Klein has attempted to subpoena Discord and Reddit for information that would reveal the identity of moderators of a subreddit critical of him. The moderators' lawyers fear their clients will be physically attacked if the subpoenas go through.
Klein has attempted to subpoena Discord and Reddit for information that would reveal the identity of moderators of a subreddit critical of him. The moderatorsx27; lawyers fear their clients will be physically attacked if the subpoenas go through.#News #YouTube
Screenshots shared with 404 Media show tenant screening services ApproveShield and Argyle taking much more data than they need. “Opt-out means no housing.”#News
Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs
Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.
The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.
“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.
💡 Do you know anything else about any of these companies or the technology landlords are using? 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.
“I am livid,” they added.
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Humanity’s Toxic Wreckage Is Teeming With Life, Scientists Discover
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were lost at sea, lost in time, lost in space, and lost in translation.
If you are househunting at the moment, have you considered living on a submerged pile of Nazi munition, or in a charming community of WWI-era ghost ships, or, if you want privacy, maybe a homestead on the Moon? The first studies up this week are all about weird hubs of life here on Earth and perhaps one day off it.
Then, who will serve as general counsel for aliens? Who will feed the megaraptors? And last, the ultimate scientific mystery: what happened to Taylor Swift’s Southern twang?
By the mid-20th century, millions of tons of munitions from both World Wars had been dumped into coastal waters. Now, scientists reveal that these weapons of death have become bustling hubs of life by attracting fish, mollusks, microbes, among other creatures. Footage captured during submersible dives last year shows thriving aquatic communities on war detritus in the Baltic Sea.
“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic munition compounds, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels, and other epifauna on the munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs, and wooden crates,” said researchers led by Andrey Vedenin of Carl von Ossietzky University. “In this study, for the first time, the composition and structure of epifauna on the surface of marine munitions are described.” Footage from munitions sites. Image: Vedenin, Andrey et al. The munitions supported much more life than the surrounding sediment, with an average of around 43,000 organisms per square metre on the munitions compared to about 8,200 organisms on the seafloor. These hotspots were especially interesting given the toxicity levels from the explosive munitions fillings, which often exceeded water quality thresholds for aquatic organisms. (Side note: the authors describe the fillings as “cheesy” due to their texture and yellow color, which made me weirdly hungry for a munitions sandwich).
Some species seemed mildly put off by the contamination, including mussels that kept their shells closed at spots with high concentrations. But for the most part, “the high levels of chemical exposure apparently do not prevent the development of a dense epifauna community on the metal shells, fuse pockets, and transport cases centimeters from the explosive filling,” the team found. “The bare explosive, however, remains mostly free from epifauna, even from the Polydora polychaetes that are known to inhabit a vast variety of substrates.”
Wow, you know it’s bad if even Polydora polychaetes won’t touch it. Those worms live on anything but it seems they draw the line at the naked surface of an explosive.
In a separate study, researchers led by Elizabeth White of Duke University used remote-sensing drones to map out 147 shipwrecks in the eerily named “Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay” in Maryland. These WWI-era ships “have created plentiful wetlands, forests, and aquatic habitats,” according to the study. youtube.com/embed/RhJ_jOcZZyY?… “Sediment collected within wrecks has created ship-shaped islands, allowing both aquatic and terrestrial vegetation to flourish,” the team said. “Birds, such as Osprey, nest within this vegetation and on exposed areas of ships, while aquatic organisms such as the endangered Atlantic sturgeon use the subaqueous wreckage as foraging and nursery grounds.”
And there you have it: research about discarded weapons of death and creepy ship graveyards that, somehow, is kind of uplifting.
The Moon is a harsh mistress, but the harshness is not evenly distributed. To that end, scientists have scouted out the best lunar real estate for future human habitation based on metrics like temperature, topography, solar illumination, dust activity, water resources, and radiation.
“Lunar resources can provide essential support for establishing permanent lunar habitats, suggesting that the Moon may become humanity’s second home,” said researchers led by Siyan Wang of Tongji University. However, the team added that the Moon does come with some design challenges: for example, “lacking an atmosphere, lunar surface temperatures range annually from –171°C to 111°C.”
Setting aside the absence of standard atmospheric amenities, the new study spotlights three promising sites, all of which are mare plains (low-lying basaltic regions) sheltered within the craters Pytheas, Gambart, and Parry. Great locations, but you’re not going to like the commute.
Should aliens have inalienable rights? This question has been debated for years (and I explore it in my new book🔌). In a new study, scientists propose establishing a legal framework for aliens quickly, given the frenzied pace of both astrobiology and commercial space development.
“Humanity stands at the threshold of an unprecedented boom in space activity, with planned mining ventures, increased uncrewed and crewed missions, and escalating commercial interest,” said researchers led by Emma Johanna Puranen of the Open University. “This coincides with a ‘golden age’ of astrobiology, where scientists increasingly favour the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. We must act now to establish legal and ethical norms for the treatment of extraterrestrial ecosystems before irreversible harm occurs.”
The team models its proposed framework on the influential 1972 treatise “Should Trees Have Standing?” by Christopher Stone. Who knows if we’ll ever actually need a legal system for aliens, but at the very least I hope it inspires a procedural spinoff called CSI: E.T.
Scientists have discovered fossils of a megaraptor (a dinosaur as cool as it sounds) with the leg bone of a crocodilian right there in its jaws. Though it’s possible that this bone coincidentally slid into the predator’s mouth after it died, we may be looking at a 68-million-year-old version of The Last Supper. Artist concept of the newly discovered dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali with an ancient crocodile relative’s front leg in its mouth. Image: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History via AP “Here we report a previously unknown megaraptoran genus and species” called Joaquinraptor, which was found in central Patagonia and “is among the most completely represented and latest-surviving megaraptorans,” said researchers led by Lucio Ibiricu of the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Paleontology.
“A crocodyliform right humerus…was situated between the closely associated left and right dentaries of the Joaquinraptor holotype, with the apices of several tooth crowns of the megaraptorid in direct contact with the humeral shaft, which also shows potential tooth marks,” the team added. “As such, this discovery may constitute direct evidence regarding prey selection” of megaraptors.
Death is a bummer, but I bet it goes down a lot smoother with a mouthful of croc hot wings.
I knew this study was trouble when it walked in. Researchers tracked Taylor Swift’s dialect shifts across the eras by logging and analyzing more than 1,400 vowel sounds in interviews and performances spanning her career.
“The results of this study show that Taylor Swift temporarily adopted distinct measurable features of Southern American dialect during her time in Nashville…and these features disappeared upon her relocation to Philadelphia and New York City,” said authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew B. Winn of the University of Minnesota. Taylor Swift performing during her Eras tour (credit Maura Shapiro) with vocal frequency analysis overlaid (credit: Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn). Image: Maura Shapiro/Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn. The team also discovered that Swift lowered her voice pitch during her NYC years, when she became more outspoken about “The Man” (sexism and creative property rights). They speculate that she may have “intentionally modulated her voice pitch to be lower to signal the seriousness of these themes, and to convey her competence to speak on them with authority.”
Or, they add, it could be a natural voice drop “associated with aging through her 20s,” an explanation supported by her own admission that she has this thing where she gets older but just never wiser. Whatever her current accent, let’s hope she shakes it off and leaves a blank space open for new dialects. Look what you made me do; it’s me, hi, I’m the Abstract, it’s me.
Sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War can provide a habitat for epifauna, according to an analysis of footage from a remotely operated vehicle in the Baltic Sea.
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 being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit.
JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about 404 Media at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum, an annual conference. Over the years, I haven’t been to too many conferences, because honestly it was always too disruptive to the day-to-day journalism and work of managing a team to be able to get away. We’re more than two years into this, but one of the nice things about having this company is that I can mostly get my work done whenever makes sense for me, whether that’s late at night in Los Angeles or early in the morning in Greece.
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The sudden reduction in the Chandler wobble, a deviation between Earth’s axis and crust, may primarily originate in a powerful La Niña event, reports a new study.#TheAbstract
Earth Was Mysteriously Thrown Off-Kilter In 2015. Now, Scientists Think They Know Why.
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Have you noticed anything out of whack about Earth since 2015? I’m speaking, of course, about how our planet’s wobble started shrinking that year, a mysterious shift that scientists have been puzzling over ever since.
Now, researchers think they might have an explanation for the sudden decrease in the Chandler wobble (CW), a deviation in Earth's rotational axis relative to its crust that causes a drift of about 20 feet over a cycle of roughly 14 months. The recent off-kilter wobble, known as the CW reduction event, may have been largely sparked by “mass anomalies” after the La Niña of 2010–2011, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
That particular La Niña event was one of the strongest on record and it was “followed by significant ocean mass loss due to changed precipitation and evaporation patterns, providing a possible cause of the CW reduction event,” reports the study.
“Polar motion, like the Chandler wobble, reflects changes in Earth’s overall angular momentum,” said study authors Taehwan Jeon and Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist and associate professor at Seoul National University, respectively, in a joint email to 404 Media. “Changes in regional mass, and velocity fields of ocean currents and winds can affect the wobble’s amplitude. Because the wobble sums up effects from all over the globe, it is usually hard to tell exactly which region contributed how much.”
