little bit. Here's how one of the femme characters acts:

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What really makes EnjoyMeNow stand apart from plenty of other AR porn products is this insistence that not employing real models or performers makes it better or smarter, somehow. On Monday, the DCBC Group’s website said of the choice to use CGI instead of people: “This was a founding decision, not a technical workaround. The adult entertainment industry has always relied on real people putting their bodies in front of a camera—and that comes with real consequences. Exploitation, coercion, content leaked without consent, performers pressured into work they're uncomfortable with, and careers that follow people for the rest of their lives whether they want them to or not. We chose to build a platform where none of that is possible. Every character on EnjoyMeNow is created entirely in software. No one is filmed. No one is exploited. No one's livelihood depends on what they're willing to do on camera. The experience is just as immersive—and no real person is harmed or compromised in the process.”

The idea that the adult industry—and “putting bodies in front of a camera”—is inherently exploitative is not only false, it’s a harmful thing to say, and it’s especially galling coming from a literal porn web toy. This entire statement is so infuriating it’s hard to know where to begin with it. These are talking points used by the most conservative, anti-porn lobbying groups and politicians on the planet to justify stripping us all of rights, here being floated by an app that makes weird, schlocky and unsatisfying 3D characters that the residents in Second Life’s least-attended sex clubs wouldn’t even find sexy.

But again, because I had the time and was feeling fresh, I asked DCBC Group to defend this statement with some data at least. “We're not making a judgment about the adult industry or its performers,” they said. “We built a product around CGI characters, that’s a format choice, not a moral position. Some people prefer content that doesn't involve real people. We built for them. We've now updated our press page to better reflect that; thank you Sam for that observation.” The page now says “EnjoyMeNow is built around computer-generated characters rather than real performers. This is a format choice—offering a new kind of private, interactive experience that doesn't exist in traditional adult content.” Good for them for changing it.

And since users are being asked to position their dongs in front of their phone cameras on a browser-based app, I took a look at the “privacy” section of the FAQ. “Privacy is architectural, not a policy bolt-on. No app is installed. No account is required,” DCBC wrote. “All camera and motion processing runs locally on the phone—no frames, no images, no data ever leave the device. There is no cloud processing, no recording, and no persistent data stored after the session ends. When you close the tab, the adult content is automatically purged from the browser.”

I asked DCBC’s rep if they could elaborate. Well, they could at least throw more words at it: “Regarding content encryption, every 3D asset is individually encrypted at the file level, stored encrypted, transmitted encrypted, and only decrypted at render time using per-session keys that never touch the device,” they said. “There are no downloadable model files. This is a custom content protection system built specifically to prevent our CGI assets from being extracted, redistributed or changed. The specifics are proprietary, but it goes well beyond transport-layer encryption. One core goal of this architecture is ensuring no one can upload their own content to the platform. This is a closed system by design.”

“Just needless words really,” 404 Media’s privacy and security reporter Joseph Cox said about this when I showed him what DCBC said. It could easily be cut down to “we don’t allow uploads.” Which is, to be clear, for the best.

I should say here that I don’t go into these sorts of reviews assuming that I am the target audience. I’m pitched regularly by porn sites and sex toy companies on products that aren’t my personal thing; I wrote a column for years about kinks and fetishes that are not many people’s thing at all, but I wanted to better understand them and what appeal they hold for the people who love them. Maybe there are people out there who simply cannot consume content with real people in it; if that’s you, please hit me up, I would really like to hear more about that.

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^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}