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2026-07-24 18:11:04

Behind the Blog: No Spoilers

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 astrology, Flock on the brain, The Odyssey, and more.

JASON: This week I wrote pretty much exclusively about Flock, and I am working on a few more articles about automated license plate readers that will probably go in the next week or so. I am well aware that there are other topics in the world, but, basically, there is now so much interest in the company and its practices that I am getting inundated with tips, story ideas, and sources, and it feels like I have to chase many of the leads I’m getting. There are only so many hours in the day, so this means some other things I want to cover are either falling by the wayside or will have to wait.

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Behind the Blog: No Spoilers

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2026-07-17 16:07:19

Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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 AI music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization.

EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point to pull the curtain on our story selection process. Usually, we do this when we explain the reasoning behind the decision to write a story we already published, but today I want to talk about a story I didn’t write (yet).

For the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X.

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Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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2026-07-10 17:20:01

Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

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 mobile podcasting, participating in the meme, and vertigo.

JASON: My last few articles have basically been first person behind the blog vibes about things I’m doing (Cannes, influencer LARPing), or things that annoy me (ChatGPT flyers), so I’m trying to think how much more people want to know about my Process or what’s going on in my brain. As mentioned in those posts, I flew to France for Cannes a few weeks ago, and, because I was in Europe already, have been here for a few weeks now (also as discussed in the LARPing post, having our own company has given me the ability to do some pretty cool things, and to work weird hours from faraway places without it ruining everything). I’m headed back home to the US today, writing this from Heathrow on a layover. When I’m at home, I either work on my patio or at my desktop computer battle station that you probably know from my podcast. A few gear and time-zone related observations from my last few weeks:

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Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

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2026-07-03 10:00:02

Behind the Blog: With Blogs Like These, Who Needs a Private Jet

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Supreme Court, the private jet, and AI on the TV.

JOSEPH: I used to cover court cases and judge’s opinions a lot more back at Motherboard. Sometimes it was in cases I broke news in, like that time the FBI secretly ran a dark web child abuse website. Other times it is big decisions that have wider impacts on privacy, surveillance, and government power.

Here’s big news regarding the latter sort of decision. I first saw news of it on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. As it says at the start: “You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.”

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Behind the Blog: With Blogs Like These, Who Needs a Private Jet

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2026-06-26 17:04:16

Behind the Blog: Salesforce Beach

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 talking aloud to computers, Cannes, and “Engineering Creativity: Guac Is Extra."

JASON: This week I was in Cannes, France for the Cannes Lions advertising conference, which is a sentence you probably did not expect to be reading and is definitely not a sentence I expected to be writing. It’s rare that I BTB something before I actually write about it, but in this case I think it’s OK, as this is going to be significantly different from the actual articles I do. There is no sense in being coy about it—Cannes, which at least in the media business stands for both the beach town in the south of France and the advertising conference (but not the film festival), is a ridiculous place and experience filled with excess and extravagant displays of money wasting. Back when we worked at VICE, every year around this time there would be a bunch of whispers around the office about which executives and higher level sales people were going to Cannes and who was not (us journalists definitely were not). Then, during Cannes, there was a barely spoken sentiment that we, the journalists, should try extra hard to not fuck up lest we create some sort of situation that a VICE executive in Cannes would have to deal with from another time zone while drinking rosé on a yacht.

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Behind the Blog: Salesforce Beach

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2026-06-19 16:07:48

Behind the Blog: Landfillcore and Go Knicks

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 questionable analysis, mysterious parcels, and the Knicks (sorta).

SAM: I was in Amsterdam for most of this week and walked by something called a “Mystery Parcel Store.” It was a storefront loaded with mostly Amazon packages of all shapes and sizes, where people could pick out a package to open (and pay for it based on weight) and hope they scored something cool. I didn’t participate on the spot because it seemed like it involved opening the package in front of the lingering street crowd and getting your photo posted to their social media, but now I kind of wish I’d done it anyway. A group doing it while I watched unboxed a bunch of garbagecore plastic trash, which made it less appealing. I think my strategy would be to seek out heavy boxes with lithium battery labels, but that could still mean I got trash or something I wouldn’t want to have to pack home.

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Behind the Blog: Landfillcore and Go Knicks

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2026-06-12 15:01:10

Behind the Blog: World Cup Madness and Film Reviews

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 Trump fucking up the World Cup, some thoughts on ICE coverage, and movies.

JASON: I have been meaning for weeks to write an article with a headline like: Donald Trump and FIFA Have Really Fucked Up the World Cup, but I never really honed in on the exact correct thesis or argument to make, but I’m gonna ramble a bit here in the BTB in hopes it shakes loose something in my head that I can turn into a more coherent article later. It was going to be part of a bigger piece or series of pieces I’ve been meaning to do about live events in general, which make the basic argument that live ticket prices—for sports, concerts, everything—are simply too high, and it’s an entirely artificial problem that is having an actually negative effect on sports, the music industry, and the local communities that venues and stadiums nominally are there to serve.

