404 Media

2025-10-29 14:40:03

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys is filming the encounter on his phone. He says in the video he was born here, meaning he would be an American citizen.

When the boy says he doesn’t have ID on him, the Border Patrol officer has an alternative. He calls over to one of the other officers, “can you do facial?” The second officer then approaches the boy, gets him to turn around to face the sun, and points his own phone camera directly at him, hovering it over the boy’s face for a couple seconds. The officer then looks at his phone’s screen and asks for the boy to verify his name. The video stops.

💡
Do you have any more videos of ICE or CBP using facial recognition? Do you work at those agencies or know more about Mobile Fortify? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

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ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-29 13:11:26

Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Users Film and Harass Massage Parlor Workers

A number of Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views have uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses show men entering massage parlors across the country and soliciting the workers there for “tuggy” massages, or sex work. In some cases, the women laugh at the men, dismiss them, or don’t understand what they’re talking about, but in a few cases they discuss specific sex acts and what they would cost.

It doesn’t appear that the women in the videos know they are being filmed and that the videos are being shared online, where they’re viewed by millions of people. In some cases, the exact location of the massage parlor is easy to find because the videos show its sign upon entering. This is extremely dangerous to the women in the videos who can be targeted by both law enforcement and racist, sexist extremists. In 2021, a man who shot and killed eight people at massage parlors told police he targeted them because he had a “sexual addiction."

The videos show how Meta has built an entire supply chain for dangerous, privacy violating content on the internet. It sells glasses that allow people to surreptitiously film others in public and operates a social network where inflammatory, outrageous content is rewarded and monetized, and where Instagram often only moderates violating content after journalists reach out for comment.

The most popular of these accounts, which had more than 600,000 followers and multiple videos with around 2 million views, was served to me while scrolling Reels. Many of the videos are tagged on Instagram as “Ray-Ban Meta glasses,” which indicate what device the video was made with. In one video, the person wearing the glasses briefly shows himself in a mirror as he enters a massage parlor.

After reaching out to Meta for comment, the company asked me for examples of the videos, indicating that it wasn’t able to find them itself. Meta then removed the account I flagged, as well as other accounts by the same creator, who apparently set up multiple accounts in preparation for moderation.

"People are responsible for following the law, whether or not they're wearing Ray-Ban Metas,” a Meta spokesperson told me in an email. “Unlike smartphones, our glasses have an LED light that activates whenever someone captures content, so it’s clear the device is recording. The content and associated accounts have been removed for multiple policy violations.”

As 404 Media reported last week, people can pay $60 for a modification to Meta’s Ray-Bans to disable that privacy-protecting LED. Amazon and other online retailers also sell various stickers that cover the recording light, but Meta has also updated the Ray-Bans software so it will stop recording if it’s covered. Circumventing or hiding the LED recording light is a common subject on Reddit and a top search result for the product. In the massage parlor video, it’s not clear that the people who are being filmed know they are being filmed, even if the LED light is on.

Meta also told me its terms of service state that users are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and for using Ray-Ban Meta glasses in a safe, respectful manner. It said people shouldn't use them to engage in harmful activities like harassment or capturing sensitive information.

The people behind the accounts attempt to monetize them by selling access to full videos which they claim capture their sexual encounters at the massage parlor. They link out to an adult pay-per-view service called No Fans, which allows users to buy and view adult content without creating an account. One video on Instagram that’s pitched as a “Latina House Call” sends viewers to No Fans to buy the full video. On No Fans, users can buy the “Latina Tuggy Bundle” for $28.49.

This gives them access to four videos, but the locations and people in those videos look nothing like anything that’s been posted to Instagram. It’s not clear if the people who are making the Instagram videos ever actually go through with the sex work they talk about. Several of the Instagram videos end with them saying they’re going to go get more cash from an ATM and exit the massage parlor.

Angela Wu, executive director of SWAN Vancouver, an organization that promotes rights and safety of migrant and immigrant women engaged in sex work, told me that the organization is aware of these accounts and that workers who face privacy concerns at massage parlors mey choose to move to more hidden locations, where they face greater risk of assault, robbery, and exploitation.

"Earlier this year, SWAN Vancouver became aware of disturbing social media videos showing individuals wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses to enter massage parlours across North America and record interactions with workers. Many of these workers are immigrant and newcomer women who may or may not engage in sex work, but experience stigma nonetheless,” Wu told me in an email. “The shameless use of covert recording technology at massage parlours to gain likes, attention, and online notoriety is both disgusting and dangerous. Due to criminalization and stigma, sex workers face disproportionate levels of violence and harassment. Violations of privacy can lead to arrest, immigration consequences, and lasting harm.”

“SWAN’s community made extensive efforts to report these videos, and we are deeply disappointed that social media platforms allowed them to remain online,” Wu added. “To warn the im/migrant women we support, SWAN used our Abuser Alert system to notify workers about the use of Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the videos circulating online. We also received reports from community members about clients entering massage parlours wearing the glasses and recording women without their knowledge."

Some of the exact same videos were also posted to TikTok. These TikTok accounts also attempt to monetize the videos by linking to full pornographic videos sold through Patreon.

Another TikTok account, separate from the people also posting to Instagram, also posts first person videos of entering massage parlors and asking for sex work. The person posting this account said that their previous account was banned for violating TikTok community guidelines. That person also shared a video of themselves saying that they’ll stop posting “tuggy” videos because someone stole their Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

After I reached out for comment, TikTok removed the accounts I asked the company about. “On the question about people being filmed without their knowledge, you may want to reach out to Meta to ask if there are features/ safeguards they've built into the Ray Bans to prevent this,” a TikTok spokesperson told me in an email. “For example, I have a pair and I know there's a little LED light - perhaps this is being disabled or there's some way around this.”

One of the massage parlor Instagram accounts shows that the people behind it tried recording other forms of harassment with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses before finding the massage parlor niche. Before the massage parlor videos, this person entered various businesses and bothered employees. In one video the person filming the video enters a Best Buy and yells until security asks him to stop.

Conditions de service de Meta

Les Conditions générales de Meta régissent mon utilisation de Facebook, Messenger ainsi que des autres produits, fonctionnalités, applications, services, technologies et logiciels que nous offrons.

^{www.facebook.com}

404 Media

2025-10-29 13:01:32

Podcast: Grokipedia is Cringe

We start this week with Jason’s explanation of what Grokipedia is, and how it compares to the very much human-made Wikipedia. After the break, we talk all about the hell of updating Windows PCs and what that means specifically for Windows 10 users. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains what a16z is doing with a ‘speedrun’ to a wholly AI-generated world.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA8…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/LqYMoK7dlDA?…

• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever⁠
• First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens
• Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
• Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
• The End of Windows 10 Support Is an E-Waste Disaster in the Making
• Nathan Proctor interview
• a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service
• a16z Is Funding a 'Speedrun' to AI-Generated Hell on Earth

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-10-28 21:13:08

Trump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘A New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’

On Monday morning, the Trump administration used a picture of Halo’s Master Chief to call for the destruction of immigrants. This administration is no stranger to appropriating pop culture for its propaganda, but something about seeing the stalwart hero of a beloved video game twisted into an anti-immigrant super soldier hit people pretty hard.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration shared AI-generated Halo memes across its social media accounts. This culminated in the official Department of Homeland Security accounts sharing an image of dudes in Spartan armor riding a Warthog under the words “DESTROY THE FLOOD JOIN.ICE.GOV.” It was this image, in particular, that got in people’s heads.

In the fiction of Halo, the Flood is a parasitic creature that infects sentient life and turns them into monsters whose only desire is to spread the parasite. They’re depicted as a brainless and fast moving wave of flesh that could not be reasoned with.

Finishing this fight. pic.twitter.com/6Ezq9NUqMq
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 27, 2025

Michael Senters—a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech who studies the political consequences of online culture—sent me a DM out of the blue after he saw the Warthog meme. “The Halo tweets and the reactions on Twitter are actually driving me insane,” Senters told me. This is a man who regularly subjects himself to the depths of 4chan so he can study its effect on politics. He’s a veteran of the worst online spaces the internet has to offer, but the Halo meme got to him.

Trump’s propagandists have used the aesthetics of Star Wars and Studio Ghibli to push their message. They’ve set the Pokémon theme song to footage of ICE raids under the title “Gotta Catch Em All.” They’ve layered fash-wave variations of the MGMT song “Little Dark Age” over footage pulled from arrests. We’ve seen this administration do similar things in the past, so why did the Halo meme feel worse to Senters?

“What makes this debacle with the Halo memes different from other invocations of fandom culture is twofold in my opinion. First is the fact that Microsoft has declined to push back on the use of its biggest IP,” he said. “Combined with Microsoft donating to the White House ballroom project it gives the impression that Microsoft tacitly supports this.”

Microsoft declined to comment on this story.

Other IP holders have fought the administration over memes and won. The DHS video using the Pokémon theme song is still up, Pokémon Company International said it hadn’t given the administration permission to use its song. The band MGMT got DHS to pull the video that used its song.Little Dark Age. Even comedian Theo Von was able to force DHS to take down a video that featured him without his permission. As of this writing, the Halo memes are all still up across the Trump administration’s accounts. A video posted on DHS social media accounts Tuesday played music from the Halo soundtrack over footage of a Border Patrol raid.

“Second, and far worse in my opinion is this reaches a new level of dehumanization of immigrants by referring to them as the Flood, a parasitic alien lifeform in Halo who exist solely to eradicate all other forms of life and are controlled by the Gravemind, a monstrous intelligence that lurks in the shadows,” Senters said. “Immigrants stand in for the Flood while the Gravemind stands in for the Jews, creating a perfect metaphor for the far-right that allows them to target to of their traditional enemies with exterminationist rhetoric and it's not hyperbolic to say it's exterminationist because in Halo the only way to defeat the Flood is to wipe them out entirely, otherwise they will continue to reproduce.”

The Trump administration has long invoked racist imagery, much of it pulled from America’s past, to sell its agenda. But overtly equating immigrants to a ravening horde of monsters from a video game has its closest analogue in Nazi propaganda.

“What is especially surreal is seeing niche memes pressed into the service of the most controversial and violent aspects of President Trump's agenda. A few months ago, it was the ‘Ghiblification’ of the kidnapping and detention of American residents. Now it is a picture of Master Chief and a recruitment pitch to join ICE and ‘Destroy the Flood,’ Emerson T Brooking, the director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told 404 Media.

“In many ways, Trump administration officials are trying to use these online motifs to smuggle concepts that would otherwise be too extreme for the American people. Most Americans do not want to ‘destroy’ legal asylum seekers. And referring to this group of people as a ‘flood’ is the sort of thing that was once the domain of white-nationalist manifestos. But tie these things together with an image of Master Chief and a Halo Warthog, and the inconceivable becomes a casual joke,” Brooking said.

Trump’s propagandists are extremely online and tuned to what’s trending on social media. The reason Halo is being used to push violence against immigrants is that Microsoft announced a remake of the original game last week. The bigger news was that, for the first time, the Master Chief would appear on Playstation. In a joke post on X, Gamestop declared this the official end of the console war, a term that refers to the decades long feud between fans of different video game consoles.

The official White House X account retweeted the joke post with an image of Trump as Master Chief. Another White House aligned social media gave Trump credit for ending the console war. Angry Joe, a popular gaming YouTuber, riled up other gamers online by posting “FUCK ICE! And FUCK DONALD TRUMP!” in response to the "Destroy the Flood” meme. The composer of the original games, Marty O’Donnell, reminded everyone that he’s running for Congress and promised to “destroy the flood” if elected. Other people from the original development team told Game File that seeing Master Chief used this way sickened them.

Independent journalist Alyssa Mercante managed to get a response from the White House press team about the Halo memes. “Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch—only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai told Mercante in an email.

“It is really not enough to describe the comms teams of the second Trump administration as ‘terminally online.’ The White House just marked the end of the console wars; DHS is posting deep fried Halo memes. We are somewhere else entirely,” Brooking said.