“Still, given the scale of the phenomenon, it makes sense that global climate events such as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) have a stronger influence than small local changes,” the pair continued. “Not every El Niño or La Niña does this, but as our study shows, the 2010-2011 La Niña produced an unusually strong anomaly when viewed from the perspective of Earth’s polar motion.”
The Chandler wobble is one of many wandering deviations between the axis and crust; for instance, we recently covered the effect of impounded dam water on Earth’s rotation. The wobble has also increased and decreased many times in the past in response to shifting global mass distributions, so the latest anomaly isn’t unprecedented.
Still, scientists are curious what might be driving the recent CW reduction, which reached its peak intensity between 2015 and 2020. To approach this mystery, Jeon, Seo, and their colleagues broke the wobble up into two components: the forced wobble and the free wobble.
“The Chandler wobble is actually a two-dimensional pendulum-like motion, but for simplicity it can be compared to a one-dimensional swing,” explained Jeon and Seo. “If you let a swing move without pushing it, it will eventually slow down and stop. That ‘natural’ motion without any external force is what we call the ‘free wobble.’”
“Now imagine giving the swing a push at just the right timing,” they continued. “The swing will keep moving. Depending on how you push, its amplitude can increase or decrease. On Earth, all moving masses (such as air, oceans and water on land) act like those pushes. The part of the wobble driven by these pushes is called the ‘forced wobble.’”
Because the Chandler wobble is the sum of these two parts, the reduction is caused by the free and forced phases cancelling each other out, according to the team’s models. In other words, the study showed that the strong 2010-2011 La Niña event drove the forced wobble out of phase, allowing it to interfere with the free wobble and reduce the overall CW amplitude.
Jeon and Seo said their results “were partly expected and partly surprising.” On the one hand, they noted that oscillations naturally decay over time, so they were expecting to see only recent changes reflected in the Chandler wobble, with ENSO events of the past few decades playing an outsized role in those shifts.
“What surprised us was that not every ENSO event seems to matter, and in particular, the 2010-2011 La Niña turned out to be the strongest contributor,” the pair said. “That was not something we had fully predicted before doing the analysis.”
With that in mind, it’s possible that the Chandler wobble will continue to go haywire in the coming decades, as ENSO events are being amplified by human-driven climate change.
“Large-scale and systematic shifts in Earth’s mass and motion can strongly affect the Chandler wobble, especially when they show a cycle close to the Chandler period (about 433 days), which can resonate more strongly,” Jeon and Seo said.
In particular, the pair pointed to how much ENSO events can disrupt rainfall patterns, which ended up being a main factor in how the 2010–2011 La Niña anomalies impacted on the CW reduction. Changes in global ice mass, however, have more influence over the long-term drift of Earth’s rotation axis, and don’t influence the short-term Chandler wobble as much.
“Since 2010-2011, mass and velocity field changes have continued around the globe, and separating their individual effects remains very challenging,” Jeon and Seo said. “Still, because the Chandler wobble’s amplitude has been increasing again since late 2020, we expect that it may soon return to levels comparable to those observed before 2010.”
“Although the amplitude drop during 2015-2020 was unusual, there were also earlier periods when the Chandler wobble was decreased or increased in amplitude,” the pair concluded. “We suspect that major ENSO events may have played a similar role during those times as well. A next step would be to investigate the broader patterns—what kinds of ENSO events tend to leave a mark on Earth’s polar motion, and what features make them most influential.”
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The swings between El Niño and La Niña have been bigger in recent decades than earlier ones. Our guest blogger covers new research pointing the finger at human-caused climate change.
Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies
People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. The tide of terrible Twin Peaks related slop lasted for about two days before the subreddit’s mods broke, reversed their decision, and deleted the AI generated content.
Twin Peaks is a moody TV show that first aired in the 1990s and was followed by a third season in 2017. It’s the work of surrealist auteur David Lynch, influenced lots of TV shows and video games that came after and has a passionate fan base that still shares theories and art to this day. Lynch died earlier this year and since his passing he’s become a talking point for pro-AI art people who point to several interviews and second hand stories they claim show Lynch had embraced an AI-generated slop future.
On Tuesday, a mod posted a long announcement that opened the doors to AI on the sub. In a now deleted post titled “Ai Generated Content On r/twinpeaks,” the moderator outlined the position that the sub was a place for everyone to share memes, theories, and “anything remotely creative as long as it has a loose string to the show or its case or its themes. Ai generated content is included in all of this.”
The post went further. “We are aware of how Ai ‘art’ and Ai generated content can hurt real artists,” the post said. “Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the world we live in today. At this point I don’t think anything can stop the Ai train from coming, it’s here and this is only the beginning. Ai content is becoming harder and harder to identify.”
The mod then asked Redditors to follow an honor system and label any post that used AI with a special new flair so people could filter out those posts if they didn’t want to see them. “We feel this is a best of both worlds compromise that should keep everyone fairly happy,” the mod said.
An honor system, a flair, and a filter did not mollify the community. In the following 48 hours Lynch fans expressed their displeasure by showing r/twinpeaks what it looks like when no one can “stop the Ai train from coming.” They filled the subreddit with AI-generated slop in protest, including horrifying pictures of series protagonist Cooper doing an end-zone dance on a football field while Laura Palmer screamed in the sky and more than a few awful ChatGPT generated scripts. Image via r/twinpeaks. Free-IDK-Chicken, a former mod of r/twinpeaks who resigned over the AI debacle, said the post wasn’t run by other members of the mod team. “It was poorly worded. A bad take on a bad stance and it blew up in their face,” she told 404 Media. “It spiraled because it was condescending and basically told the community--we don’t care that it’s theft, that it’s unethical, we’ll just flair it so you can filter it out…they missed the point that AI art steals from legit artists and damages the environment.”
According to Free-IDK-Chicken, the subreddit’s mods had been fighting over whether or not to ban AI art for months. “I tried five months ago to get AI banned and was outvoted. I tried again last month and was outvoted again,” she said.
On Thursday morning, with the subreddit buried in AI slop, the mods of r/twinpeaks relented, banned AI art, and cleaned up the protest spam. “After much thought and deliberation about the response to yesterday's events, the TP Mod Team has made the decision to reverse their previous statement on the posting of AI content in our community,” the mods said in a post announcing the new policy. “Going forward, posts including generative AI art or ChatGPT-style content are disallowed in this subreddit. This includes posting AI google search results as they frequently contain misinformation.”
Lynch has become a mascot for pro AI boosters. An image on a pro-AI art subreddit depicts Lynch wearing an OpenAI shirt and pointing at the viewer. “You can’t be punk and also be anti-AI, AI-phobic, or an AI denier. It’s impossible!” reads a sign next to the AI-generated picture of the director. Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk As evidence, they point to aBritish Film Institute interview published shortly before his death where he lauds AI and calls it “incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity.” AI boosters often leave off the second part of the quote. “I’m sure with all these things, if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror. But I’m hoping better times are coming,” Lynch said. Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk The other big piece of evidence people use to claim Lynch was pro-AI is a secondhand account given to Vulture by his neighbor, the actress Natasha Lyonne. According to the interview in Vulture, Lyonne asked Lynch for his thoughts on AI and Lynch picked up a pencil and told her that everyone has access to it and to a phone. “It’s how you use the pencil. You see?” He said.
Setting aside the environmental and ethical arguments against AI-generated art, if AI is a “pencil,” most of what people make with it is unpleasant slop. Grotesque nonsense fills our social media feeds and AI-generated Jedis and Ghiblis have become the aesthetic of fascism.
We've seen other platforms and communities struggle with keeping AI art at bay when they've allowed it to exist alongside human-made content. On Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, low-effort garbage is flooding online spaces and pushing productive human conversation to the margins, while floating to the top of engagement algorithms.
Other artist communities are pushing back against AI art in their own ways: Earlier this month, DragonCon organizers ejected a vendor for displaying AI-generated artwork. Artists’ portfolio platform ArtStation banned AI-generated content in 2022. And earlier this year, artists protested the first-ever AI art auction at Christie’s.
The tech the Secret Service claims can be used to "disable cell phone towers" is very commonly used by ticket scalpers to game Ticketmaster.#SIMFarm #SIMBank #Tickets #TicketScalping #Ticketmaster
The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers
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Tuesday, the Secret Service said it “dismantled a network” of “300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.” The Secret Service suggested that this network posed a threat to the United Nations General Assembly meeting, which was “within 35 miles” of the servers and which it said could have been used to “disable cell phone towers.” The story quickly went viral, with the New York Times and CNN’s reports being widely shared and discussed.
CNN reported that the SIM servers were used in swatting calls against members of Congress, and the New York Times quoted an expert who said that they believed the servers could be used for espionage. As security researcher Robert Graham points out in a post called “That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus—it’s just normal crime,” the Secret Service has not yet released any actual evidence of what the SIM servers were used for and it is unclear how such a setup could be used for “espionage.” Graham notes that, based on photos released by the Secret Service and its description of the operations, claims that such a network could have only been created by a sophisticated nation state actor are particularly ridiculous: “I can pull this off, personally. It’s just a SIM farm. Sure, there’s some capital involved, on the order of $1 million, but it could be setup and managed by a single person. It likely wasn’t setup all at once with that much money, but has been slowly growing for years as profits are funneled back into setting up more SIM accounts,” he wrote.