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Behind the Blog: World Cup Madness and Film Reviews

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2026-06-05 15:51:06

Behind the Blog: Dangerous Memes

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 controversial memes, good times at Meta, and more.

EMANUEL: My recent story about Google employees internally sharing memes about how they hate the company’s AI product took a bit more time than it should because I had to recreate all the memes you see in that article. Rather than screenshot and repost the images Google employees shared with me, I went to imgflip.com/memegenerator and recreated the meme from scratch, making it look as close to the original as possible.

I did this in order to protect my sources at Google. It might be unlikely, but it is possible that resharing the actual memes I was sent could help management identify who was sharing them. How dangerous doing something like that depends on the nature of the images, the company, the position the source is in, how the image was accessed and shared, and many other factors. At the end of the day, I felt that it’s better to take this extra step than not. The “original” images didn’t add that much to the story, and the risk to sources is not zero. Memegen, the internal Google meme generator in question here, has also been a source of controversy at the company before. I’ve heard but can’t confirm that has led to firings in the past, so better safe than sorry.

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Behind the Blog: Dangerous Memes

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2026-05-29 16:06:59

Behind the Blog: Being New and Some Numbers

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 going deeper, Google's search changes, and a rogue zine.

SAM: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the way a line of reporting or even an entire beat or set of beats can be in conversation with itself over time. I’m thinking of this more in the last week because I published this story about a high school that’s dealing with synthetic imagery harassment—AI generated child sexual abuse material to be specific—and a lot of the people involved in that story are learning about deepfakes for the first time through this very traumatizing, difficult situation.

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Behind the Blog: Being New and Some Numbers

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2026-05-22 15:45:16

Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

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 Spencer Pratt, bricking phones, and the FTC.

JASON: I have watched mostly in horror as Spencer Pratt has taken over the internet and, it feels, the physical space around me as he attempts to run for mayor of Los Angeles on what is basically a MAGA platform. For those unaware, Pratt is a former reality show star from The Hills who I was vaguely aware of at the time and then never thought about again until a few months ago. Pratt’s political origin story is that his Pacific Palisades mansion burnt down during last year’s fire; he has since railed against the government response to the fire and announced he is running for mayor as a Republican in a city that is extremely democratic.

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Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

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2026-05-15 15:19:07

Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

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 developers' AI woes, how the magic happens, and the Beach Boys.

JOSEPH: Earlier in the week we published ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir. This took a little while because I spoke to four people who attended the conference. I spoke to one, I asked if they knew anyone else there. Got another name and phone number, and so on.

I included this line in the copy: “The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster.”

I think that was important to include because these are comments and figures coming from senior ICE officials, and one in particular, Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE. As we all know, DHS lies.

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Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

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2026-05-08 16:03:52

Behind the Blog: Storage Woes and RSS

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 storage, RSS, and a big reporting project.

JOSEPH: In an earlier BTB I mentioned the pain of obtaining cryptocurrency in 2026. Well, that was in service for the article we published this week called ‘HELLO BOSS’: Inside the Chinese Realtime Deepfake Software Powering Scams Around the World. This has been a long time coming. As you can read in the piece, it took weeks, eventually more than a month really, to get the people to sell me the software and for us to test it.

I wanted to talk about my opinion on the ethics around a story like this. This is not a science. Many journalists have a different view on all sorts of different techniques or conduct. But these are my thoughts.

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Behind the Blog: Storage Woes and RSS

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2026-05-01 16:50:32

Behind the Blog: Big Questions of Consciousness

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a wild message, big questions about consciousness, and a visit to a museum.

JASON: I got an extremely funny Signal message yesterday after I published my most recent article about Flock. Like, very confused Signal message from someone who ostensibly thought maybe they were a source? We do sometimes get article tips that are like “Off the record, not to be quoted, confidential source:” and then the entirety of the message is like “did you see this article in The New York Times?”

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Behind the Blog: Big Questions of Consciousness

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2026-04-17 13:00:29

Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the Madonna-whore algorithm, reader tips, and jazz.

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

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Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

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2026-04-10 16:07:51

Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.

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

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

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Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

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2026-04-03 16:55:57

Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss crypto, journalists using AI, and a cool photo of Earth.

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

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

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Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

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2026-03-20 15:00:00

Behind the Blog: Marathon and the Metaverse

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 getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon.

EMANUEL: I think I’m addicted to Twitter again.