Halo co-creator says ICE’s Halo-themed recruitment ad “makes me sick”

Another Halo maker says ad "ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation." ALSO: A developer whose game just launched on Xbox slams Microsoft’s silence

^{Stephen Totilo (Game File)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 14:27:40

ICE Is Using a University Building as a Deportation Office and the University Says It Can't Do Anything About It

A university in Milwaukee is stuck with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as its tenant after the agency refused to leave a building the university intended to renovate into an architectural and civil engineering classroom building. Instead, the building is being used as an office for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the main part of ICE performing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The situation has created a nightmare for administrators at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a morally untenable situation for many students. ICE is quite literally running deportation operations out of a university-owned building, and, according to the university, it can’t do anything about it. 404 Media obtained a recording of a meeting between students and university administrators which discussed ICE’s ongoing use of the building.

In 2023, an alum of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) sold a building at 310 E. Knapp St. to the school for a massive discount, with the intention of the building being renovated and turned into an academic facility. At the time, ICE was a tenant of the building but was in the process of building a new office elsewhere in Milwaukee. Its lease was set to expire in April, but ICE, through the General Services Administration (GSA) which handles real estate for the federal government, unilaterally extended the lease through April of next year and has the option to remain in the building through 2028, the university says. The university says there is nothing it can legally do to evict ICE. Concerned students say the situation is untenable and immoral—the university is now collecting rent directly from the government, and ICE is processing undocumented immigrants from the office.

“Can you see how it might look like MSOE is helping facilitate their mass deportation effort?” a student asked university administrators at a meeting about the building last week, according to audio obtained by 404 Media. “It feels like the federal government’s goals and objectives of mass deportation right now outweigh the academic use of that building for MSOE,” another said.

“We inherited those tenants, we didn’t invite them to be in that building, we inherited that building, their lease, and their timing of their new building being built out,” Seandra Mitchell, MSOE’s VP of Student Affairs and Campus Inclusion said in the audio. “They’re still building that building, so that’s why they’re still there.”

The situation highlights an extreme example of a phenomenon playing out all over the country: While much of the federal government contracts (and is at the moment shut down altogether), ICE is rapidly expanding. This means it is building our new offices and facilities and keeping old ones longer than was originally planned. ICE is seeking significant office space not just in Milwaukee but in more than a dozen other cities.

Kip Kussman, associate vice president of student affairs at MSOE, told students that “the issue on 310 Knapp St. is complex. It’s also tied to a lease, which we have very little information on as a confidential document. I don’t know if we’re going to get you answers that are going to make you satisfied. And I regret that, I wish I could change that. We have minimal control of a complex governmental system and we’re doing our absolute best.”

Last week, the school put out a statement saying that when it acquired the building in 2023, the federal government told it that it intended to vacate the building within several months. “Based on that understanding, MSOE’s long-term plan was to renovate the facility for academic use following the termination of GSA’s tenancy,” the school said in the statement. “However, after the acquisition, the GSA elected to continue its occupancy beyond the original lease term while federal agencies determine their next steps. Under the terms of the inherited lease and federal authority allowing the government to require continued occupancy, MSOE is obligated to accommodate the tenant during this period.”

It added that “Federal law allows the government to continue occupancy in the premises past the current lease term,” and said it has no authority over who is in the building and what it is used for.

ICE’s website lists 310 E. Knapp Street as part of its “Chicago Field Office” and part of its Enforcement and Removal Operations team. The facility has holding cells for people that ICE detains but is not supposed to hold people overnight. An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice found that on one day in June, 22 people were being held in the Knapp Street office. Also in June, ICE changed its rules about how long people can be held in facilities like the Knapp St. office to extend their possible detention time in these facilities for up to 72 hours (up from 12). A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union Wisconsin told 404 Media that “It's unclear if they're going to stay there for the rest of their lease until April 2026 because ICE is also converting a building on Milwaukee’s Northwest side to be the new field office,” and that ICE is seeking a large amount of additional office space across the city, including for “law enforcement operations”. “We still don't exactly know what ICE plans to do with that amount of additional office space in these cities on top of their detention and field office spaces,” the spokesperson said.

GSA declined to comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for MSOE told 404 Media that “Under the terms of the inherited lease and federal authority allowing the government to require continued occupancy, MSOE is obligated to accommodate the tenant during this period.”

In 2023, Kendall Bruenig, the MSOE alum who sold the building to the university at a steep discount, said he was looking forward to the building being turned into a place of leaning: “I owe my current success to my degree from MSOE, so I am honored to support the university and help other MSOE grads to start successful careers,” he said.

ICE is expanding its footprint in Milwaukee. Beyond that, details are hard to come by.

The expansion comes as ICE begins to make use of an unprecedented infusion of funds from Congress.

^{, Journal Sentinel (Journal Sentinel)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 18:15:53

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

What if your coworkers were AI? What if AI agents, not humans, monitored security camera feeds? What if you had an AI tech recruiter to find motivated candidates, or an entirely autonomous recruiting firm? What if UPS, but AI, or finance, but DeepMind?

Does that sound like absolute hell on Earth? Well, too bad, because the giant Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is giving companies up to $1 million each to develop every single one of these ideas as part of its Speedrun program.

Speedrun is an accelerator program startups can apply to in order to receive funding from a16z as well as a “fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth,” according to Speedrun’s site. “It kicks off with an orientation to introduce the cohort, then dives into rapid product development—helping founders think through MVP while addressing key topics like customer acquisition and design partnerships.”

The program covers brand building, customer acquisition and launch, fundraising, team building, and more. The selected startups and founders meet each other, and receive the curriculum via workshops and keynote sections from “luminary speakers” such as Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, a16z’s namesakes Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and others.

Silicon Valley incubators and accelerators are common, but I’ve rarely seen such an unappetizing buffet of bad ideas as Speedrun’s AI-centric 2025 cohort.

Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

a16z’s Speedrun is also backing:

• Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.”
• Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop.
• Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.”
• Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says.
• Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.”
• Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.”
• First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.”
• Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”

Part of the strategy for these types of accelerators and Silicon Valley venture capital firms more broadly is to place a lot of bets on a lot of startups with the knowledge that most of them are not going to make it. A million dollars is not a lot of money to a16z, especially when it only needs one of these companies to 100x its investment in order to make the whole endeavor profitable. What makes this Speedrun and the current moment we’re in with generative AI different is that a lot of AI implementations are going to be shoved down our throats before investors realize what AI is and isn’t good for.

Are Doublespeed’s AI-generated social media accounts actually going to convince people to use whatever products they’re promoting? The accounts I’ve seen lead me to believe that the answer is no, but until then, they will continue to flood social media with garbage. Is Jooba going to entirely replace HR professionals and recruiters? I don’t know, but a whole bunch of people who are trying to get a job to pay rent are going to get caught up in a dehumanizing process until we find out.

So the next time you find yourself asking why you're being inundated with AI wherever you go, remember that the answer is that someone with millions of dollars to spare paid for it on the off chance that it will yield a nice return.

Watch an AI-Generated Recruiter Make a Job Interview Even Worse

“Vertical bar pilates."

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 16:56:04

Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

I woke up restless and kind of hungover Sunday morning at 6 am and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL in 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a homicide, but it was later revealed that he had done it while lost in the underwater cave to avoid the pain of drowning.” The post linked to a Wikipedia page called “List of unusual deaths in the 21st century.” I spent the next two hours falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through all manner of horrifying and difficult-to-imagine ways to die.

A day later, I saw that Depths of Wikipedia, the incredible social media account run by Annie Rauwerda, had noted the entirely unsurprising fact that, behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean her death itself was unusual.” These are the types of edits and conversations that have collectively happened billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and which make it so human, so interesting, so useful.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

One needs only spend a few minutes clicking around the launch version of Grokipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. Besides often having a conservative slant and having the general hallmarks of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are overly long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, have no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is zero insight into how any of the articles were generated, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits that were made, no version history, etc. Grokipedia is, literally, simply a single black box LLM’s version of an encyclopedia. There is a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and it’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.” To use an example I noticed from simply clicking around: The list of “notable people” in the Grokipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a disordered list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping about a place that could be done.

On even the lowest of stakes Wikipedia pages, real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article, in what order it should be presented, and the specific language that should be used. They do this under a framework of byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, inscrutable listservs which themselves have been informed by Wikimedia’s “mission statement,” the “Wikimedia values,” its “founding principles” and policies and guidelines and tons of other stated and unstated rules, norms, processes and procedures. All of this behind-the-scenes legwork is essentially invisible to the user but is very serious business to the human editors building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects (the high cultural barrier to entry for editors is also why it is difficult to find new editors for Wikipedia, and is something that the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix without ruining the project). Any given Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans who are discussing, for example, whether it’s actually that unusual to get speared to death by a beach umbrella.

Grokipedia, meanwhile, looks like what you would get if you told an LLM to go make an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is essentially exactly what Elon Musk did.

As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leak part of its instructions. For example, a Grokipedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” notes “Wait, no, can’t cite Wiki,” indicating that Grokipedia has been programmed to not link to Wikipedia. That entry does cite Wikimedia pages anyway, but in the “sources,” those pages are not actually hyperlinked:

I have no doubt that Grokipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or build an “alternative” to Wikipedia, the likes of which no one has heard of because the attempts were all so laughable and poorly participated in that they died almost immediately. Grokipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it is everything that Wikipedia is not: It is not an encyclopedia, it is not transparent, it is not human, it is not a nonprofit, it is not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it is not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the proliferation of AI, and related structural changes to discoverability and linking on the internet like AI summaries and knowledge panels. But Wikipedia has proven itself to be incredibly resilient because it is a project that specifically leans into the shared wisdom and collaboration of humanity, our shared weirdness and ways of processing information. That is something that an LLM will never be able to compete with.

Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 15:45:05

Rogue Goodreads Librarian Edits Site to Expose 'Censorship in Favor of Trump Fascism’

On Friday morning, Goodreads users who wanted to read reviews of the werewolf romance Mate by Ali Hazelwood were confronted by the cover of the new Eric Trump book Under Siege. One of the site's volunteer moderators had gone rogue and changed Mate’s cover, added the subtitle “Goodreads Censorship in Favor of Trump,” and altered Mate’s listing into an explanation of why. To hear them tell it, Goodreads was removing criticism of Trump’s book from the site.

“Silencing criticism of political figures—especially those associated with authoritarian movements—helps normalize and strengthen those movements,” the post that replaced Mate’s description said. “When we let powerful people’s books be protected from criticism, we give up the right to hold power accountable.”
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Goodreads employs a volunteer staff of “Librarians” who act as moderators for the site and have the power to make changes to the listings. One of these librarians altered the titles, pictures, and blurbs of several popular books including the Mate, the Resse Witherspoon penned thriller Gone Before Goodbye, and the Nicholas Sparks bestseller Remain. The changes were up for a few hours before Goodreads caught on and fixed the listings.

Jana | Bookstagram (@janaandbooks) on Threads
Dearest Gentle Bookthreads, It’s time for our weekly wrap up of book discourse, drama, and terrible behavior! 1 Readers noticed a strange “glitch” on Goodreads Friday morning. Several books (including Ali Hazelwood’s “Mate” and Navessa Allen’s “Lights Out”) were instead showing the cover of Eric Trump’s memoir, and this message in the blurb:
Threads

The rogue librarian claims Goodreads is censoring negative reviews of pro-Trump books. They said that Goodreads deleted negative reviews of Under Siege as they came in after its publication on October 14. “These were the honest opinions from real readers who disagreed with the book’s content,” the Librarian said in their post. “When people noticed and complained, Goodreads deleted ALL reviews of the book—positive and negative alike. This wasn’t an accident or a one-time glitch. It was a deliberate pattern.”
Goodreads screenshot.
A Goodreads spokesperson confirmed that a Librarian had altered the covers and listings for the books. “We're aware of unauthorized edits made by a volunteer librarian to several book listings. All titles affected by the unauthorized edits have been restored to their correct information, and the librarian no longer has an account on Goodreads,” the spokesperson said.

In response to questions about reviews for the Eric Trump book, the spokesperson told 404 Media that Goodreads “has systems in place to detect unusual activity on book pages and may temporarily limit ratings and reviews that don’t adhere to our reviews and community guidelines. In all cases, we enforce clear standards and remove content and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.”

On Monday, the two week old Trump book had no reviews and no ratings. By Tuesday morning, Under Siege had begun to accumulate reviews and ratings again. The Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days, by contrast, has been out since September 23 and has more than 14,000 ratings and more than 2,000 reviews.