The discovery of a bunch of SIM banks (also called SIM farms, SMS gateways, and several other things) anywhere is interesting from a spam / cybercrime perspective, and they give a type of cyberpunk visual that, frankly, is extremely my shit. But the breathless way this bust has been announced—with a special video announcement by Secret Service director Sean Curran and a clearly embargoed rollout with the New York Times and CNN, makes these SIM farms seem as though they are particularly special and high tech, when they clearly are not. The technology used, which can be seen clearly in photos released by the Secret Service, are regularly used by SMS scammers, spammers, and marketers, yes, but the tech is also extremely widely used by ticket scalpers seeking to create lots of Ticketmaster accounts with which to buy tickets. This is off-the-shelf technology that anyone can buy and use; if one had enough money, one could surely buy 300 of them from Ejointech, the Chinese company that makes them, and set something like this up. I have been familiar with and meaning to write about SIM banks for a few months now, specifically because they have become popular with ticket scalpers. Like many “anti-scalping” and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn’t actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets.
This SMS verification system has created a new underground market for various technologies and software that lets scalpers game this SMS verification system. SIM boxes are such an important part of that new underground market that Ejointech now advertises one of its products—which looks very much like the models shown in the Secret Service’s images from the seized servers in New York—as specifically being good “for ticketing & bulk SMS.”
“Popular model: used by 5,000+ leading ticket brokers globally & trusted for thousands of large-scale SMS campaigns!,” Ejointech advertises on the $3,730 Ejoin 256 SIM 4G LTE SMS Gateway. On TikTok, it advertises a similar, 512 SIM card model as having “human behavior,” “cloud management,” and “auto SIM card switch.”
“Ticket brokers, streamline your Ticketmaster operations with EjoinTech! Our SMS gateway devices support up to 512 SIM cards, ensuring you never miss a verification code,” the company says. “Designed for efficiency with no unnecessary noise.” youtube.com/embed/BZnrXxt47Qw?… There is of course no evidence that the SIM boxes seized by the Secret Service this week were used by ticket scalpers, but there’s also no public evidence released by the Secret Service that suggests they were going to try to disrupt the UN General Council’s meeting. The point I’m making is that these devices and these types of farms have become somewhat common in recent years, and they are used not just to send messages in bulk but to receive them in bulk, too. They are used not just for crimes, but for various grey market and controversial, but not necessarily illegal, purposes too.
“Proxies” and real SIM cards that can receive SMS messages have become critical to the ticket scalping industry. The way ticket scalping works now is that big time brokers will create many (hundreds or thousands) of unique Ticketmaster accounts, each associated with their own phone number. These are sometimes made using prepaid or low-cost wireless carriers like MobileX, whose SIM cards appeared in bulk in Secret Service materials.
Not every big time broker is going to want to roll their own SIM bank, so a series of companies have popped up that offer “proxies,” which just means that they are basically a company running and selling access to phone numbers, keeping them online, and forwarding SMS codes directly to the ticket broker buying them. These companies do not advertise what specific hardware they are using to do this, but SIM boxes could easily be used to do this, and the scale of farm that the Secret Service found is not particularly large considering these types of services exist. They go by names like “WiredSMS,” “TextChest,” “Quick-Text,” “SMSPass,” and “Jivetel,” among others. TextChest advertises “industry-leading physical SIM lines, trusted by thousands.” A company called Seat Heroes notes that it is “carrier compliant” and that “while others rely on risky, unauthorized setups, Seat Heroes runs on the first ever Tier 1 carrier-integrated infrastructure—no modems, no VOIP, just proprietary and exclusive access to genuine numbers—always on, 24/7” and “no SIM banks—just direct connections.” In practice, ticket brokers connect their proxies—either bought from a third party or rolled by themselves—to other bespoke ticketing-buying software that helps them actually manage tons of Ticketmaster accounts and tons of phone numbers at once. There are a host of ticket broker-specific internet browsers that allow brokers to open hundreds or thousands of browser tabs, which each have a browsing session tied to either a specific SIM card or to an IP proxy which can also be bought from third-party services. This allows brokers to power through Ticketmaster’s “Virtual Waiting Rooms” because a broker can have hundreds or thousands of independent browser sessions waiting as separate “people.” The SIM box (or a SIM proxy service) can then be set up in these bespoke browsers to automatically forward and submit Ticketmaster’s SMS two-factor authentication, which is supposedly designed to prevent scalpers from getting tickets.
At one point, Private Tabs, one of the bespoke browsers for ticket scalpers, was advertising a “SIMBOX HARDWARE ADD-ON,” which could “add 512 phone numbers for $3 per line.”
“These hardware devices allow you to add 512 phone numbers to your Private Tabs account,” an archived version of the Private Tabs website reads. “If you already have one, then you can just add it to the config or call us, and we’ll set it up for ya. This ensures that every account you load in has its dedicated number. Rather than paying $9 to $24 per phone number, you can purchase one of these devices and get a phone line for as little as $3 per number. Typically, they pay for themselves within 2 months since each device can hold 512 numbers. With this device you do not need ‘TextChest’ or ‘Private Tab Phones’ [a proxy service] as you can host your own numbers for half the cost.”
The Private Tabs web browser no longer advertises SIM boxes, and in a FAQ on its current website, it says says people using their own telecom hardware may run into problems: "There have been recent reports as of 9/5/2025 that some people using Chinese hardware is a problem. You may want to contact your phone company before trying to integrate it with the API to confirm it works ok."
"We now not only know the person that bought the ticket, but we’re going to know those three people that you are taking to the show, which we have not known historically."
Multiple Palantir and Flock sources say the companies are spinning a commitment to "democracy" to absolve them of responsibility. "In my eyes, it is the classic double speak," one said.#News
How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump
In a blog post published in June, Garrett Langley, the CEO and co-founder of surveillance company Flock, said “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.” The post explained that the company believes the laws of the country and individual states and municipalities, not the company, should determine the limits of what Flock’s technology can be used for, and came after 404 Media revealed local police were tapping into Flock’s networks of AI-enabled cameras for ICE, and that a sheriff in Texas performed a nationwide search for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
💡 Do you work at any of these companies or others like them? 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.
Langley’s statement echoes a common refrain surveillance and tech companies selling their products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other parts of the U.S. government have said during the second Trump administration: we live in a democracy. It is not our job to decide how our powerful capabilities, which can track peoples’ physical location, marry usually disparate datasets together, or crush dissent, can or should be used. At least, that’s the thrust of the argument. That is despite the very clear reality that the first Trump administration was very different to the Biden administration, and both pale in comparison to Trump 2.0, with the executive branch and various agencies flaunting ordinary democratic values. The idea of what a democracy is capable of has shifted.
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"Find My Parking Cops" pins the near-realtime locations of parking officers all over the city, and shows what they're issuing fines for, and how much.
"Find My Parking Cops" pins the near-realtime locations of parking officers all over the city, and shows what theyx27;re issuing fines for, and how much.
‘Find My Parking Cops’ Tracks Officers Handing Out Tickets All Around San Francisco
With “Find My Parking Cops,” technologist Riley Walz reverse engineered San Francisco’s parking ticket system to place cops on a map seconds after they issue parking citations—in theory, helping people avoid spots where officers are handing out tickets.
“I can see every ticket seconds after it's written,” Walz wrote on X. So I made a website. Find My Friends? AVOID THE PARKING COPS.”
On the Find My Parking Cops site, visitors can see a map of San Francisco with pins locating parking cops, as well as lines tracking their shift routes, how much money they’ve fined people during their shifts, and for what violation the tickets are cited. Most are “street cleaning” violations, where someone didn’t move their car on designated days. Some are for “hill parking,” a citation I, a lifelong East Coast driver, had never heard of until today, that fines parkers for failing to curb the wheels of a vehicle on a hill in a way that would prevent it from rolling. A bunch of expired meter tickets and parking in tow-away areas also pop up on Wednesday morning.
I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it's written
The site also has a leaderboard showing the officers who fines the most each week: As of this morning, the top cop is Officer 0435, who has given out $17,877 in tickets since Monday.
Walz's site pulls public data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to make the site work. “I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation,” he wrote on his website. “But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don't have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently.” He figured out that ticket numbers follow a predictable pattern. “So if an officer just wrote a ticket, I know with certainty the ID after that one will be the next ticket the same officer writes. AND, immediately after a ticket is written, it becomes available to be viewed on the city's website.” He also learned that the city has about 300 parking cops, and that they are issuing tickets with numbers in batches of 100.
“All I have to do is check the first ticket in each batch I don't have in my database,” he wrote on his site. “This approach means I only have to make a request to the city's website every few seconds. Great!”