We haven’t written a ton about the war with Iran but I’ve been following the news closely because I’m checking if there are important stories for us to do there, and because I can’t help but watch the disaster unfold even if it’s making me incredibly anxious.

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Behind the Blog: Marathon and the Metaverse

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2026-03-13 16:56:57

Behind the Blog: DOGE Bros and Data Labelers

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 traveling for reporting and watching way too much DOGE bros.

JOSEPH: I just wanted to write some brief notes about the DOGE depositions and the piece I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves. Much of the reason I managed to watch all of this testimony was because I was on a couple of long flights this week. On the first flight, I saw the Justin Fox deposition on YouTube. I started watching it and recording the timestamps of interesting parts, and passed those over to our social manager Evy who then cut them into videos which have since been shared pretty widely.

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Behind the Blog: DOGE Bros and Data Labelers

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2026-03-06 16:26:59

Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerously dumb narrative.

EMANUEL: I want to update those who have been following the 404 Media sidequest “Emanuel’s CPU is dying.” The update is that I basically got a new PC. I kept my GPU (4080 Super), my CPU cooler, and storage, and upgraded everything else, including the case, because I bought the old one in the era before GPUs were more than a foot long.

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Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

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2026-02-27 16:27:13

Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

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 wishes made, god complexes, and the point of it all.

SAM: This week I wrote about Amazon’s changing policy for wishlists. It’s allowing gifters to choose third-party sellers for items, which could expose recipients’ delivery addresses to the gifter. The notice Amazon sent wishlist holders is a basic example of CYA messaging: Amazon can’t guarantee what a third party seller will do with your address once they have it, including giving it to a gifter for tracking purposes.

Sex workers first flagged this change on social media because many use wishlists as an easy way to accept gifts, tributes, tips, etc instead of or in addition to actual funds. This is important because payment processors are wildly hostile and actively discriminatory toward the adult industry, and having alternative ways to get paid is crucial if you’re debanked or banned from the usual payment processors. I think most use it in a supplementary fashion, though.

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Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

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2026-02-20 16:54:17

Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

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 parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.

EMANUEL: I felt a great relief this week getting out this story about Alpha School, an AI-powered private school where—shockingly—the AI is not working as promised. I’ve been working on it intensely for a few weeks and it always feels good getting a big investigation off your plate, especially when people seem to appreciate it, which I’m glad they did in this case.

When my wife was pregnant, Sam, Jason, Joe and I joked about how we were about to get a lot of baby and parenting related content on the site. Historically, a lot of our reporting was influenced by subjects we were interested in in our personal lives. Being a parent is an all-consuming life change, so we all assumed I’d be writing about baby monitor hacking or something like this. I’ve definitely done a little bit of that (please check out this podcast I did with Patrick Klepek about screen time and kids), but not as much as I expected.

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Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

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2026-02-13 15:27:28

Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

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 support and saying RIP to FPDS.

JOSEPH: I think I might make this into a more full article in a couple weeks when it actually happens, but yesterday I realized that FPDS.gov is shutting down. That is the Federal Procurement Data System, a website that includes decades of records showing what the U.S. government bought, from what company, and when. I check it essentially every day, and it has been the basis of countless of my articles at this point. Whether it’s finding an initial lead, or a story in itself, FPDS is behind so many of them.

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Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

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2026-02-06 17:54:33

Behind the Blog: The Neverending Cybersecurity Story

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 AI bubble hysteria, "just go independent," and more.

JOSEPH: This week we reported how the FBI has been unable to get into a Washington Post reporter’s iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode. Side note, I wonder how the insane cuts at The Post are going to impact its digital or physical protection of journalists, if at all. This court record was very, very interesting in that it’s a quite rare admission of why exactly authorities were unable to access a device.

I don’t think there’s an area of cybersecurity, which we have a lot of reporting on, that is constantly in flux as mobile forensics. Nothing stays still, even for what feels like five minutes. There are constant tech developments, both on the side of Apple and Google, then on companies trying to break into those phones, like Cellebrite and Grayshift, the creator of Graykey.

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Behind the Blog: The Neverending Cybersecurity Story

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2026-01-30 17:03:10

Behind the Blog: Own Goals and Lying Devs

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a trip to Kenya, reconstructing images, and lying developers.

JASON: Last week, I was in Kenya, a trip that turned out so overwhelmingly positive and left me in such a good mood that I am still somehow a week still carrying with me. I was invited to give a presentation at a conference about how AI is changing journalism, and how journalists can navigate an age of disinformation, slop, and general chaos.

It was a very small conference, with about 30 people, and everyone was incredibly interesting and cool; it was a mix of people who run independent newsrooms across Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as human rights and nonprofit researcher types. At the conference itself, I met a lot of people who I hope we’ll be able to partner with in some way in the future.

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Behind the Blog: Own Goals and Lying Devs

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