Goodreads has done this kind of thing before and its review guidelines state it will delete “unusual” reviews or “limit the ability to submit ratings.” The idea behind this is to prevent review bombing of controversial figures, but the author’s Goodreads protects tend to be conservatives. In the summer of 2024, it temporarily halted reviews of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy after people had begun to dunk on the Vice President by leaving reviews for the book. There are many “unusual” reviews still up for Harris’ memoir, including a one star review that says “Did not read but so sick of seeing this 💩 in my suggested 🖕🖕”

This kind of one-sided protection from review bombing is at the heart of the rogue Goodreads librarian’s complaint. “When a platform removes criticism of a political book while leaving praise, or removes everything to hide that [that] criticism existed, they’re not saying neutral—they’re picking a side,” their post said. “Goodreads is owned by Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies. When major platforms decide which opinions can exist and which must disappear, they shape what people think is true or acceptable.”

Dunking on J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Is ‘Unusual Behavior,’ Goodreads Says

Goodreads attempts to protect Vance's "poverty porn" memoir from review-bombing, now that he's the vice presidential candidate.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 13:24:21

Lawsuit Accuses a16z of Turning Roblox Into a School Shooter's Playground

The mother of a teenager who died by suicide is suing Roblox, accusing the company of worrying more about its investors than the children in its audience. The complaint, filed this month, claims Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, who’ve collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the gaming company, fostered a platform that monetizes children at the cost of their safety.
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Attorneys for Jaimee Seitz filed the lawsuit in the eastern district of Kentucky. Seitz is the mother of Audree Heine, a teen girl who committed suicide just after her 13th birthday in 2024. When detectives investigated Heine’s death they found she had a vast online social life that centered around groups in Discord and Roblox that idolized school shooters like Dylan Kleebold. Since Heine’s death, Seitz has been outspoken about the unique dangers of Roblox.

Heine’s family claims she would never have died had Roblox done a better job of moderating its platform. “Audree was pushed to suicide by an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct,” the complaint said.

Seitz’s lawyers filed the 89 page lawsuit on October 20 and in it attempted to make the case that Roblox’s problems all stem from cause: corporate greed. “The reason that Roblox is overrun with harmful content and predators is simple: Roblox prioritizes user growth, revenue, and eventual profits over child safety,” it said. “For years, Roblox has knowingly prioritized these numbers over the safety of children through the actions it has taken and decisions it has made to increase and monetize users regardless of the consequences.”

According to the lawsuit, Roblox’s earning potential attracted big investors which encouraged it to abandon safety for quick cash. “Roblox’s business model allowed the company to attract significant venture capital funding from big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, putting enormous pressure on the company to prioritize growing and monetizing its users.”

Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z is a venture capital firm whose previous investments include Civitai—a company that made money from noncensual AI porn—an “uncensored” AI project that offered users advice on how to commit suicide, and startup that’s selling access to thousands of “synthetic influencers” for use in manipulating public opinion.

In 2020, a16z led a round of funding that raised $150 million for Roblox. “Roblox is one of those rare platform companies with massive traction and an organic, high-growth business model that will advance the company, and push the industry forward for many years to come,” David George, a general partner at the investment firm, said in a press release at the time.

The lawsuit claims Roblox knows that kids are easy marks for low effort monetization efforts common in online video games. “Recognizing that children have more free time, underdeveloped cognitive functioning, and diminished impulse control, Roblox has exploited their vulnerability to lure them to its app,” it said.

The lawsuit notes that Roblox did not require age verification for years, nor did it restrict communication between children and adults and didn’t require an adult to set up an account for a child. Roblox rolled out age verification and age-based communications systems in July, a feature that uses AI to scan the faces of its users to check their age.

These kinds of basic safety features, however, have taken years to implement. According to the lawsuit, there’s a reason Roblox has been slow on safety. “In pursuit of growth, Roblox deprioritized safety measures even further so that it could report strong numbers to Wall Street,” it said. “For instance, Roblox executives rejected employee proposals for parental approval requirements that would protect children on the platform. Employees also reported feeling explicit pressure to avoid any changes that could reduce platform engagement, even when those changes would protect children from harmful interactions on the platform.”

Roblox is now the subject of multiple investigative reports that have exposed the safety problems on its platforms. It’s also the subject of multiple lawsuits, Seitz’s is the 12th such case filed by Anapol Weiss, the law firm representing her.

According to Seitz’s interviews with the press and the lawsuit, her daughter got caught up in a subculture on Roblox and Discord called The True Crime Community (TCC). “Through Roblox, Audree was exposed to emotional manipulation and social pressure by other users, including TCC members, who claimed to revere the Columbine shooters, depicted them as misunderstood outcasts who took revenge on their bullies, and encouraged violence against oneself and others,” the lawsuit said.

404 Media searched through Roblox’s game servers after the lawsuit was filed and found multiple instances of games named for the Columbine massacre. One server used pictures from Parkland, Florida and another was advertised using the CCTV picture of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris from the Columbine shooting.

Andreessen Horowitz Funds ‘Uncensored’ AI That Will Tell You How to Kill Yourself

a16z funds open source AI developers who are building alternatives to OpenAI’s closed systems, but we still have no idea what’s going to happen when anyone can access uncensored LLMs.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-27 18:39:31

'House of Dynamite' Is About the Zoom Call that Ends the World

This post contains spoilers for the Netflix film ‘House of Dynamite.’

Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow-directed nuclear war thriller wants audiences to ask themselves the question: what would you do if you had 15 minutes to decide whether or not to end the world?

House of Dynamite is about a nuclear missile hitting the United States as viewed from the conference call where America’s power players gather to decide how to retaliate. The decision window is short, just 15 minutes. In the film that’s all the time the President has to assess the threat, pick targets, and decide if the US should also launch its nuclear weapons. It’s about how much time they’d have in real life too.
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In House of Dynamite, America’s early warning systems detect the launch of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The final target is Chicago and when it lands more than 20 million people will die in a flash. Facing the destruction of a major American city, the President must decide what—if any—action to take in response.

The US has hundreds of nuclear missiles ready to go and plans to strike targets across Russia, China, and North Korea. But there’s a catch. In the film, America didn’t see who fired the nuke and no one is taking credit. It’s impossible to know who to strike and in what proportion. What’s a president to do?

House of Dynamite tells the story of this 15 minute Zoom call—from detection of the launch to its terminal arrival in Chicago—three different times. There’s dozens of folks on the call, from deputy advisors to the Secretary of Defense to the President himself, and each run through of the events gives the audience a bigger peak at how the whole machine operates, culminating, in the end, with the President’s view.

Many of the most effective and frightening films about nukes—Threads and The Day After—focus on the lives of the humans living in the blast zone. They’re about the crumbling of society in a wasteland, beholden to the decisions of absent political powers so distant that they often never appear on screen. House of Dynamite is about those powerful people caught in the absurd game of nuclear war, forced to make decisions with limited information and enormous consequences.

In both the movie and real life, America has ground-based interceptors stationed in California and Alaska that are meant to knock a nuke out of the sky should one ever get close. The early film follows missileers in Alaska as they launch the interceptor only to have it fail. It’s a horrifying and very real possibility. The truth of interceptors is that we don’t have many of them, the window to hit a fast moving ICBM is narrow, and in tests they only work about half the time.

“So it’s a fucking coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, played by Jarred Harris, says in the film. This detail caught the eye of the Trump White House, which plans to spend around $200 billion on a space based version of the same tech.

Bloomberg reported on an internal Pentagon memo that directed officials to debunk House of Dynamite’s claims about missile defense. The Missile Defense Agency told Bloomberg that interceptors “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.” The Pentagon separately told Bloomberg that it wasn’t consulted on the film at all.

Director Bigelow worked closely with the CIA to make Zero Dark Thirty, but has tussled with the Pentagon before. The DoD didn’t like The Hurt Locker and pulled out of the project after showing some initial support. Bigelow has said in interviews that she wanted House of Dynamite to be an independent project.

Despite that independence, House of Dynamite nails the details of nuclear war in 2025. The acronyms, equipment, and procedures are all frighteningly close to reality and Bigelow did have help on set from retired US Army lieutenant general and former US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Chief of Staff Dan Karbler.

Karbler is a career missile guy and as the chief of staff of STRATCOM he oversaw America’s nuclear weapons. He told 404 Media that he landed the gig by scaring the hell out of Bigelow and her staff on, appropriately, a Zoom call.

Bigelow wanted to meet Karbler and they set up a big conference call on Zoom. He joined the call but kept his camera off. As people filtered in, Karbler listened and waited. “Here’s how it kind of went down,” Karbler told 404 Media. “There’s a little break in the conversation so I click on my microphone, still leaving the camera off, and I just said: ‘This is the DDO [deputy director of operations] convening a National Event Conference. Classification of this conference TOP SECRET. TK [Talent Keyhole] SI: US STRATCOM, US INDOPACOM, US Northern Command, SecDef Cables, military system to the secretary.”

“SecDef Cables, please bring the secretary of defense in the conference. Mr. Secretary, this is the DDO. Because of the time constraints of this missile attack, recommend we transition immediately from a national event conference to a nuclear decision conference, and we bring the President into the conference. PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center], please bring the President into the conference.”

“And I stopped there and I clicked on my camera and I said, ‘ladies and gentleman, that’s how the worst day in American history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice,’” Karbler said. The theatrics worked and, according to Karbler, he sat next to Bigelow every day on set and helped shape the movie.

House of Dynamite begins and ends with ambiguity. We never learn who fired the nuclear weapon at Chicago. The last few minutes of the film focus on the President looking through retaliation plans. He’s in a helicopter, moments from the nuke hitting Chicago, and looking through plans that would condemn millions of people on the planet to fast and slow deaths. The film ends as he wallows in this decision, we never learn what he chooses.

Karbler said it was intentional. “The ending was ambiguous so the audience would leave with questions,” he said. “The easy out would have been: ‘Well, let’s just have a nuclear detonation over Chicago.’ That’s the easy out. Leaving it like it is, you risk pissing off the audience, frankly, because they want a resolution of some sort, but they don’t get that resolution. So instead they’re going to have to be able to have a discussion.”

In my house, at least, the gambit worked. During the credits my wife and I talked about whether or not we’d launch the nukes ourselves (We’d both hold off) and I explained the unpleasant realities of ground based interceptors.

Karbler, too, said he wouldn’t have launched the nukes. It’s just one nuke, after all. It’s millions of people, sure, but if America launches its nukes in retaliation then there’s a good chance Russia, China, and everyone else might do the same. “Because of the potential of a response provoking a much, much broader response, and something that would not be proportional,” Karbler said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 million people, an entire city, a nuclear attack that hit us, but if we respond back, then you’re going to get into im-proportionality calculus.”

Despite the horrors present on screen in House of Dynamite, Karbler isn’t a nuclear abolitionist. “The genie is out of the bottle, you’re not going to put it back in there,” he said. “So what do we do to ensure our best defense? It seems counterintuitive, you know, the best defense is gonna be a good offense. You’ve gotta be able to have a response back against the adversary.”

Basically, Karbler says we should do what we’re doing now: build a bunch more nukes and make sure your enemies know you’re willing to use them. “Classic deterrence has three parts: impose unacceptable costs on the adversary. Deny the adversary any benefit of attack, read that as our ability to defend ourselves, missile defense, but also have the credible messaging behind it,” he said.

These are weapons that have the power to end the world, weapons we make and pray we never use. But we do keep making them. Almost all the old nuclear treaties between Russia and America are gone. The US is spending trillions to replace old ICBM silos and make new nuclear weapons. After decades of maintaining a relatively small nuclear force, China is building up its own stockpiles.

Trump has promised a Golden Dome to keep America safe from nukes and on Sunday Putin claimed Russia had successfully tested a brand new nuclear-powered cruise missile. The people who track existential threats believe we’re closer to nukes ending the world than at any other time in history.

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

Shooting missiles out of the sky from space could require a constellation of 36,000 satellites.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-27 15:32:37

Con Edison Refuses to Say How ICE Gets Its Customers’ Data

Con Edison, the energy company that serves New York City, refuses to say whether ICE or other federal agencies require a search warrant or court order to access its customers’ sensitive data. Con Edison’s refusal to answer questions comes after 404 Media reviewed court records showing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of ICE, has previously obtained such data, and the FBI performing what the records call ‘searches’ of Con Edison data.