A few hours after Walz posted the project on X, he said the city changed the way it allows people to pull that public data, and the site went down. But he found a workaround, he wrote, and it went back up. As of Wednesday morning, it's spotty, with the service showing that it was up, then back down.
SFMTA told 404 Media in a statement Tuesday evening: “Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
As the SF Chronicle noted, the city has recently ramped up parking citations in an effort to make up for a $322 million deficit.
Walz previously made Bop Spotter, a project where he hid a solar-powered Android phone in a box on a pole in San Francisco, set it to record audio, and had it send songs to Shazam’s API to identify what people are listening to in public. He called it “Shot Spotter for music,” referring to the gunshot detection technology.
An emulator called Effort.jl can drastically reduce computational time without sacrificing accuracy, which could help solve longstanding mysteries about the cosmos.#TheAbstract
A Vast ‘Cosmic Web’ Connects the Universe—Really. Now, We Can Emulate It.
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You may have noticed that the universe is pretty big—in fact, possibly infinite. These immense scales offer a challenge for scientists who seek to model the “cosmic web,” a network of large-scale structures that link the universe and intersect at nodes where galaxies accumulate into clusters.
That’s why researchers led by Marco Bonici, a cosmologist at the University of Waterloo, have developed an emulator called Effort.jl that can parse cosmic data much faster than traditional models. This approach will accelerate the pace of discoveries about the mysterious cosmic web and help test fundamental theories about the nature of spacetime.
The tool achieves “exceptional computational performance without sacrificing accuracy,” according to the team’s study, which was published last week in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
“An emulator is a mimic, in a sense,” Bonici said in a call with 404 Media. “It basically lets you do the same kind of analysis that you would do on a supercomputer in a few days of time, in a bunch of hours on your laptop.”
Emulators can imitate the predictions of more complex models by training on their outputs, he added, without getting bogged down in the underlying physics and repetitive calculations.
“Of course, there is a trade-off in precision,” Bonici said. “This is an approximate method. The goal of my study was to show that for some scenarios, we are able to recover the final result of an analysis, even with the emulator. In this way, we can show that the error that we are introducing is negligible.”
The new emulator is designed to probe the Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure (EFTofLSS), a well-corroborated theoretical model of the universe. Bonici first started developing Effort.jl—an abbreviation of “effective field theory surrogate”—during his work on the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope, which launched in 2023.
Euclid, along with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, are producing a flood of exciting new observations about the cosmic web, dark matter, and dark energy that may overturn longstanding assumptions about the universe. Ejjort.jl aims to help interpret these findings more quickly.
Dark matter is an unidentified substance that accounts for most matter in the universe and forms the basis of the cosmic web, while dark energy is the term for whatever the heck is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
The concept of dark energy dates back to Albert Einstein, who proposed that a “cosmological constant” acts as an anti-gravity force to keep the universe in a static state, preventing it from collapsing under its own gravity. Einstein famously called the constant his “greatest blunder” after Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not static, but was rather expanding.
However, the cosmological constant was later repurposed into the standard model of cosmology, also called the Lambda-cold dark matter model (ΛCDM), where Lambda stands for the constant. This constant describes the accelerating expansion of the universe and is now closely associated with dark energy.
This complicated tale now has another exciting twist: DESI’s observations strongly suggest that this constant is not all that constant across the universe’s history. In other words, the effect of dark energy on the universe may change over time, a finding that could upend our basic assumptions about this strange cosmos we inhabit (this seems to happen a lot).
“With DESI’s first data release, we had the first hint that was pointing towards this deviation from the cosmological constant,” Bonici said. “With the second release, that hint was still there.”
“If we have an independent confirmation that this is actually correct, then this will be the first evidence for a behavior beyond the standard model of cosmology,” he continued. “It would be a huge revolution.”
The standard model is still highly accurate in describing cosmic phenomena, but scientists have long wondered about weak spots in its armor, including the unexplained nature of dark matter and dark energy. As Euclid and DESI gather real observations of the cosmic web, these underlying mysteries of our universe will come into sharper focus.
Bonici and his colleagues hope Effort.jl can speed up the process of evaluating the enormous reams of incoming data, acting as a complement to more resource-intensive models that require supercomputers and other expensive and time-consuming approaches.
Though Bonici’s work on the emulator requires a painstaking focus on lines of code, he does occasionally get an opportunity to step back and consider the broad implications of his field. To that end, he recalled that one of his colleagues opened his PhD thesis with the wry observation: “Cosmology is that humble branch of physics which wants to explain the universe as a whole.”
“We are describing literally everything in the universe,” Bonici said. “Most of the time, I just focus on the small details, but when I look at the big picture, to me, it is always exciting to think about, and mind blowing.”
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We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple of stories about AI ‘workslop’ and the engineers who fix peoples’ vibe coding. In the subscribers-only section, we start with a malicious game on Steam stealing cryptocurrency from a cancer patient, then we talk about Silk Song. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA2… Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player. youtube.com/embed/NWuDzmKE8kg?…
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 …
AI slop is taking over workplaces. Workers said that they thought of their colleagues who filed low-quality AI work as "less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output."#AISlop #AI
The drone flight log data, which stretches from March 2024 to March 2025, shows CBP flying its drones to support ICE and other agencies. CBP maintains multiple Predator drones and flew them over the recent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.#FOIA
404 Media has filed a lawsuit against ICE for access to its contract with Paragon, a company that sells powerful spyware for breaking into phones and accessing encrypted messaging apps.#Announcements
We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract
On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply concerned about what the agency, which continues to push the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, may use the technology for. The contract and related documents 404 Media is suing for may provide more information on what ICE intends to do with the spyware.
“404 Media has asked ICE to disclose agency records relating to its contract with a company known for its powerful spyware tool whose potential use in the agency’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign has prompted lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, and immigration groups to express deep concerns over potential civil rights abuses,” the lawsuit says.
404 Media first filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with ICE for documents related to its Paragon purchase in September 2024. Under the law, agencies are required to provide a response within 20 days, or provide an explanation of why they need more time. ICE acknowledged receipt of the request in September 2024, but has not since replied to any follow up inquiries. 404 Media then filed the lawsuit.
💡 Do you know anything else about Paragon, this contract, or any others? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
The contract itself is for “a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training,” according to a description included in a public U.S. procurement database. The funding office for the purchase is listed as a division of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). It is not clear if the ICE deal is for a custom-made tool or for some version of Paragon’s flagship “Graphite” software.
Graphite is capable of letting police remotely break into messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Gmail according to a 2021 report from Forbes. While other government spyware tries to take over an entire device allowing all sorts of other capabilities, Paragon sets itself apart by promising to access just the messaging applications, according to Forbes.
Still, that is an exceptionally powerful capability which can skirt the protections offered by end-to-end encrypted apps, and one that is likely very attractive to law enforcement or some intelligence agencies. In March researchers from Citizen Lab, an academic group that investigates the government spyware industry, said they identified suspected Paragon deployments in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. Separately the New York Times reported that the DEA has used Graphite.
Citizen Labs’ researchers said they shared their analysis with Meta, which in turn discovered an active Paragon zero-click exploit for WhatsApp. It involved the attacker adding a target to a WhatApp group and sending them a PDF which automatically infected the device. This meant Paragon’s software could hack into a target phone through its WhatsApp client without any target interaction. Later WhatsApp notified more than 90 people it believed had been targeted with Paragon’s exploit. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Some of those targets were in Italy, including prominent Italian and other European journalists, and activists who rescue refugees at sea. Those revelations have since ballooned into a full-scale political crisis, with parliamentary inquiries and The Guardian reporting that Paragon cancelled its contract with Italy.
Paragon has positioned itself as a more ethical player in the scandal and abuse-ridden government spyware industry. Tools from other vendors stretching back years, from Hacking Team, to FinFisher, to NSO Group, have all been used at some point to spy on journalists or activists. Like the notorious NSO Group, which also tried to enter the U.S. market, Paragon is based in Israel.
After ICE reactivated its Paragon contract, Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement to Bloomberg “ICE is already shredding due process and ruining lives in its rush to lock up kids, cooks and firefighters who pose no threat to anyone.”
“I’m extremely concerned about how ICE will use Paragon’s spyware to further trample on the rights of Americans and anyone who Donald Trump labels as an enemy,” he added.
The best way to support 404 Media and fund our ability to sue the Trump administration to release public records is to become a paying subscriber. If you'd like to make a larger, tax deductible donation, please contact us at donate@404media.co.
More than 100 artifacts on Turkey’s Aegean coast hints that humans and Neanderthals may have crossed a vanished bridge now submerged beneath the sea.#TheAbstract
A Breakthrough Prehistoric Discovery May Rewrite Early Human History
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that walked the walk, squeezed with ease, and became immortalized in amber.
First, ancient artifacts in Turkey might rewrite the history of early human migrations into Europe. Then: a Cretaceous insectarium, badminton in space, a breakthrough in quantum sensing, and block parties for chimps.
Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is available for preorder and will be out on September 30! It’s a one-stop primer for the diverse meanings of aliens to people, touching on their precursors in myths, their massive footprint in pop culture, our fascination with UFOs, and the real scientific effort to find extraterrestrial life, which is now entering its most exciting phase. If you like the Abstract, I think you’ll enjoy my book, too! To follow updates about First Contact (or my work in general), I also just launched the BeX Files, a personal newsletter to accompany the book.
Early humans may have walked to Europe on a now-submerged land bridge that stretched across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to mainland Greece hundreds of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene period, the Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago.
The discovery of 138 artifacts at ten sites around Ayvalık in western Turkey provides “the first systematic dataset from a region previously unexplored in the context of Pleistocene archaeology,” according to a new study.
While humans and Neanderthals are known to have entered Europe via the Levant and Balkan regions, the excavation of tools at Ayvalık hints at an entirely new route into the continent for these early explorers of the Paleolithic (the anthropological equivalent to the geological Pleistocene age). During this time, vast glacial ice sheets in the region caused sea levels to drop roughly 330 feet lower than they are today, potentially allowing periodic passage to early humans searching for new horizons.
“These findings reveal a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence and establish Ayvalık as a promising locus for future research on early human dispersals in the northeastern Aegean,” said researchers led by Hande Bulut of Düzce University in Turkey.
The team discovered many flaked stone tools, used as cutting instruments, including objects from the Levallois tradition that dates back 450,000 years and is associated with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For context, Neanderthals were present in Europe many hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens, which arrived within the last 100,000 years, so both groups may have used this land bridge.
It’s difficult to pin down a rough age for these tools because of Ayvalık’s coastal geology, which has basically erased their stratigraphic context. In other words, the region is so dynamic that the tools can’t be linked to a clear geological layer, which is one of the main ways archaeologists establish age estimates.
“While the absence of absolute dates and stratified contexts poses interpretive limitations, the data contribute significantly to our understanding of Paleolithic occupation in western Anatolia and its role in broader Aegean dynamics” and “underscore the region’s potential to contribute to broader debates on Aegean connectivity and technological evolution during the Pleistocene,” the team said.
It’s tantalizing to imagine the journeys of these ancient humans whose ghostly footprints may now lie beneath the Aegean waves.
Paleontologists have discovered beetles, flies, pollen, and spider webs that date back 112 million years and are eerily preserved in amber fossils from Ecuador. Though amber fossils have been found all around the world, these specimens are the first to come from South America, opening a rare window into the insects and plants that lived in the ecosystems of the supercontinent Gondwana. A fly in the Cretaceous ointment. Image: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer “This discovery and the associated plant remains in the amber-bearing rocks, enhance our understanding of the Gondwanan arthropod fauna and flora inhabiting forests along its western margin during a time interval of major ecosystem transformation,” said researchers led by Xavier Delclòs of the University of Barcelona.
With their extraordinary detail, amber fossils are like sepia-filtered snapshots of the deep past (and they make great cane ornaments for delusional tycoons too—a thriving market these days!).
If humans aspire to live on the Moon or travel to Mars, they’re going to have to avoid being bored out of their gourd for long periods of time. A possible solution: badminton. The sport had positive mental and physical health benefits for participants who spent months in a simulated lunar base in Hawaii, according to a new study.
“These findings underline that badminton, although underexplored in space psychology literature, holds promise as a feasible and beneficial activity for astronauts,” said authors Aagam Jain and Pushpdant Jain of VIT Bhopal University in India.
The authors noted that existing studies on “shuttlecock dynamics” in normal gravity “may inform adaptations for reduced gravity settings.” Badminton in lunar gravity? Can’t wait! The winner is the first to smash the birdie into orbit.
Scientists have demonstrated “quantum squeezing” for the first time with a nanoparticle, a breakthrough that paves the way to “exploring quantum mechanics at a macroscopic scale,” according to a new study.
Quantum squeezing sounds like a cuddle party for atoms, but it is actually a way for scientists to navigate the pesky quantum world, where simply observing phenomena can influence results. Quantum “squeezers” get around uncertainties by enhancing precision measurements of one property, such as a particle’s position, in exchange for losing precision of another, like its velocity.
Though quantum squeezing has been achieved in the laboratory many times, a team has now applied it to a nanoscale glass particle, which is a big object for the quantum world. The glass was trapped in laser light and chilled down to near its lowest-energy state, allowing for precision measurements through squeezing while it levitated. “My sugarboo, I'm levitatin’” (nanoparticle getting quantum squeezed). Image: Kamba et al 2025 “Manipulating the motion of macroscopic objects near their quantum mechanical uncertainties has been desired in diverse fields, including fundamental physics, sensing, and transducers,” said researchers led by Mitsuyoshi Kamba of the University of Tokyo. “Our work shows that a levitated nanoparticle offers an ideal platform.”
Wild chimpanzees may be consuming up to two standard alcoholic beverages a day, a finding that suggests an attraction to alcohol in primates has deep evolutionary roots. While it’s well-established that chimps devour these fruity librations—see our past story on chimp sangria—scientists have now measured the ethanol (alcohol) content of these fruits for the first time during field observations of wild chimps in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire. How many fermented figs can you fit in your mouth at once? Chimpanzees observed in Côte d'Ivoire. Image: Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley “Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day” which is a full ten pounds and corresponds to “the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks,” said researchers led by Alexey Maro of the University of California, Berkeley. The results support the “drunken monkey” hypothesis that suggests hominid ancestors of chimps and humans adapted to drinking alcohol tens of millions of years ago.
In addition to confirming this shared compulsion to imbibe, the researchers also observed some interesting behaviors at these boozy chimp gatherings. Fermented figs “attract large groups of chimpanzees,” they note “which in turn results in increased social interactions for both sexes and in social activities such as territorial boundary patrols and hunts.”
Dale Britt Bendler “earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court record.#News
A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those CIA systems as “his own personal Google,” according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media and Court Watch.
💡 Do you know anything else about this case? 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.
Dale Britt Bendler, 68, was a long running CIA officer before retiring in 2014 with a full pension. He rejoined the agency as a contractor and sold a wealth of classified information, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday. His clients included a U.S. lobbying firm working for a foreigner being investigated for embezzlement and another foreign national trying to secure a U.S. visa, according to the court record.
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Dale Britt Bendler “earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court re…
Union Warns Professors About Posting In the ‘Current Climate’
A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling and legal services.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published the two page document on September 17, days after the September 10 killing of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. The list of college professors and academics who've been censured or even fired for joking about, criticizing, or quoting Kirk after his death is long. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Clemson University in South Carolina fired multiple members of its faculty after investigating their Kirk-related social media posts. On Monday the state’s Attorney General sent the college a letter telling it that the first amendment did not protect the fired employees and that the state would not defend them. Two universities in Tennessee fired multiple members of the staff after getting complaints about their social media posts. The University of Mississippi let a member of the staff go because they re-shared a comment about Kirk that people found “insensitive.” Florida Atlantic University placed an art history professor on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. Florida's education commissioner later wrote a letter to school superintendents warning them there would be consequences for talking about Kirk in the wrong way. “Govern yourselves accordingly,” the letter said.
AAUP’s advice is meant to help academic workers avoid ending up as a news story. “In a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the consequences of our online speech and choices, we hope you will find these strategies and resources helpful,” it said.
Here are its five explicit tips: “1. Set your personal social media accounts to private mode. When prompted, approve the setting to make all previous posts private. 2. Be mindful that anything you post online can be screenshotted and shared. 3. Before posting or reposting online commentary, pause and ask yourself: a. Am I comfortable with this view potentially being shared with my employer, my students, or the public? Have I (or the person I am reposting) expressed this view in terms I would be comfortable sharing with my employer, my students, or the public?”
The advice continues: “4. In your social media bios, state that the views expressed through the account represent your own opinions and not your employer. You do not need to name your employer. Consider posting positive statements about positions you support rather than negative statements about positions you disagree with. Some examples could be: ‘Academic freedom is nonnegotiable,’ ‘The faculty united will never be divided,’ ‘Higher ed research saves lives,’ ‘Higher ed transforms lives,’ ‘Politicians are interfering with your child’s education.’”
The AAUPthen provides five digital safety tips that include setting up strong passwords, installing software updates as soon as they’re available, using two-factor authentication, and never using employer email addresses outside of work.
The last tip is the most revealing of how academics might be harassed online through campaigns like Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” “Search for your name in common search engines to find out what is available about you online,” AAUP advises. “Put your name in quotation marks to narrow the search. Search both with and without your institution attached to your name.”
After that, the AAUP provided a list of trauma, counseling, and insurance services that its members have access to and a list of links to other pieces of information about protecting themselves.
“It’s good basic advice given that only a small number of faculty have spent years online in my experience, it’s a good place to start,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College told 404 Media. Kaurin resigned her position at the college earlier this year after realizing that the college would not defend academic freedom during Trump’s second term.
“I think this reflects the heightened level of scrutiny and targeting that higher ed is under,” Kaurin said. “While it’s not entirely new, the scale is certainly aided by many platforms and actors that are engaging on [social media] now when in the past faculty might have gotten threatening phone calls, emails and hard copy letters.”