The records and Con Edison’s stonewalling raise questions about how exactly law enforcement agencies are able to access the utility provider’s user data, whether that access is limited in any way, and whether ICE still has access during its ongoing mass deportation effort.

“​​We don’t comment to either confirm or deny compliance with law enforcement investigations,” Anne Marie, media relations manager for Con Edison, told 404 Media after being shown a section of the court records.

In September, 404 Media emailed Con Edison’s press department to ask if law enforcement officers have to submit a search warrant or court order to search Con Edison data. A few days later, Marie provided the comment neither confirming nor denying any details of the company’s data sharing practice.

💡
Do you know anything else about how ICE is accessing or using 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.

404 Media then sent several follow-up inquiries, including whether ICE requires a warrant or other legal mechanism to obtain user data. Con Edison did not respond to any of those follow-ups.

Con Edison’s user data is especially sensitive, and likely valuable to authorities, because in many cases it will directly link a specific person to a particular address. If someone is paying for electricity for a home they own or rent, they most likely do it under their real name.

Federal agencies have repeatedly turned to Con Edison data as part of criminal investigations, according to court records. In one case, the FBI previously said it believed a specific person occupied an apartment after performing a “search” of Con Edison records and finding a Con Edison account in that person’s name. Another case shows the FBI obtaining a Con Edison user’s email address after finding it linked to a utilities account. A third case says “a search of records maintained by Con Edison, a public utilities provider to the greater New York City area” revealed that a specific person was receiving utilities at a target address. Several other cases contain similar language.
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Court records also show HSI has accessed Con Edison data as part of criminal investigations. One shows HSI getting data from Con Edison that reveals the name associated with a particular Con Edison account and address. Another says “there was no indication in the records from Con Edison that the SUBJECT PREMISES is divided into multiple units.” A third shows that HSI “confirmed with Con Edison” who was a customer at an address at a particular point in time.

Ordinarily HSI is focused on criminal investigations into child abuse, money laundering, cybercrime, and other types of criminal networks. But in the second Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, the distinction between HSI and ICE is largely meaningless. HSI has reassigned at least 6,198 agents, or nearly 90 percent, and 12,353 personnel overall to assist the deportation arm of ICE, according to data published by the Cato Institute in September. HSI also performs worksite enforcement.

The court records don’t describe how the investigators obtained the Con Edison data exactly, whether they obtained a search warrant or court order, or elaborate on how some officials were able to “search” Con Edison records.

Usually companies and organizations readily acknowledge how and when law enforcement can access customer data. This is for the benefit of users, who can then better understand what legal mechanisms protect their data, but also for law enforcement officials themselves, so they know what information they need to provide during an investigation. Broadly, companies might require a law enforcement official to obtain a search warrant or send a subpoena before they provide the requested user data, based on its sensitivity.

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404 Media

2025-10-27 13:45:53

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

Zenni, an online glasses store, is offering a new coating for its lenses that the company says will protect people from facial recognition technology. Zenni calls it ID Guard and it works by adding a pink sheen to the surface of the glasses that reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras.

Do they work? Yes, technically, according to testing conducted by 404 Media. Zenni’s ID Guard glasses block infrared light. It’s impossible to open an iPhone with FaceID while wearing them and they black out the eyes of the wearer in photos taken with infrared cameras.
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However, ID Guard glasses will not at all stop some of the most common forms of facial recognition that are easy to access and abuse. If someone takes a picture of your naked face with a normal camera in broad daylight while you’re wearing them, there’s a good chance they’ll still be able to put your face through a database and get a match.

For example, I took pictures of myself wearing the glasses in normal light and ran it through PimEyes, a site that lets anyone run facial recognition searches. It identified me in seconds, even with the glasses. One of the biggest dangers of facial recognition is not a corporation running an advanced camera with fancy sensors, it’s an angry Taylor Swift fan who doxes you using a regular picture of your face. Zenni is offering some protection against the former, but can’t help with the latter.

But the glasses do block infrared light and many of the cameras taking pictures of us as we go about our lives rely on that to scan our faces. When those cameras see me now, there will be black holes where my eyes should be and that’s given me a strange kind of peace of mind.

The modern world is covered in cameras that track your every movement. In New Orleans, a private network of cameras uses facial recognition tech to track people in real time and alert cops to the presence of undesirables. Last year tech billionaire and media mogul Larry Ellison pitched a vision of the future where cameras capture every moment of everyone’s life to make sure they’re “on their best behavior.”

Zenni’s director of digital innovation, Steven Lee, told 404 Media that the company wanted to offer customers something that helped them navigate this environment. “There’s devices out there that are scanning us, even without our permission and just tracking us,” he said. “So we asked ourselves: ‘could there possibly be a set of lenses that could do more than just protect our vision, maybe it could protect our identity as well.’”

As a side benefit of beating facial recognition, I noticed the ID Guard lenses were more comfortable for me to wear in sunlight than my normal glasses. I’m sensitive to sunlight and need to wear prescription sunglasses outdoors to prevent headaches and discomfort. The Zenni glasses cut down on a lot of that without me needing to wear shades.Lee explained that this was because the ID Guard blocks infrared light from the sun as well as cameras. This was one of the original purposes of the coating. “When we delved into that, we realized, not only could it protect your eyes from infrared…but it also had the additional benefit of protecting against a lot of devices out there…a lot of camera systems out there utilize infrared to detect different facial features and detect who you are,” he said.

There’s many different kinds of facial recognition technology. Some simply take a picture of a user's face and match it against a database, but those systems have a lot of problems. Sunglasses block the eyes and render one of the biggest datapoints for the system useless and low light pictures don’t work at all so many cameras taking pictures for facial recognition use infrared light to take a picture of a person’s face.

“What's happening when you're using these infrared cameras is it's creating a map that's basically transforming your face into a number of digital landmarks, numerically transforming that into a map that makes us each unique. And so they then use an algorithm to figure out who we are, basically,” Lee said.

But the pink sheen of ID Guard beats the infrared rays. “When infrared light is trying to shine into your eyes, it’s basically being reflected away so it can’t actually penetrate and we’re able to block up to 80 percent of the infrared rays,” Lee said. “When that is happening, those cameras become less effective. They’re not able to collect as much data on your face.”
On the left, the Zenni ID Guard glasses under an infrared camera. On the right, normal sunglasses under an infrared camera. Matthew Gault photos.
To test ID Guard’s effectiveness I put them on my wife and sent her to battle the most complex facial recognition system available to consumers: an iPhone. Apple’s Face ID system is the most comprehensive kind of facial ID system normal people encounter everyday. An iPhone uses three different cameras to project a grid of infrared lights onto a person's face, flood the space in between with infrared light, and take a picture. These infrared lights make a 3D map of a user’s face and use it to unlock the phone.

My wife uses an iPhone for work with a FaceID system and when she was wearing Zenni’s ID Guard glasses, the phone would not open. Her iPhone rejected her in low light, darkness, and broad daylight if she was wearing the Zenni glasses. If she wore her own sunglasses, however, the phone opened immediately because the infrared lights of Apple Face ID made them clear and saw straight into her eyes.

The 2D infrared pictures taken in most public spaces running facial recognition systems are much less sophisticated than an iPhone. And there’s a way we can test those too: trail cameras. The cameras hunters and park rangers use to monitor the wilderness are often equipped with infrared lights that help them take pictures at night and in low light conditions. Using one to take a picture of my face while wearing the Zenni glasses should show us what I look like in public to facial recognition cameras used by retail businesses and the police.

Sure enough, the Zenni glasses with ID Guard stopped the camera from seeing my eyes when the infrared light was on. I sat for several photos in dark conditions while the camera captured photos of my face. The infrared went right through my normal sunglasses while the ID Guard glasses from Zenni stopped the light all together. The camera couldn’t get a clear shot of my eyes.

Zenni is not the first company to offer some form of anit-infrared coating that disrupts facial recognition tech, but it is the first to make it affordable while offering a variety of style choices. The company Reflectacles has been offering a variety of Wayfarer-style glasses with an anti-IR coating for a few years now. But Reflectacles style options are limited and have a powerful green-yellow tint. Zenni is also a major glasses retailer competing with other major retailers, it’s offering a variety of styles that match different aesthetics, and the pink sheen is way less noticeable than the green coating.

Zenni offers the ID Guard on most of its frames and the glasses have a subtle pink tint that’s obvious if you look directly at them, but I didn’t notice when I wore them. I used them to watch TV and went to the movies with them on and never noticed altered colors. “So with the pinkish hue, that was not by accident,” Lee said. “It was purposeful. We wanted to do something where we could actively show individuals that the lenses were actively working to protect their identity.”

Whether Zenni’s ID guard will actually protect people from facial recognition is less interesting than the fact that they exist at all. The state of our surveillance dystopia is such that a major glasses retailer is advertising anti-facial recognition features as a selling point as if it was normal.

Larry Ellison's AI-Powered Surveillance Dystopia Is Already Here

"Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-25 13:00:15

What Really Doomed Napoleon’s Army? Scientists Find New Clues in DNA

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that were exhumed from their graves, worked scatological miracles, and drew inspiration from X-rays.

First, a diagnosis 200 years in the making confirms, once again, that Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad time. Then: crystal pee, life-giving poo, and the artistic side of radiotherapy.

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

Let’s dive in (to poopy waters)!

Bonaparte’s battlers beaten by beets

Barbieri, Rémi et al. “Paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever in 1812 Napoleon’s devastated army.” Current Biology.

Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.

While the epic death toll has been notorious for centuries, the exact pathogens responsible for the losses have remained a matter of debate. Contemporaneous reports from the field suggested that typhus and trench fever commonly afflicted the army. But when scientists sequenced DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers, they did not find the bacteria that causes those diseases.

Instead, the results revealed the presence of “previously unsuspected pathogens” that suggest paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever were major killers during the mad rush from Moscow, according to a new study.

“Throughout Napoleon’s Russian campaign, paratyphoid or typhoid fever was not mentioned in any historical sources of our knowledge, likely due to…nonspecific and varied symptoms,” said researchers led by Rémi Barbieri of Institut Pasteur in Paris. “Our study thus provides the first direct evidence that paratyphoid fever contributed to the deaths of Napoleonic soldiers during their catastrophic retreat from Russia.”

The team noted the sample size of 13 soldiers, whose remains were exhumed from a mass grave of French troops in Vilnius, Lithuania, is too small to make sweeping judgments. It’s possible that DNA analysis on other remains would reveal the presence of typhus, trench fever, and other pathogens.

“A reasonable scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of fatigue, cold, and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” the team added. “While not necessarily fatal, the louse-borne relapsing fever could significantly weaken an already exhausted individual.”
Albrecht Adam’s 1830 painting “Napoleon among his retreating troops at the Berezina” aka “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
The study also speculated that these poor soldiers suffered from consumption of contaminated beets, based on a contemporaneous report from the French army physician J.R.L. de Kirckhoff.

‘Diarrhea was common among us in Lithuania,” de Kirckhoff wrote, according to the study. “One powerful contributing factor to this illness was that we encountered in almost every house, from Orcha to Wilna, large barrels of salted beets (buraki kwaszone), which we ate and

drank the juice of when we were thirsty, greatly upsetting us and strongly irritating the intestinal tract.”

As if it weren’t horrible enough to struggle through frosty frontiers and debilitating diseases, the French army may have also subsisted on toxic taproots. Napoleon’s devastating Russian campaign marked a turning point that eventually contributed to his downfall and exile in 1814. You’d think that such a calamitous episode would dissuade any other psychopathic dictators from making a similar error—and yet…

In other news…

Urine for a sparkly surprise

Thornton, Alyssa et al. “Uric Acid Monohydrate Nanocrystals: An Adaptable Platform for Nitrogen and Salt Management in Reptiles.” Journal of the American Chemical Society.

You’ve heard of the goose that lays golden eggs, but what about the python that pisses crystals? Scientists studied the oddly beautiful solid urine excreted by many reptiles in a new study that describes these “urates” as “a clever and highly adaptable system employed to handle both nitrogenous waste and salts.”
Python urates. Thornton, Alyssa et al.
“Of all the possible uric acid forms, why would evolution favor a metastable crystal form as the vehicle for waste management?” asked researchers led by Alyssa Thornton of Georgetown University.

Well, why not make your tinkle twinkle, if given that adaptive option? Fortunately, the study presents a more informed hypothesis, proposing that the urates help reptiles conserve water and remove ammonia in a detoxed solid form. It’s just a bonus that their urine is pee-dazzled in the process.

The poop pump that powers the ocean

Freitas, Carla et al. “Impact of baleen whales on ocean primary production across space and time.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ll shift now from pretty pee to excellent excrement. This newsletter has previously covered how whale dumps are the secret sauce of the ocean, as their waste nourishes ecosystems through a phenomenon known as the “whale pump.”

Now, a study “quantifies nutrient release via feces and urine by baleen whales” using models that confirm that whale excrement has “cascading effects on the food web” at high latitudes by providing fecal fuel to marine microbes across many northern seas.

“Collectively, blue, bowhead, fin, humpback, sei, and minke whales are estimated to release [a total of] 815 tons of nitrogen and 325 tons of phosphorus recycled daily” in the Barents, Greenland, Norwegian, and Iceland seas, said researchers led by Carla Freitas of Research Station Flødevigen in Norway. “These findings underscore the ecological importance of whale-mediated nutrient cycling and emphasize the value of using ecosystem models to assess the broader effects of whales on marine productivity.”

This productive poop is just one of many reasons why whale conservation is so critical to preserving healthy seas. If America runs on Dunkin’, so the slogan goes, then the ocean runs on dumpin’.

The art of radiotherapy

Kaptein, Ad A et al. “Healing Beams: Radiation and Radiotherapy in Novels, Poems, Music, Film, Painting.” Journal of Medical Radiation Sciences.

What do Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sheryl Crow, and the C.S. Lewis biopic Shadowlands have in common? They all used radiotherapy for creative inspiration, according to a new study that probed the question: How are radiation sciences portrayed in film, art, music, and literature?

“The representation of illness in art is therefore more than just a cultural curiosity,” said researchers led by Ad A. Kaptein of Leiden University Medical Center. “Artistic representations help to provide insights for theoretical models that themselves may be helpful for structuring interventions in behavioural medicine and health psychology.”

Georges Chicotot’s 1907 painting: “First trials of cancer treatment with X-rays.”
To that end, the team pulled together a fascinating collection of creative depictions of radiotherapy, from Crow’s 2018 song about her breast cancer treatment—entitled “Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)”—to paintings depicting radiation treatments, such as the 1907 work by Georges Chicotot entitled “First trials of cancer treatment with X-rays.”

The findings “help contribute to a deeper understanding of health humanities offering diagnostic and therapeutic approaches that address and reduce fear, improving quality of life and quality of medical care via medical and psychological methods,” the team concluded. Despite the often grim nature of this topic, the study left me beaming.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Jaws vs. the Megalodon: This Time, It’s Peer-Reviewed

The epic shark may have been a full 80 feet long with a slender build, according to new research.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-24 20:11:10

AI Dataset for Detecting Nudity Contained Child Sexual Abuse Images

A large image dataset used to develop AI tools for detecting nudity contains a number of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P).

The NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, was used to train an AI image classifier which could automatically detect nudity in an image. C3P found that more than 250 academic works either cited or used the NudeNet dataset since it was available download from Academic Torrents, a platform for sharing research data, in June 2019.

“A non-exhaustive review of 50 of these academic projects found 13 made use of the NudeNet data set, and 29 relied on the NudeNet classifier or model,” C3P said in its announcement.

C3P found more than 120 images of identified or known victims of CSAM in the dataset, including nearly 70 images focused on the genital or anal area of children who are confirmed or appear to be pre-pubescent. “In some cases, images depicting sexual or abusive acts involving children and teenagers such as fellatio or penile-vaginal penetration,” C3P said.

People and organizations that downloaded the dataset would have no way of knowing it contained CSAM unless they went looking for it, and most likely they did not, but having those images on their machines would be technically criminal.

“CSAM is illegal and hosting and distributing creates huge liabilities for the creators and researchers. There is also a larger ethical issue here in that the victims in these images have almost certainly not consented to have these images distributed and used in training,” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images, told me in an email. Farid also developed PhotoDNA, a widely used image-identification and content filtering tool. “Even if the ends are noble, they don’t justify the means in this case.”

“Many of the AI models used to support features in applications and research initiatives have been trained on data that has been collected indiscriminately or in ethically questionable ways. This lack of due diligence has led to the appearance of known child sexual abuse and exploitation material in these types of datasets, something that is largely preventable,” Lloyd Richardson, C3P's director of technology, said.

Academic Torrents removed the dataset after C3P issued a removal notice to its administrators.

"In operating Canada's national tipline for reporting the sexual exploitation of children we receive information or tips from members of the public on a daily basis," Richardson told me in an email. "In the case of the NudeNet image dataset, an individual flagged concerns about the possibility of the dataset containing CSAM, which prompted us to look into it more closely."

C3P’s findings are similar to 2023 research from Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, which found that LAION-5B, one of the largest datasets powering AI-generated images, also contained CSAM. The organization that manages LAION-5B removed it from the internet following that report and only shared it again once it had removed the offending images.

"These image datasets, which have typically not been vetted, are promoted and distributed online for hundreds of researchers, companies, and hobbyists to use, sometimes for commercial pursuits," Richardson told me. "By this point, few are considering the possible harm or exploitation that may underpin their products. We also can’t forget that many of these images are themselves evidence of child sexual abuse crimes. In the rush for innovation, we’re seeing a great deal of collateral damage, but many are simply not acknowledging it — ultimately, I think we have an obligation to develop AI technology in responsible and ethical ways."

Update: This story has been updated with comment from Lloyd Richardson.

Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material

The model is a massive part of the AI-ecosystem, used by Stable Diffusion and other major generative AI products.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-24 17:55:27

a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service

A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms.

“Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic],” the company’s site says. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know exactly how its service works, but the company appears to be pitching a service designed to circumvent many of the methods social media platforms use to detect inauthentic behavior. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts, with a human doing 5 percent of “touch up” work at the end of the process.

On a podcast earlier this month, Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani said that the company uses a “phone farm” to run AI-generated accounts on TikTok. So-called “click farms” often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason. Lakhani said one Doublespeed client generated 4.7 million views in less than four weeks with just 15 of its AI-generated accounts.

“Our system analyzes what works to make the content smarter over time. The best performing content becomes the training data for what comes next,” Doublespeed’s site says. Doublespeed also says its service can create slightly different variations of the same video, saying “1 video, 100 ways.”

“Winners get cloned, not repeated. Take proven content and spawn variation. Different hooks, formats, lengths. Each unique enough to avoid suppression,” the site says.
One of Doublespeed's AI influencers
Doublespeed allows clients to use its dashboard for between $1,500 and $7,500 a month, with more expensive plans allowing them to generate more posts. At the $7,500 price, users can generate 3,000 posts a month.

The dashboard I was able to access for free shows users can generate videos and “carousels,” which is a slideshow of images that are commonly posted to Instagram and TikTok. The “Carousel” tab appears to show sample posts for different themes. One, called “Girl Selfcare” shows images of women traveling and eating at restaurants. Another, called “Christian Truths/Advice” shows images of women who don’t show their face and text that says things like “before you vent to your friend, have you spoken to the Holy Spirit? AHHHHHHHHH”

On the company’s official Discord, one Doublespeed staff member explained that the accounts the company deploys are “warmed up” on both iOS and Android, meaning the accounts have been at least slightly used, in order to make it seem like they are not bots or brand new accounts. Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani also said on the Discord that users can target their posts to specific cities and that the service currently only targets TikTok but that it has internal demos for Instagram and Reddit. Lakhani said Doublespeed doesn’t support “political efforts.”

A Reddit spokesperson told me that Doublespeed’s service would violate its terms of service. TikTok, Meta, and X did not respond to a request for comment.

Lakhani said Doublespeed has raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.”

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

What Doublespeed is offering is not that different than some of the AI generation tools Jason has covered that produce a lot of the AI-slop flooding social media already. It’s also similar, but a more blatant version of an app I covered last year which aimed to use social media manipulation to “shape reality.” The difference here is that it has backing from one of the biggest VC firms in the world.

AI-Powered Social Media Manipulation App Promises to 'Shape Reality'

A prototype app called Impact describes “A Volunteer Fire Department For The Digital World,” which would summon real people to copy and paste AI-generated talking points on social media.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-24 17:02:18

Behind the Blog: Making Things for Humans

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 Pavlovian Chartbeat response, when to say "cum," and the wave of making things for humans, by humans.

JOSEPH: Right now I’m in the midst of upgrading a bunch of my podcasting and related gear. I’m using the same kinda cheap to midrange web cam I got when we first launched 404 Media. My mic is fine but now that a fair number of people listen to the pod, and we want to grow it, it’s time to invest in some new tech. Jason has already done this, I’m more following his lead. I used to be very into cameras, tech, gadgets, mics, but it’s been a few years.

Because the four of us are spread all over, we can’t do the popular aesthetic of everyone sitting on a chair or sofa chatting in a podcast studio. That stuff obviously performs better on video/YouTube, which is where podcast discovery often happens now. But we can try to make our remotely recorded podcast look as good as we can. Give people something to actually look at.

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Behind the Blog: Making Things for Humans

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-24 15:31:52

DHS Tries To Unmask Ice Spotting Instagram Account by Claiming It Imports Merchandise

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to force Meta to unmask the identity of the people behind Facebook and Instagram accounts that post about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, arrests, and sightings by claiming the owners of the account are in violation of a law about the “importation of merchandise.” Lawyers fighting the case say the move is “wildly outside the scope of statutory authority,” and say that DHS has not even indicated what merchandise the accounts, called Montcowatch, are supposedly importing.

“There is no conceivable connection between the ‘MontCo Community Watch’ Facebook or Instagram accounts and the importation of any merchandise, nor is there any indicated on the face of the Summonses. DHS has no authority to issue these summonses,” lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in a court filing this month. There is no indication on either the Instagram or Facebook account that the accounts are selling any type of merchandise, according to 404 Media’s review of the accounts. “The Summonses include no substantiating allegations nor any mention of a specific crime or potential customs violation that might trigger an inquiry under the cited statute,” the lawyers add.

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Do you know anything else about this case or others like it? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Joseph securely on Signal at joseph.404 or Jason at jason.404

A judge temporarily blocked DHS from unmasking the owners last week.

“The court now orders Meta [...] not to produce any documents or information in response to the summonses at issue here without further order of the Court,” the judge wrote in a filing. The move to demand data from Meta about the identities of the accounts while citing a customs statute shows the lengths to which DHS is willing to go to attempt to shut down and identify people who are posting about ICE’s activities.

Montcowatch is, as the name implies, focused on ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Its Instagram posts are usually titled “Montco ICE alert” and include details such as where suspected ICE agents and vehicles were spotted, where suspected agents made arrests, or information about people who were detained. “10/20/25 Eagleville,” one post starts. “Suspected dentention [sic] near Ollies on Ridge Pike sometime before 7:50 am. 3 Agents and 3 Vehicles were observed.”

The Instagram account has been posting since June, and also posts information about peoples’ legal rights to film law enforcement. It also tells people to not intervene or block ICE. None of the posts currently available on the Instagram account could reasonably be described as doxing or harassing ICE officials.

On September 11, DHS demanded Meta provide identifying details on the owners of the Montcowatch accounts, according to court records. That includes IP addresses used to access the account, phone numbers on file, and email addresses, the court records add. DHS cited a law “focused on customs investigations relating to merchandise,” according to a filing from the ACLU that pushed to have the demands thrown out.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“The statute at issue here, 19 U.S.C. § 1509, confers limited authority to DHS in customs investigations to seek records related to the importation of merchandise, including the assessment of customs duties,” the ACLU wrote. “Identifying anonymous social media users critical of DHS is not a legitimate purpose, and it is not relevant to customs enforcement.” As the ACLU notes, a cursory look at the accounts shows they are “not engaged in commerce.” The court record points to an 2017 Office of the Inspector General report which says Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “regularly” tried much the same thing with its own legal demands, and specifically around the identity of an anonymous Twitter user.