The AAUP guidance was co-written by Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and the director of the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom. Kamola told 404 Media that the recommendations came for years of experience working with faculty who’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment campaigns. “That’s incredibly destabilizing,” he said. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like until it happens to you.”
Kamola said that academic freedom was already under threat before Kirk’s death. “It’s a multi-decade strategy of making sure that certain people, certain bodies, certain dies, are not in higher education, so that certain other ones can be, so that you can reproduce the ideas that a political apparatus would prefer existed in a university,” he said.
It’s telling that the AAUP felt the need to publish this, but the advice is practical and actionable, even for people outside of academia. Freedom of expression is under attack in America and though academics and other public figures are perhaps under the most threat, they aren’t the only ones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is actively monitoring the social media activity of military personnel as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense.
“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Sean Parnell, public affairs officer at the Pentagon, wrote on X, using the new nickname for the Department of Defense. In the private sector, Sony fired one of its video game developers after they made a joke on X about Kirk’s death and multiple journalists have been fired for Kirk related comments.
AAUP did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show
A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.
The show—called Политукладчик or “PolitStacker,” according to a Google translation—airs every Friday on Zvezda, a television station owned by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. It’s hosted by “Natasha,” an AI avatar modeled on Russian journalist Nataliya Metlina. In a clip of the show, “Natasha” said that its resemblance to Metlina is intentional.
“I am the creation of artificial intelligence, entirely tuned to your informational preferences,” it said. “My task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candies in a little box.” The shows’ title sequence and advertisements show gold wrapped candies bearing the faces of politicians like Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky being sorted into a candy box.
“‘PolitStacker’ is the world’s first television program created by artificial intelligence,” said an ad for the show on the Russian social media network VK, according to Google translate. “The AI itself selects, analyzes, and comments on the most important news, events, facts, and actions—as it sees them. The editorial team’s opinion may not coincide with the AI’s (though usually…it does.) “‘PolitStacker’” is not just news, but a tough breakdown of political madness from a digital host who notices what others overlook.”
Data scientist Kalev Leetaru discovered the AI-generated Russian show as part of his work with the GDELT Project, which collaborates with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, a project that scans and stores television broadcasts from around the world. “If you just look at the show and you didn’t know it had AI associated with it, you would never guess that. It looks like a traditional propaganda show on Russian television," Leetaru told 404 Media. “If they are using AI to the degree that they say they are, even if it’s just to pick topics, they mastered that formula in a way that others have not.”
PolitStacker’s 40 minute runtime is full of silly political commentary, jokes, and sloppy AI deepfakes that look like they were pulled from a five-year-old Instagram reel. In one episode, Macron, with curlers in his hair, adjusts Zelensky’s tie ahead of a meeting at the Kremlin. Later, a smiling Macron bearing six pack abs stands in a closet in front of a clown costume and a leather jumpsuit. “Parts of it have an uncanny valley to it, parts of it are really really good. This is only their fourth episode and they’re already doing deep fake interviews with world leaders,” Leetaru said. Image via the Internet Archive. In one of the AI-generated Trump interviews, the American president talked about how he’d end the war in Ukraine by building a casino in Moscow with golden toilets. “And all the Russian oligarchs, they would all be inside. All their money would be inside. Problem solved. They would just play poker and forget about this whole war. A very bad deal for them, very distracting,” the deepfake Trump said.
Deepfake world leaders aren’t new and are pretty common across the internet. For Leetaru, the difference is that this is airing on a state-backed television station. “It’s still in parody form, but to my knowledge, no national television network show has even gone this far,” he told 404 Media. “Today it’s a parody video that’s pretty clearly a comedic interview. But, you know, how far will they take that? And does that inspire others to maybe step into spaces that they wouldn’t have before?”
Trump also loves AI and the AI aesthetic. Government social media accounts often post AI-generated slop pictures of Trump as the Pope or a Jedi. ICE and the DHS share pictures on official channels that paint over the horrifying reality of the administration's immigration policy with a sheen of AI slop. Trump shared an AI-generated video that imagined what Gaza would look like if he built a resort there. And he’s teamed with Perplexity to launch an AI powered search engine to Truth Social.
“PolitStacker” is a parody show, but Russian media is experimenting with less comedic AI avatars as well. Earlier this year, the state-owned news agency Sputnik began to air what it called the “Dugin Digital Edition.” In these little lectures, an AI version of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin discusses the news of the day in English.
Last year, a Hawaiian newspaper, The Garden Island, teamed with an Israeli company to produce a news show on YouTube staffed by AI anchors. Reactions to the program were overwhelmingly negative, it brought in fewer than 1,000 viewers per episode, and The Garden Island stopped making the show a few months after it began.
In a twist of fate, Leetaru only discovered Moscow’s AI-generated show thanks to an AI system of his own. The GDELT project is a massive undertaking that records thousands of hours of data from across the world and it uses various AI systems to generate transcripts, translate them, and create an index of what’s been archived. “In this case I totally skimmed over what I thought was an ad for a propaganda show and then some candy commercial. Instead it ended up being something that’s fascinating,” he said.
But his AI indexing tool noted Zvezda's new show as an AI-generated program that sought to “analyze political follies of the outgoing week.” He took a second look and was glad he did. “That’s the power of machines being able to catch things and guide your eye towards that.”
What he saw disturbed him. “Yes, it’s one show on an obscure Russian government adjacent network using deep fakes for parody,” he said. “But the fact that a television network finally made that leap, to me, is a pivotal moment that I see as the tip of the iceberg.”
A massive hack of a popular dashcam company; the sentencing of someone Sam has covered for years; and the mass firings around Charlie Kirk's assassination.
A massive hack of a popular dashcam company; the sentencing of someone Sam has covered for years; and the mass firings around Charlie Kirkx27;s assassination.#Podcast
We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the Charlie Kirk assassination and our reporting around that. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA3… Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player. youtube.com/embed/-51f4patIkw?…
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 …
Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Trump administration’s promise to go after the “radical left” a study showing most domestic terrosim is far-right was disappeared.#News
The "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" proposes a total ban on porn in the state, and also targets the existence of trans people online, content like erotic ASMR, and selling VPNs in the state.#porn #ageverification #laws #lawsuits
ChatGPT Will Guess Your Age and Might Require ID for Age Verification
OpenAI has announced it is introducing new safety measures for ChatGPT after the a wave of stories and lawsuits accusing ChatGPT and other chatbots of playing a role in a number of teen suicide cases. ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user’s age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old.
“We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” the company said in its announcement.
“I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.
In August, OpenAI was sued by the parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April. The lawsuit alleges that alleges that the ChatGPT helped him write the first draft of his suicide note, suggested improvements on his methods, ignored early attempts and self-harm, and urged him not to talk to adults about what he was going through.
“Where a trusted human may have responded with concern and encouraged him to get professional help, ChatGPT pulled Adam deeper into a dark and hopeless place by assuring him that ‘many people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an ‘escape hatch’ because it can feel like a way to regain control.’”
In August the Wall Street Journal also reported a story about a 56-year-old man who committed a murder-suicide after ChatGPT indulgedhis paranoia. Today, the Washington Postreported another story about another lawsuit alleging that a Character AI chatbot contributed to a 13-year-old girl’s death by suicide.
OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures.
In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user’s age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot.
“For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting,” the announcement said. “And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.”
OpenAI’s post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called “uncensored” models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions.
“We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety,” Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to “‘Treat our adult users like adults’ is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else’s freedom.
OpenAI is not the first company that’s attempting to use machine learning to predict the age of its users. In July, YouTube announced it will use a similar method to “protect” teens from certain types of content on its platform.
$2,000 Shipping: International Sellers Charge Absurd Prices to Avoid Dealing With American Tariffs
Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs.
A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The shipping price from Japan to the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Costa Rica, Canada, and other countries I checked is $29, meanwhile. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. That price used to be the threshold for the de minimis tariff exemption, a rule that previously allowed people to buy things without paying tariffs on lower-priced goods. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by.
eBay does allow sellers to opt out of selling to the United States entirely, but some sellers have found it easier to modify existing listings to have absurd shipping prices for the United States only rather than deal with taking entire listings down and delisting them to restrict American buyers entirely. I found numerous listings from a handful of different sellers who, rather than say they won't ship to the United States, have simply jacked up their shipping costs to absurd levels for the United States only. There are $575 cameras that the seller is now charging $500 to ship to the United States but will mail for free anywhere else in the world. Another Japanese seller is charging $640 to mail to the United States but will ship for free to other countries. A seller in Kazakhstan is charging $35 to mail a camera internationally but $999 to send to the United States. A German yarn seller is charging $10.50 to ship to Canada, but $500 to ship to the United States. On Reddit, users are reporting the same phenomenon occurring with some sellers on Etsy as well (it is harder to search Etsy by shipping prices, so I couldn’t find too many examples of this).
What is happening here, of course, is that some sellers in other countries don't want to have to deal with Trump's tariffs and the complicated logistics they have created for both buyers and sellers. Many international shipping companies have entirely stopped shipping to the United States, and many international sellers don't want to have to deal with the hassle of changing whatever shipping service they normally use to accommodate American buyers. eBay has also warned sellers that they may get negative feedback from American buyers who do not understand how tariffs work. eBay's feedback system is very important, and just a few negative reviews can impact a seller's standing on the platform and make it less likely that buyers will purchase something from them.