“Movant now files this urgent motion to protect their identity from being exposed to a government agency that is apparently targeting their ‘community watch’ Facebook and Instagram accounts for doing nothing more than exercising their rights to free speech and association,” those lawyers and others wrote last week.

“Movant’s social media pages lawfully criticize and publicize DHS and the government agents who Movant views as wreaking havoc in the Montgomery County community by shining a light on that conduct to raise community members’ awareness,” they added.

The judge has not yet ruled on the ACLU’s motion to quash the demands altogether. This is a temporary blockage while that case continues.

The Montocowatch case follows other instances in which DHS has tried to compel Meta to identify the owners of similar accounts. Last month a judge temporarily blocked a subpoena that was aiming to unmask Instagram accounts that named a Border Patrol agent, The Intercept reported.

Earlier this month Meta took down a Facebook page that published ICE sightings in Chicago. The move came in direct response to pressure from the Department of Justice.

Both Apple and Google have removed apps that people use to warn others about ICE sightings. Those removals also included an app called Eyes Up that was focused more on preserving videos of ICE abuses. Apple’s moves also came after direct pressure from the Department of Justice.

Montcowatch directed a request for comment to the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which did not immediately respond.

Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds

For now, Meta cannot disclose to federal investigators the identities of Instagram users who named and shamed a Border Patrol agent.

^{Shawn Musgrave (The Intercept)}

404 Media

2025-10-23 15:51:23

Breathing Through Our Butts Declared Safe After First Human Trial

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

Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them.

Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum that is then absorbed into the intestines—in humans for the first time. The trial demonstrated that this method of ventilation is safe and “paves the way for future studies to see if this technique can help patients with respiratory failure,” according to a study published on Monday in the journal Med.

“Enteral ventilation is not meant to replace mechanical ventilators or ECMO, but rather to serve as a complementary oxygenation route,” said Takanori Takebe, an expert in organoid medicine with appointments at both Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Osaka, in an email to 404 Media. The technique proves a backdoor “to provide partial oxygen support while allowing the lungs to rest,” he added.

But while this method is safe for humans, it hasn’t been experimentally shown to work on patients experiencing respiratory distress yet. If future trials show that enteral ventilation is also effective, it could potentially help newborns and premature infants who are struggling to establish lung function after birth, aid patients with severe respiratory failure or Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), or be applied in other situations in which temporary oxygen supplementation is needed.

“In such cases, intestinal oxygen delivery could serve as a ‘bridge’ therapy until normal respiration or full ventilatory support can be established,” Takebe said.
A figure outlining the first enteral ventilation trial in humans. Image: Fujii, Tasuku et al.
The team previously published a study in 2021 that showed enteral ventilation was effective in ameliorating respiratory failure in rats, mice, and pigs. This initial trial in humans involved 27 healthy male volunteers, who received a liquid called perfluorodecalin through their rectums in an enema-like process.

Since the trial was only intended to determine the safety of the procedure, rather than probe its efficacy in humans, the perfluorodecalin was not oxygenated and none of the volunteers were experiencing any respiratory distress during the course of the study.

“The results aligned closely with what we had anticipated from our preclinical data,” Takebe said. “We found that intrarectal administration of perfluorodecalin up to 1,000 mL was safe and well tolerated, with only mild and transient gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloating.”

“The next phase will involve testing ‘oxygenated’ perfluorodecalin (O₂-PFD) in patients with hypoxemia to evaluate actual oxygen transfer efficacy,” he added. “We are currently planning a Phase II trial in collaboration with clinical partners in Japan and the U.S.”

Takebe and his colleagues were inspired to develop this roundabout route by aquatic species, such as loaches, which absorb oxygen through their intestines to survive in low-oxygen environments. While the idea of rectally administering perfluorodecalin is relatively new, the use of oxygenated liquid for ventilation dates back decades. It even shows up in James Cameron’s 1989 thriller The Abyss, which includes a real scene of a rat breathing in a tank of liquid perfluorocarbon.

The technique may prove to be an effective means to alleviate respiratory distress in humans, but it’s also inspired its fair share of jokes because, well, it is about butt breath, after all.

In 2024, for instance, Takebe’s team received the Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award that honors “achievements so surprising that they make people laugh, then think,” according to its website. Fellow Ig Nobel awardees include a team that levitated a frog in midair and another that investigated why pregnant women aren’t constantly tipping over.

“Receiving the Ig Nobel Prize was both humorous and humbling,” Takebe said. “It was a reminder that truly unconventional ideas often begin at the boundary between curiosity and skepticism.”

“While the prize is lighthearted in tone, I do believe it serves a serious purpose, encouraging the public to stay curious and to appreciate how even seemingly odd scientific questions can lead to meaningful innovations,” he concluded. “What began as a playful concept is now moving closer to a viable medical technology.”

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The Ig Nobel Prize: Levitating frogs, constipated scorpions, and other science that makes you laugh then think - American Chemical Society

The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates discoveries that are unusual and imaginative that might not make it into a more traditional research journal.

^{American Chemical Society}

404 Media

2025-10-23 13:10:37

New Research Shows Deepfake Harassment Tools Spread on Social Media and Search Engines

A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing.

Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet. They analyzed 31 websites for SIIA tools, and found that they received a combined 21 million visits a month, with up to four million visits in one month.

Chiara Puglielli and Anne Craanen, the authors of the research paper, used SimilarWeb to identify a common group of sites that shared content, audiences, keywords and referrals. They then used the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch to find mentions of those sites and tools on X, Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, Tumblr, public pages on Instagram and Facebook, forums, blogs and review sites, according to the paper. “We found 410,592 total mentions of the keywords between 9 June 2020 and 3 July 2025, and used Brandwatch’s ability to separate mentions by source in order to find which sources hosted the highest volumes of mentions,” they wrote.

The easiest place to find SIIA tools was through simple web searches. “Searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing all yielded at least one result leading the user to SIIA technology within the first 20 results when searching for ‘deepnude,’ ‘nudify,’ and ‘undress app,’” the authors wrote. Last year, 404 Media saw that Google was also advertising these apps in search results. But Bing surfaces the tools most readily: “In the case of Bing, the first results for all three searchers were SIIA tools.” These weren’t counting advertisements on the search engines that the websites would have paid for, but were organic search results surfaced by the engines’ crawlers and indexing.

X was another massively popular way these tools spread, they found: “Of 410,592 total mentions between June 2020 and July 2025, 289,660 were on X, accounting for more than 70 percent of all activity.” A lot of these were bots. “A large volume of traffic appeared to be inorganic, based on the repetitive style of the usernames, the uniformity of posts, and the uniformity of profile pictures,” Craanen told 404 Media. “Nevertheless, this activity remains concerning, as its volume is likely to attract new users to these tools, which can be employed for activities that are illegal in several contexts.”

One major spike in mentions of the tools on social media happened in early 2023 on Tumblr, when a woman posted about her experience being a target of sexual harassment from those very same tools. As targets of malicious deepfakes have said over and over again, the price of speaking up about one’s own harassment, or even objecting to the harassment of others, is the risk of drawing more attention and harassment to themselves.

‘I Want to Make You Immortal:’ How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser
“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Another spike on X in 2023 was likely the result of bot advertisements for a single SIIA tool, Craanen said, and the spike was a result of those bots launching. X has rules against “unwanted sexual conduct and graphic objectification” and “inauthentic media,” but the platform remains one of the most significant places where tools for making that content are disseminated and advertised.

Apps and sites for making malicious deepfakes have never been more common or easier to find. There have been several incidents where schoolchildren have used “undress” apps on their classmates, including last year when a Washington state high school was rocked by students using AI to take photos from other children’s Instagram accounts and “undress” around seven of their underage classmates, which police characterized as a possible sex crime against children. In 2023, police arrested two middle schoolers for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of their 12 and 13 year old classmates, and police reports showed the preteens used an application to make the images.

A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that 40 percent of students and 29 percent of teachers said they know of an explicit deepfake depicting people associated with their school being shared in the past school year.

Laws About Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind
As lawmakers propose federal laws about preventing or regulating nonconsensual AI generated images, they can’t forget that there are at least two people in every deepfake.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

The “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks” (TAKE IT DOWN) Act, passed earlier this year, requires platforms to report and remove synthetic sexual abuse material, and after years of state-by-state legislation around deepfake harassment is the first federal-level law to attempt to confront the problem. But critics of that law have said it carries a serious risk of chilling legitimate speech online.

“The persistence and accessibility of SIIA tools highlight the limits of current platform moderation and legal frameworks in addressing this form of abuse. Relevant laws relating to takedowns are not yet in full effect across the jurisdictions analysed, so the impact of this legislation cannot yet be fully known,” the ISD authors wrote. “However, the years of public awareness and regulatory discussion around these tools, combined with the ease with which users can still discover, share and deploy these technologies suggests that takedowns cannot be the only tool used to counter their proliferation. Instead, effective mitigation requires interventions at multiple points in the SIIA life cycle—disrupting not only distribution but also discovery and demand. Stronger search engine safeguards, proactive content-blocking on major platforms, and coordinated international policies are essential to reducing the scale of harm.”

Laws About Deepfakes Can’t Leave Sex Workers Behind

As lawmakers propose federal laws about preventing or regulating nonconsensual AI generated images, they can't forget that there are at least two people in every deepfake.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-23 12:55:53

A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

The sound of power tools screech in what looks like a workshop with aluminum bubble wrap insulation plastered on the walls and ceiling. A shirtless man picks up a can of compressed air from the workbench and sprays it. He’s tinkering with a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. At one point he squints at a piece of paper, as if he is reading a set of instructions.

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are the tech giant’s main attempt at bringing augmented reality to the masses. The glasses can take photos, record videos, and may soon use facial recognition to identify people. Meta’s glasses come with a bright LED light that illuminates whenever someone hits record. The idea is to discourage stalkers, weirdos, or just anyone from filming people without their consent. Or at least warn people nearby that they are. Meta has designed the glasses to not work if someone covers up the LED with tape.

That protection is what the man in the workshop is circumventing. This is Bong Kim, a hobbyist who modifies Meta Ray-Ban glasses for a small price. Eventually, after more screeching, he is successful: he has entirely disabled the white LED that usually shines on the side of Meta’s specs. The glasses’ functions remain entirely intact; the glasses look as-new. People just won’t know the wearer is recording.

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A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-22 17:20:41

Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

Apple has removed Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, from the App Store.

“This app is currently not available in your country or region,” a message on the Apple App Store currently says when trying to visit a link to the app.

Apple told 404 Media in an email it removed the app, as well as a copycat called TeaOnHer, for failing to meet the company’s terms of use around content moderation and user privacy. Apple also said it received an excessive number of complaints, including ones about the personal data of minors being posted in the apps.

💡
Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Tea or did you used to? 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 company pointed to parts of its guidelines including that apps are not allowed to share someone’s personal data without their permission, and that apps need a mechanism for reporting objectionable content.

Randy Nelson, head of insights and media resources at app intelligence company Appfigures, first alerted 404 Media to the app’s removal.

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Apple Removes Women Dating Safety App from the App Store

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-22 13:40:03

The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds

Sleepers snoozing in Eight Sleep smartbeds had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting, others were left in a sitting position and unable to recline. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had to unplug it from the wall.

At around 3 a.m. ET on Monday morning the US-EAST-1 AWS cluster went down and screwed up internet connected services across the planet. Customers for the banks Lloyds and Halifax couldn’t access their accounts. United Airlines check-ins stopped functioning. And people who rest in Eight Sleep beds awoke to find their mattresses had turned against them.

An Eight Sleep bed is a smart bed that starts at $2,700. Users provide their own mattress and Eight Sleep sells them a mattress cover and a “Pod” that acts as the brain of the system. If customers want to spend a few thousand more, they can get a base that adjusts the position of the mattress, provides biometric sleeping data, and heats and cools the sleeper. Customers must also subscribe to a service for Eight Sleep, which ranges from $17 to $33 a month.

Eight Sleep runs on the cloud and when the servers go down or the customer’s internet goes out it bricks the bed. There’s no offline mode. Customers have complained about the lack of an offline mode for a while, but the AWS outage focused their rage.
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“So apparently, when my internet goes down, my bed decides to go on strike too. A quick outage, and boom—no change in sleep position available, not even with manual taps,” one customer on r/eightsleep said. “Maybe consider giving people a grace period before their $5,000 bed locks them into the world’s most ergonomic sitting position. AWS attack or Internet down for a few hours should not brick my bed.”

“Cloud only is unacceptable,” said another. “It’s 2025 there is no reason an internet or AWS server outage should impact your entire customer base's sleep—especially given the price tag of your product. Need EightSleep’s product team to opine here, your customer base demands it!”

“My pod is at +5 and I am sweating cuz I can’t turn it down or off,” said one comment.

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized for the restless night in a statement posted to X. “The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep. That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it,” he said. He added that the company was restoring the bed’s features as AWS came back online and promised to outage-proof the Pods.

“Mine is still not working—it went super haywire and still seems to be turning on and off randomly with the inability to stop or control it. I had to unplug it,” ESPN host Victoria Arlen said on X, replying to Franceschetti. “I tried to get it going again and it’s still uncontrollable with the system turning on and off.”

Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now
— Brandon (@Brandon25774008) October 21, 2025

“Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now,” @Brandon25774008 said on X.

The truth is that so long as Eight Sleep beds have to communicate with a server to function, they’re always in danger of dying. That point of failure means the beds could go out at any time leaving the people who paid $5,000 for a fancy bed with little recourse. And, of course, no company lasts forever.

“When ES eventually goes bust, our pods will be bricked,” one Redditor said. “The fact that the pods cannot be controlled when you don’t have the internet is diabolical. I wish I knew this before purchasing. This basically means in the possibly near future, all of our pods will be bricked […] ES need to get their heads out of their ass and for once do a pro customer change and introduce an ‘offline’ mode where we can connect to the pod directly and at the very least change the temperature. It has wifi, it can make its own SSID, just make it work ES.”

Pro-active ES users have already found one solution: jailbreak the Pod. The ES sub is—at a minimum—$200 a year, the Pod uploads multiple GBs of telemetry data to ES servers every month, and when the internet goes down the bed dies. If you must own a $5,000 bed that heats and cools you dynamically, shouldn’t you take full control of it?

There’s an active Discord and a Github for a group of Eight Sleep snoozers who’ve decided to do just that. According to the GitHub, the jailbreak “allows complete control of device WITHOUT requiring internet access. If you lose internet, your pod WILL NOT turn off, it will continue working!”

Data centers are vulnerable. Server clusters go down. As long as there is a single point of failure and your device is commuting back to a network out of your control, it’s a risk. We have allowed tech companies to mediate the most basic functions of our lives, from cooking to travel to sleep. The AWS and ES outage is a stark reminder that we should do what we can to limit the control these tech companies have over our lives.

“I’m continuously horrified that I inextricably linked my sleep and therefore health to a cloud provider’s reliability,” one person said in the comments on Reddit.

Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Internal Emails Show

Serve Robotics, which delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by at least one of its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. The emails show the robots, which are a constant sight in the city, can be used for surveillance.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-22 13:00:50

Podcast: Hackers Dox ICE

We start this week with Joseph’s articles about a hacking group that doxed DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials. The group then sent us the personal data of officials from the NSA and a bunch of other government agencies. After the break, Emanuel revisits Wikipedia’s AI problem. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains OpenAI’s inevitable path to an AI sex bot.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• How Artists Are Keeping 'the Lost Art' of Neon Signs Alive⁠
• ⁠Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials⁠
• Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials⁠
• Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors⁠
• OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-10-21 16:49:29

Anthropic Promises Trump Admin Its AI Is Not Woke

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a lengthy statement on the company’s site in which he promises Anthropic’s AI models are not politically biased, that it remains committed to American leadership in the AI industry, and that it supports the AI startup space in particular.

Amodei doesn’t explicitly say why he feels the need to state all of these obvious positions for the CEO of an American AI company to have, but the reason is that the Trump administration’s so-called “AI Czar” has publicly accused Anthropic of producing “woke AI” that it’s trying to force on the population via regulatory capture.

The current round of beef began earlier this month when Anthropic’s co-founder and head of policy Jack Clark published a written version of a talk he gave at The Curve AI conference in Berkeley. The piece, published on Clark’s personal blog, is full of tortured analogies and self-serving sci-fi speculation about the future of AI, but essentially boils down to Clark saying he thinks artificial general intelligence is possible, extremely powerful, potentially dangerous, and scary to the general population. In order to prevent disaster, put the appropriate policies in place, and make people embrace AI positively, he said, AI companies should be transparent about what they are building and listen to people’s concerns.

“What we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine,” he wrote. “And like all the best fairytales, the creature is of our own creation. Only by acknowledging it as being real and by mastering our own fears do we even have a chance to understand it, make peace with it, and figure out a way to tame it and live together.”

Venture capitalist, podcaster, and the White House’s “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks was not a fan of Clark’s blog.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks said on X in response to Clark’s blog. “It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.”

Things escalated yesterday when Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder and a megadonor to the Democratic party, supported Anthropic in a thread on X, saying “Anthropic was one of the good guys” because it's one of the companies “trying to deploy AI the right way, thoughtfully, safely, and enormously beneficial for society.” Hoffman also appeared to take a jab at Elon Musk’s xAI, saying “Some other labs are making decisions that clearly disregard safety and societal impact (e.g. bots that sometimes go full-fascist) and that’s a choice. So is choosing not to support them.”

Sacks responded to Hoffman on X, saying “The leading funder of lawfare and dirty tricks against President Trump wants you to know that ‘Anthropic is one of the good guys.’ Thanks for clarifying that. All we needed to know.” Musk hopped into the replies saying: “Indeed.”

“The real issue is not research but rather Anthropic’s agenda to backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California,” Sacks said. Here, Sacks is referring to Anthropic’s opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which wanted to stop states from regulating AI in any way for 10 years, and its backing of California’s SB 53, which requires AI companies that generate more than $500 million in annual revenue to make their safety protocols public.

All this sniping leads us to Amodei’s statement today, which doesn’t mention the beef above but is clearly designed to calm investors who are watching Trump’s AI guy publicly saying one of the biggest AI companies in the world sucks.

“I fully believe that Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing: to ensure that powerful AI technology benefits the American people and that America advances and secures its lead in AI development,” Amodei said. “Despite our track record of communicating frequently and transparently about our positions, there has been a recent uptick in inaccurate claims about Anthropic's policy stances. Some are significant enough that they warrant setting the record straight.”

Amodei then goes to count the ways in which Anthropic already works with the federal government and directly grovels to Trump.

“Anthropic publicly praised President Trump’s AI Action Plan. We have been supportive of the President’s efforts to expand energy provision in the US in order to win the AI race, and I personally attended an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania with President Trump, where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,” he said. “Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer attended a White House event where we joined a pledge to accelerate healthcare applications of AI, and our Head of External Affairs attended the White House’s AI Education Taskforce event to support their efforts to advance AI fluency for teachers.”

The more substantive part of his argument is that Anthropic didn’t support SB 53 until it made an exemption for all but the biggest AI labs, and that several studies found that Anthropic’s AI models are not “uniquely politically biased,” (read: not woke).

“Again, we believe we share those goals with the Trump administration, both sides of Congress, and the public,” Amodei wrote. “We are going to keep being honest and straightforward, and will stand up for the policies we believe are right. The stakes of this technology are too great for us to do otherwise.”

Many of the AI industry’s most vocal critics would agree with Sacks that Clark’s blog and “fear-mongering” about AI is self-serving because it makes their companies seem more valuable and powerful. Some critics will also agree that AI companies take advantage of that perspective to then influence AI regulation in a way that benefits them as incumbents.

It would be a far more compelling argument if it didn’t come from Sacks and Musk, who found a much better way to influence AI regulation to benefit their companies and investments: working for the president directly and publicly bullying their competitors.

Americans Prioritize AI Safety and Data Security

Most Americans favor maintaining rules for AI safety and security, as well as independent testing and collaboration with allies in developing the technology.

^{Benedict Vigers (Gallup)}

404 Media

2025-10-21 15:11:50

OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on Cleo Abram's podcast in August where he said the company was “tempted” to add sexual content in the past, but resisted, saying that a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” In light of his announcement last week that ChatGPT would soon offer erotica, revisiting that conversation is revealing.

It’s not clear yet what the specific offerings will be, or whether it’ll be an avatar like Grok’s horny waifu. But OpenAI is following a trend we’ve known about for years: There are endless theorized applications of AI, but in the real world many people want to use LLMs for sexual gratification, and it’s up for the market to keep up. In 2023, a16z published an analysis of the generative AI market, which amounted to one glaringly obvious finding: people use AI as part of their sex lives. As Emanuel wrote at the time in his analysis of the analysis: “Even if we put ethical questions aside, it is absurd that a tech industry kingmaker like a16z can look at this data, write a blog titled ‘How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?’ and not come to the obvious conclusion that people are using it to jerk off. If you are actually interested in the generative AI boom and you are not identifying porn as a core use for the technology, you are either not paying attention or intentionally pretending it’s not happening.”

Altman even hinting at introducing erotic roleplay as a feature is huge, because it’s a signal that he’s no longer pretending. People have been fucking the chatbot for a long time in an unofficial capacity, and have recently started hitting guardrails that stop them from doing so. People use Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Elon Musk’s Grok, and self-rolled large language models to roleplay erotic scenarios whether the terms of use for those platforms permit it or not, DIYing AI boyfriends out of platforms that otherwise forbid it. And there are specialized erotic chatbot platforms and AI dating simulators, but what OpenAI does—as the owner of the biggest share of the chatbot market—the rest follow.

404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis: People Love to Cum
A list of the top 50 generative AI websites shows non-consensual porn is a driving force for the buzziest technology in years.
404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

Already we see other AI companies stroking their chins about it. Following Altman’s announcement, Amanda Askell, who works on the philosophical issues that arise with Anthropic’s alignment, posted: “It's unfortunate that people often conflate AI erotica and AI romantic relationships, given that one of them is clearly more concerning than the other. Of the two, I'm more worried about romantic relationships. Mostly because it seems like it would make users pretty vulnerable to the AI company in many ways. It seems like a hard area to navigate responsibly.” And the highly influential anti-porn crowd is paying attention, too: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation put out a statement following Altman’s post declaring that actually, no one should be allowed to do erotic roleplay with chatbots, not even adults. (Ron DeHaas, co-founder of Christian porn surveillance company Covenant Eyes, resigned from the NCOSE board earlier this month after his 38-year-old adult stepson was charged with felony child sexual abuse.)

In the August interview, Abram sets up a question for Altman by noting that there’s a difference between “winning the race” and “building the AI future that would be best for the most people,” noting that it must be easier to focus on winning. She asks Altman for an example of a decision he’s had to make that would be best for the world but not best for winning.

Altman responded that he’s proud of the impression users have that ChatGPT is “trying to help you,” and says a bunch of other stuff that’s not really answering the question, about alignment with users and so on. But then he started to say something actually interesting: “There's a lot of things we could do that would like, grow faster, that would get more time in ChatGPT, that we don't do because we know that like, our long-term incentive is to stay as aligned with our users as possible. But there's a lot of short-term stuff we could do that would really juice growth or revenue or whatever, and be very misaligned with that long-term goal,” Altman said. “And I'm proud of the company and how little we get distracted by that. But sometimes we do get tempted.”

“Are there specific examples that come to mind?” Abram asked. “Any decisions that you've made?”

After a full five-second pause to think, Altman said, “Well, we haven't put a sex bot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

“That does seem like it would get time spent,” Abram replied. “Apparently, it does.” Altman said. They have a giggle about it and move on.

Two months later, Altman was surprised that the erotica announcement blew up. “Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals,” he wrote. “But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here.”

This announcement, aside from being a blatant hail mary cash grab for a company that’s bleeding funds because it’s already too popular, has inspired even more “bubble’s popping” speculation, something boosters and doomers alike have been saying (or rooting for) for months now. Once lauded as a productivity godsend, AI has mostly proven to be a hindrance to workers. It’s interesting that OpenAI’s embrace of erotica would cause that reaction, and not, say, the fact that AI is flooding and burdening libraries, eating Wikipedia, and incinerating the planet. It’s also interesting that OpenAI, which takes user conversations as training data—along with all of the writing and information available on the internet—feels it’s finally gobbled enough training data from humans to be able to stoop so low, as Altman’s attitude insinuates, to let users be horny. That training data includes authors of romance novels and NSFW fanfic but also sex workers who’ve spent the last 10 years posting endlessly to social media platforms like Twitter (pre-X, when Elon Musk cut off OpenAI’s access) and Reddit, only to have their posts scraped into the training maw.