None of this is terribly surprising, but as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.
Lens ABQA11389. Lens condition. Mark in the lens. 93-94% Mint Minimal sings of use, Still very clean. 97-98% Mint++ Never used, but pre-owned. 95-96% Mint+ Almost no signs of use. 80-85% For Parts As-is.
AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook
A software engineer in Austin has hooked up Animal Crossing to an AI and breathed new and disturbing life into its villagers. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on Animal Crossing scripts and an RSS reader, the anthropomorphic folk of the Nintendo classic spouted new dialogue, talked about current events, and actively plotted against Tom Nook’s predatory bell prices.
The Animal Crossing LLM is the work of Josh Fonseca, a software engineer in Austin, Texas who works at a small startup. Ars Technica first reported on the mod. His personal blog is full of small software projects like a task manager for the text editor VIM, a mobile app that helps rock climbers find partners, and the Animal Crossing AI. He also documented the project in a YouTube video. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Fonseca started playing around with AI in college and told 404 Media that he’d always wanted to work in the video game industry. “Turns out it’s a pretty hard industry to break into,” he said. He also graduated in 2020. “I’m sure you’ve heard, something big happened that year.” He took the first job he could find, but kept playing around with video games and AI and had previously injected an LLM into Stardew Valley.
Fonseca used a Dolphin emulatorrunning the original Gamecube Animal Crossing on a MacBook to get the project working. According to his blog, an early challenge was just getting the AI and the game to communicate. “The solution came from a classic technique in game modding: Inter-Process Communication (IPC) via shared memory. The idea is to allocate a specific chunk of the GameCube's RAM to act as a ‘mailbox.’ My external Python script can write data directly into that memory address, and the game can read from it,” he said in the blog.
He told 404 Media that this was the most tedious part of the whole project. “The process of finding the memory address the dialogue actually lives at and getting it to scan to my MacBook, which has all these security features that really don’t want me to do that, and ending up writing to the memory took me forever,” he said. “The communication between the game and an external source was the biggest challenge for me.”
Once he got his code and the game talking, he ran into another problem. “Animal Crossing doesn't speak plain text. It speaks its own encoded language filled with control codes,” he said in his blog. “Think of it like HTML. Your browser doesn't just display words; it interprets tags like <b> to make text bold. Animal Crossing does the same. A special prefix byte, CHAR_CONTROL_CODE, tells the game engine, ‘The next byte isn't a character, it's a command!’”
But this was a solved problem. The Animal Crossing modding community long ago learned the secrets of the villager’s language, and Fonseca was able to build on their work. Once he understood the game’s dialogue systems, he built the AI brain. It took two LLM models, one to write the dialogue and another he called “The Director” that would add in pauses, emphasize words with color, and choose the facial animations for the characters. He used a fine-tuned version of Google’s Gemini for this and said it was the most consistent model he’d used.
To make it work, he fine-tuned the model, meaning he reduced its input training data to make it better at specific outputs. “You probably need a minimum of 50 to 100 really good examples in order to make it better,” he said.
Results for the experiment were mixed. Cookie, Scoot, and Cheri did indeed utter new phrases in keeping with their personality. Things got weird when Fonseca hooked up the game to an RSS reader so the villagers could talk about real world news. “If you watch the video, all the sources are heavily, politically, leaning in one direction,” he said. “I did use a Fox news feed, not for any other reason than I looked up ‘news RSS feeds’ and they were the first link and I didn’t really think it through. And then I started getting those results…I thought they would just present the news, not have leanings or opinions.”
“Trump’s gonna fight like heck to get rid of mail-in voting and machines!” Fitness obsessed duck Scoot said in the video. “I bet he’s got some serious stamina, like, all the way in to the finish line—zip, zoom!”
The pink dog Cookie was up on her Middle East news. “Oh my gosh, Josh 😀! Did you see the news?! Gal Gadot is in Israel supporting the families! Arfer,” she said, uttering her trademark catchphrase after sharing the latest about Israel.
In the final part of the experiment, Fonseca enabled the villagers to gossip. “I gave them a tiny shared memory for gossip, who said what, to whom, and how they felt,” he said in the blog.The villagers almost instantly turned on Tom Nook, the Tanuki who runs the local stores and holds most of Animal Crossing's inhabitants in debt. “Everything’s going great in town, but sometimes I feel like Tom Nook is, like, taking all the bells!” Cookie said.
“Those of us with big dreams are being squashed by Tom Nook! We gotta take our town back!” Cheri the bear cub said.
“This place is starting to feel more like Nook’s prison, y’know?” Said Scoot. youtube.com/embed/7AyEzA5ziE0?… Why do this to Animal Crossing? Why make Scoot and Cheri learn about Gal Gadot, Israel, and Trump?
“I’ve always liked nostalgic content,” Fonscesca said. His TikTok and YouTube algorithm is filled with liminal spaces and music from his childhood that’s detuned. He’s gotten into Hauntology, a philosophical idea that studies—among other things—promised futures that did not come to pass.
He sees projects like this as a way of linking the past and the future. “When I was a child I was like, ‘Games are gonna get better and better every year,’’ he said. “But after 20 years of playing games I’ve become a little jaded and I’m like, ‘oh there hasn’t really been that much innovation.’ So I really like the idea of mixing those old games with all the future technologies that I’m interested in. And I feel like I’m fulfilling those promised futures in a way.”
He knows that not everyone is a fan of AI. “A lot of people say that dialogue with AI just cannot be because of how much it sounds like AI,” he said. “And to some extent I think people are right. Most people can detect ChatGPT or Gemini language from a mile away. But I really think, if you fine tune it, I was surprised at just how good the results were.”
Animal Crossing’s dialogue is simple and that simplicity makes it a decent test case for AI video game marks, but Fonseca thinks he can do similar things with more complicated games. “There’s been a lot of discussion around how what I’m doing isn’t possible when there’s like, tasks or quests, because LLMs can’t properly guide you to that task without hallucinating. I think it might be more possible than people think,” he said. “So I would like to either try out my own very small game or take a game that has these kinds of quests and put together a demo of how that might be possible.”
He knows people balk at using AI to make video games, and art in general, but believes it’ll be a net benefit. “There will always be human writers and I absolutely want there to be human writers handling the core,” he said. “I would hope that AI is going to be a tool that doesn’t take away any of the best writers, but maybe helps them add more to their game that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I would hope that this just helps create more art in the world. I think I see the total art in the world increasing as a good thing…now I know some people would say that using AI ceases to make it art, but I’m also very deep in the programming aspect of it. What it takes to make these things is so incredible that it still feels like magic to me. Maybe on some level I’m still hypnotized by that.”
New documents obtained by 404 Media show how a data broker owned by American Airlines, United, Delta, and many other airlines is selling masses of passenger data to the U.S. government.#FOIA
Airlines Sell 5 Billion Plane Ticket Records to the Government For Warrantless Searching
📄 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.
A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including American Airlines, United, and Delta, is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples’ movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, and many other agencies, according to a new contract and other records reviewed by 404 Media.
The contract provides new insight into the scale of the sale of passengers’ data by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), the airlines-owned data broker. The contract shows ARC’s data includes information related to more than 270 carriers and is sourced through more than 12,800 travel agencies. ARC has previously told the government to not reveal to the public where this passenger data came from, which includes peoples’ names, full flight itineraries, and financial details.
“Americans' privacy rights shouldn't depend on whether they bought their tickets directly from the airline or via a travel agency. ARC's sale of data to U.S. government agencies is yet another example of why Congress needs to close the data broker loophole by passing my bipartisan bill, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
💡 Do you know anything else about ARC or the sale of this data? 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.
ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, publicly released documents show. Its board of directors includes representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Air France and Lufthansa, and Canada’s Air Canada. ARC acts as a bridge between airlines and travel agencies, in which it helps with fraud prevention and finds trends in travel data. ARC also sells passenger data to the government as part of what it calls the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP).
TIP is updated every day with the previous day’s ticket sales and can show a person’s paid intent to travel. Government agencies can then search this data by name, credit card, airline, and more.
The new contract shows that ARC has access to much more data than previously reported. Earlier coverage found TIP contained more than one billion records spanning more than 3 years of past and future travel. The new contract says ARC provides the government with “5 billion ticketing records for searching capabilities.”
Screenshots of the documents obtained by 404 Media.
404 Media obtained the contract through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the Secret Service. The contract indicates the Secret Service plans to pay ARC $885,000 for access to the data stretching into 2028. A spokesperson for the agency told 404 Media “The U.S. Secret Service is committed to protecting our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure in close coordination with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. To safeguard the integrity of our work, we do not discuss the tools used to conduct our operations.” The Secret Service did not answer a question on whether it seeks a warrant, subpoena, or court order to search ARC data.
404 Media has filed FOIA requests with a wide range of agencies that public procurement records show have purchased ARC data. That includes ICE, CBP, ATF, the SEC, TSA, the State Department, U.S. Marshals, and the IRS. A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows the FBI has asked ARC to search its databases for a specific person as part of a drug investigation. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The ATF told 404 Media in a statement “ATF uses ARC data for criminal and investigative purposes related to firearms trafficking and other investigations within ATF’s purview. ATF follows DOJ policy and appropriate legal processes to obtain and search the data. Access to the system is limited to a very small group within ATF, and all subjects searched within ARC must be part of an active, official ATF case/investigation.”
An ARC spokesperson told 404 Media in an email that TIP “was established by ARC after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has since been used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community to support national security and prevent criminal activity with bipartisan support. Over the years, TIP has likely contributed to the prevention and apprehension of criminals involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, sex trafficking, national security threats, terrorism and other imminent threats of harm to the United States.”
The spokesperson added “Pursuant to ARC’s privacy policy, consumers may ask ARC to refrain from selling their personal data.”
After media coverage and scrutiny from Senator Wyden’s office of the little-known data selling, ARC finally registered as a data broker in the state of California in June. Senator Wyden previously said it appeared ARC had been in violation of Californian law for not registering while selling airline customers’ data for years.
It’s a legal requirement for data brokers to register in the state of California. ARC, the airlines-owned data broker that has been selling your flight information to the government for years, only just registered after being contacted by the office …
How Trump's tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPT's reckoning.
How Trumpx27;s tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPTx27;s reckoning.#Podcast
This week, we talk about how 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the 'AI Darwin Awards,' which is, uhh, celebrating the dumbest uses of AI. playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA1… Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player. youtube.com/embed/jCak5De0oaw?…
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 …
Strange “leopard spots” on Mars are the most promising signs of alien life on the planet yet, but they could also have a geological origin.#TheAbstract
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that broke ice, broke hearts, and broke out the libations. Also, if you haven’t seen it already, we just covered an amazing breakthrough in our understanding of the cosmos, which is as much a story about humanity’s endless capacity for ingenuity as it is about the wondrous nature of black holes.
Scientists have discovered Arctic algae moving around with ease in icy environments of -15°C (5°F)—the lowest temperatures ever recorded for motility in a eukaryotic lifeform. While some simple microbes can survive lower temperatures, this is the first time that scientists have seen eukaryotic life—organisms with more complex cells containing a nucleus—able to live, thrive, and locomote in such chilly environments.
It’s amazing that these so-called “ice diatoms” can move around at all, but it’s even cooler that they do it in style with a gliding mechanism that researchers describe as a “‘skating’ ability.” Their secret weapon? Mucus threads (“mucilage”) that they use like anchors to pull themselves through frozen substrates.
“The unique ability of ice diatoms to glide on ice” enables them “to thrive in conditions that immobilize other marine diatoms,” said researchers led by Qing Zhang of Stanford University. An Arctic diatom, showing the actin filaments that run down its middle and enable its skating motion. Image: Prakash Lab Zhang and her colleagues made this discovery by collecting ice cores from 12 locations around the Arctic Chukchi Sea during a 2023 expedition on the research vessel Sikuliaq, which is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this is a research area that could be destroyed by the Trump administration, with NSF facing 70 percent cuts to its polar research budget.
If lifeforms are doing triple axels in Arctic ice on Earth, it’s natural to wonder whether alien organisms may have emerged elsewhere. To that end, scientists announced the discovery of a tantalizing hint of possible life on Mars this week. youtube.com/embed/ieJKWW8sp2A?… NASA’s Perseverance rover turned up organic carbon-bearing mudstones that preserve past redox reactions, which involves the transfer of electrons between substances resulting in one being “reduced” (gaining electrons) and one being “oxidized” (losing electrons). The remnants of those reactions look like “leopard spots” in the Bright Angel formation of Jezero Crater, where the rover landed in 2021, according to the study. The “leopard spots” at Bright Angel. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS This is not slam-dunk evidence of life, as the reactions can be geological in origin, but they “warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures.”
“This assessment is further supported by the geological context of the Bright Angel formation, which indicates that it is sedimentary in origin and deposited from water under habitable conditions,” said researchers led by Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University.
The team added that the best way to confirm the origin of the ambiguous structures is to bring Perseverance’s samples back to Earth for further study as part of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Unfortunately, the Trump administration wants to cancel MSR. It seems that even when we have nice things, we still can’t have nice things, a paradox that we all must navigate together.
About 150 million years ago, a pair of tiny pterodactyls—just days or weeks old—were trying to fly through a cataclysmic storm. But the wind was strong enough to break the bones of their baby wings, consigning them to a watery grave in the lagoon below.
Now, scientists describe how the very storm that cut their lives short also set them up for a long afterlife as exquisitely preserved fossils, nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II, in Germany's Solnhofen limestone. Fossils of Lucky II. Image: University of Leicester “Storms caused these pterosaurs to drown and rapidly descend to the bottom of the water column, where they were quickly buried in storm-generated sediments, preserving both their skeletal integrity and soft tissues,” said researchers led by Robert Smyth of the University of Leicester.
“This catastrophic taphonomic pathway, triggered by storm events, was likely the principal mechanism by which small- to medium-sized pterodactyloids…entered the Solnhofen assemblage,” they added.
While it’s sad that these poor babies had such short lives, it’s astonishing that such a clear cause of death can be established 150 million years later. Rest in peace, Lucky and Lucky II.
Trump’s aid cuts could cause millions of deaths from tuberculosis alone
The Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), carried out in public fashion by Elon Musk and DOGE, will likely cause millions of excess deaths from tuberculosis (TB) by 2030, reports a sobering new study.
“Termination of US funding could result in an estimated 10.6 million additional TB cases and 2.2 million additional TB deaths during the period 2025–2030,” said researchers led by Sandip Mandal of the Center for Modeling and Analysis at Avenir Health. “The loss of U.S. funding endangers global TB control efforts” and “potentially puts millions of lives at risk.”
Beyond TB, the overall death toll from the loss of USAID is estimated to reach 14 million deaths by 2030. The destruction of USAID must never be memory-holed as it is shaping up to be among the most deadly actions ever enacted by a government outside of war.
In more bad news, it turns out that the bacteria that’s responsible for making a lot of Earth’s oxygen is highly vulnerable to human-driven climate change. Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, is the source of about 20 percent of the oxygen in our biosphere. But rapidly warming seas could set off “a possible 17–51 percent reduction in Prochlorococcus production in tropical oceans,” according to a new study.
“Prochlorococcus division rates appear primarily determined by temperature, increasing exponentially to 28°C, then sharply declining,” said researchers led by François Ribalet of the University of Washington. “Regional surface water temperatures may exceed this range by the end of the century under both moderate and high warming scenarios.”
It’s possible that this vital bacteria will adapt by moving to higher latitudes or by evolving more heat-tolerant variants. But that seems like a big gamble on something as important as Earth’s oxygen budget.
We are far from the first generation to live through unstable times, as evidenced by a new study about the “climatic change and economic upheaval” in Britain during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age about 3,000 years ago.
These disruptions were traumatic, but they also galvanized new modes of community connection—a.k.a epic parties where people ate, drank, made merry, and dumped the remnants of their revelry in trashpiles called “middens.” East Chisenbury midden under excavation. Image: Cardiff University “These vast mounds of cultural debris represent the coming together of vast numbers of people and animals for feasts on a scale unparalleled in British prehistory,” said researchers led by Carmen Esposito of Cardiff University. “This study, the largest multi-isotope faunal dataset yet delivered in archaeology, has demonstrated that, despite their structural similarities, middens had diverse roles.”
"Given the proximity of all middens to rivers, it is likely that waterways played a role in the movement of people, objects and livestock,” the team added. “Overall, the research points to the dynamic networks that were anchored on feasting events during this period and the different, perhaps complementary, roles that different middens had at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.”
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.
JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech.
“We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.”
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An email sent to NBCUniversal employees, including journalists at NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more, eulogizes Charlie Kirk as an "advocate for open debate" and reminds staff that even milquetoast statements about Kirk's death can result in their firing.#CharlieKirk #Journalism
Footage from munitions sites. Image: Vedenin, Andrey et al.
Artist concept of the newly discovered dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali with an ancient crocodile relative’s front leg in its mouth. Image: Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History via AP
Taylor Swift performing during her Eras tour (credit Maura Shapiro) with vocal frequency analysis overlaid (credit: Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn). Image: Maura Shapiro/Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn.
Image via r/twinpeaks.
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
Image via r/slopcorecirclejerk
A fly in the Cretaceous ointment. Image: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer
“My sugarboo, I'm levitatin’” (nanoparticle getting quantum squeezed). Image: Kamba et al 2025
How many fermented figs can you fit in your mouth at once? Chimpanzees observed in Côte d'Ivoire. Image: Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley
Image via the Internet Archive.
An Arctic diatom, showing the actin filaments that run down its middle and enable its skating motion. Image: Prakash Lab
The “leopard spots” at Bright Angel. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Fossils of Lucky II. Image: University of Leicester
East Chisenbury midden under excavation. Image: Cardiff University