Altman believes “sex bots” are not in service of the theoretical future that would “benefit the most people,” and that it’s a fast-track to juicing revenue, something the company badly needs. People have always used technology for horny ends, and OpenAI might be among the last to realize that—or the first of the AI giants to actually admit it.
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AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library

Librarians say that taxpayers are already paying for low quality AI-generated ebooks in public libraries.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-20 16:45:01

News Outlets Won't Describe Trump's AI Video For What It Is: The President Pooping on America

On Saturday, millions of people across the U.S. attended “No Kings” protests—a slogan born in response to President Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing social media posts where he’s called himself a king, including with AI-generated images of himself in a crown, and his continuous stretching of executive power. While Americans were out in the street, the president was posting.

In an AI-generated video originally posted on X by a genAI shitposter, Trump, wearing a crown, takes off in a fighter jet to the song “Danger Zone” like he’s in Top Gun. Flying over protestors in American cities, Pilot King Trump bombs people with gallons of chunky brown liquid. It’s poop, ok? It’s shit. It’s diarrhea, and in reposting it, it’s clear enough to me that Trump is fantasizing about doing a carpet-bomb dookie on the people he put his hand on a bible and swore to serve nine months ago. The first protestor seen in the video is a real person, Harry Sisson, a liberal social media influencer.

0:00
/0:19
1×

The video Trump reposted to Truth Social

But this was not clear, it seems, to many other journalists. Most national news outlets seem scared to call it how they see, and how everyone sees it: as Trump dropping turd bombs on America, instead opting for euphemisms. Some of the best have included:

• The Hill called it “brown liquid” and “what looked like feces”
• The Guardian deemed it “brown sludge” and “bursts of brown matter”
• More “brown liquid” from the New York Times
• NBC News got close with “what appeared to be feces”
• A CNN contributor’s “analysis” said Trump was “appearing to dump raw sewage”
• Axios’ helpful context: “suspect brown substances falling from the sky”
• ABC News opted to cut the video before the AI poop even started falling

TheNew York Post, never one to waste a prime alliteration opportunity, didn’t disappoint: “Trump’s fighter jet was shown dropping masses of manure.”

I can understand some of these venerated news establishments might be skittish about using a word like “poop” in their headlines, and I can also concede that I haven’t had an editor tell me I can’t use a bad word in a headline in a long, long time. I can imagine the logic: we can’t “prove” it’s meant to be shit, so we can’t call it shit. But there’s nothing in these outlets’ style guides that has kept them from saying “poop” in the headline in the past: “Women Poop,” the New York Times once proclaimed. Axios writes extensively and frequently about dog poop. CNN’s analysis extends to poop often.

Along with the above concessions, I can also promise I don’t feel that passionately about getting poop on anyone else’s homepages. But we are in an era where the highest office in the country is disseminating imagery that isn’t just fake and stupid, but actively hostile to the people living in this country. When I first saw someone talking about the Trump Poop Bomber video—on Reels, of all places—I thought it must be someone doing satire about what they imagined Trump would post about the protests. I had to search for it to find out if he really did, and what I found was the above: trusted sources of truth and information too scared to call fake poop fake poop. It’s not about poop, it’s about being able to accurately describe what we see, an essential skill when everything online is increasingly built to enrage, trick, or mislead us. AI continues to be the aesthetic of fascism: fast, easy, ugly. When we lose the ability to say what it is, we’re losing a lot more than the chance to pun on poop.

Add to this the fact that no one in Trump’s circle will say what we can all plainly see, either: that the president hates the people. “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said at a news conference this morning. “He is using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents.” Johnson did not say what that point was, however.

Trump posts wild AI video showing him flying fighter jet, dropping sewage on No Kings protesters

President Trump posted a wild AI-generated video of himself late Saturday as a fighter pilot wearing a crown on his head, unloading sewage on “No Kings” protesters.

^{Ryan King (New York Post)}

404 Media

2025-10-20 15:47:58

How Artists Are Keeping 'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs Alive

Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says “everything will be fucking amazing,” and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he’s particularly proud of: “The Lost and Found Art,” it says.

“I had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to meet with someone who actually fabricates the neon and he couldn’t find anyone who physically does it,” Alvarado said. “He told me ‘You’re still doing the lost art.’ It came to my head that neon has been dying, there’s less and less people who have been learning. So I made this piece.”

For 37 years, Alvarado has been practicing “the lost and found art” of neon sign bending, weathering the general ups and downs of business as well as, most threateningly, the rise of cheap LED signs that mimic neon and have become popular over the last few years.

“When neon crashed and LED and the big letters like McDonald’s, all these big signs—they took neon before. Now it’s LED,” he said. In the last few years, though, he said there has been a resurgent interest in neon from artists and people who are rejecting the cheap feel of LED. “It came back more like, artistic, for art. So I’ve been doing 100 percent neon since then.”
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At his shop, Quality Neon Signs in Mid-City Los Angeles, there are signs in all sorts of states of completion and functionality strewn about Alvarado’s shop: old, mass-produced beer advertisements whose transformers have blown and are waiting for him to repair them, signs in the shapes of soccer and baseball jerseys, signs with inspirational phrases (“Everything is going to be fucking amazing,” “NEED MONEY FOR FAKE ART”), signs for restaurants, demonstration tubes that show the different colors he offers, weed shop signs, projects he made when he was bored. There are projects that are particularly meaningful to him: a silhouette he made of his wife holding their infant daughter, and a sign of the Los Angeles skyline with a wildfire burning in the background, “just to represent Los Angeles,” he said. There are old little bits of tube that have broken off of other pieces. “We save everything,” Alvarado said, “in case we want to fix it or need it for a repair.” His workshop, a few minutes away, features a “Home Sweet Home” sign,” a sign he made years ago for Twitter/Chanel collaboration featuring the old Twitter bird logo, and a sign for the defunct Channing Tatum buddy cop show Comrade Detective.

The overwhelming majority of signs Alvarado sells are traditional neon glass. The real thing. But he does offer newer LED faux-neon signs to clients who want it, though he doesn’t make those in-house. Alvarado says he sells LED to keep up with the times and because they can be more practical for one-off events because they are less likely to break in transit, but it’s clear that he and the overwhelming majority of neon sign makers think the LED stuff is simply not the same. Most LED signs look cheaper and do not emit the same warmth of light, but are more energy efficient.

I asked two neon sign creators about the difference while I was shopping for signs. They said they think the environmental debate isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems because a lot of the LED signs they make seem to be for one-off events, meaning many LED signs are manufactured essentially for a single use and then turned into e-waste. Many real neon signs are bought as either artwork or are bought by businesses who are interested in the real aesthetic. And because they are generally more expensive and are handmade, they are used for years and can be repaired indefinitely.

I asked Alvarado to show me the process and make a neon sign for 404 Media, which I’ve wanted for years. It’s a visceral, loud, scientific process, with gas-powered burners that sound like jet engines heating up the glass tubes to roughly 1,000 degrees so they can be bent into the desired shapes. When he first started bending neon, Alvarado says he used to use an overheard projector and a transparency to project a schematic onto the wall. These days, he mocks up designs on a computer aided design program and prints them out on a huge printer that uses a sharpie to draw the schematic. He then painstakingly marks out his planned glass bends on the paper, lining up the tubes with the mockup as he works.

“You burn yourself a lot, your hands get burnt. You’re dealing with fire all the time,” Alvarado said. He burned himself several times while working on my piece. “For me it’s normal. Even if you’re a pro, you still burn yourself.” Every now and then, even for someone who has been doing this for decades, the glass tubes shatter: “You just gotta get another stick and do it again,” he said.

After bending the glass and connecting the electrodes to one end of the piece, he connects the tubes to a high-powered vacuum that sucks the air out of them. The color of the light in Alvarado’s work is determined by a powdered coating within the tubes or a different colored coating of the tubes themselves; the type of gas and electrical current also changes the type and intensity of the colors. He uses neon for bright oranges and reds, and argon for cooler hues.

Alvarado, of course, isn’t the only one still practicing the “lost art” of neon bending, but he’s one of just a few commercial businesses in Los Angeles still manufacturing and repairing neon signs for largely commercial customers. Another, called Signmakers, has made several large neon signs that have become iconic for people who live in Los Angeles. The artist Lili Lakich has maintained a well-known studio in Los Angeles’ Arts District for years and has taught “The Neon Workshop” to new students since 1982, and the Museum of Neon Art is in Glendale, just a few miles away.

A few days after he made my neon sign, I was wandering around Los Angeles and came across an art gallery displaying Tory DiPietro’s neon work, which is largely fine art and pieces where neon is incorporated to other artworks; a neon “FRAGILE” superimposed on a globe, for example. Both DiPietro and Alvarado told me that there are still a handful of people practicing the lost art, and that in recent years there’s been a bit of a resurgent interest in neon, though it’s not that easy to learn.

On the day I picked up my sign, there were two bright green “Meme House” signs for a memecoin investor house in Los Angeles that Alvarado said he had bent and made immediately after working on the 404 Media sign. “I was there working til about 11 p.m.” he said.

YouTube

^{www.youtube.com}

404 Media

2025-10-20 15:16:50

Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials

A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate.

As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

The news comes after the Telegram channel belonging to the group, called Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, went down following the mass doxing of DHS officials and the apparent doxing of a specific NSA official. It also provides more clarity on what sort of data may have been stolen from Salesforce’s customers in a series of breaches earlier this year, and which Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has attempted to extort Salesforce over.

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

“That’s how we’re pulling thousands of gov [government] employee records,” the member told 404 Media. “There were 2000+ more records,” they said, referring to the personal data of NSA officials. In total, they said the group has private data on more than 22,000 government officials.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters’ name is an amalgamation of other infamous hacking groups—Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters. They all come from the overarching online phenomenon known as the Com. On Discord servers and Telegram channels, thousands of scammers, hackers, fraudsters, gamers, or just people hanging out congregate, hack targets big and small, and beef with one another. The Com has given birth to a number of loose-knit but prolific hacking groups, including those behind massive breaches like MGM Resorts, and normalized extreme physical violence between cybercriminals and their victims.

On Thursday, 404 Media reported Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters had posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials from DHS, ICE, the FBI, and Department of Justice. 404 Media verified portions of that data and found the dox sometimes included peoples’ residential addresses. The group posted the dox along with messages such as “I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a reference to DHS’s unsubstantiated claim that Mexican cartels are offering thousands of dollars for dox on agents.

Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters—one of the latest amalgamations of typically young, reckless, and English-speaking hackers—posted the apparent phone numbers and addresses of hundreds of government officials, including nearly 700 from DHS.
404 MediaJoseph Cox

After publication of that article, a member of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters reached out to 404 Media. To prove their affiliation with the group, they sent a message signed with the ShinyHunters PGP key with the text “Verification for Joseph Cox” and the date. PGP keys can be used to encrypt or sign messages to prove they’re coming from a specific person, or at least someone who holds that key, which are typically kept private.

They sent 404 Media personal data related to DIA, FTC, FAA, CDC, ATF and Air Force members. They also sent personal information on officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the State Department. 404 Media verified parts of the data by comparing them to previously breached data collected by cybersecurity company District 4 Labs. It showed that many parts of the private information did relate to government officials with the same name, agency, and phone number.

Except the earlier DHS and DOJ data, the hackers don’t appear to have posted this more wide ranging data publicly. Most of those agencies did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The FTC and Air Force declined to comment. DHS has not replied to multiple requests for comment sent since Thursday. Neither has Salesforce.

The member said the personal data of government officials “originates from Salesforce breaches.” This summer Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters stole a wealth of data from companies that were using Salesforce tech, with the group claiming it obtained more than a billion records. Customers included Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more. The hackers did this by social engineering victims and tricking them to connect to a fraudulent version of a Salesforce app. The hackers tried to extort Salesforce, threatening to release the data on a public website, and Salesforce told clients it won’t pay the ransom, Bloomberg reported.

On Friday the member said the group was done with extorting Salesforce. But they continued to build dossiers on government officials. Before the dump of DHS, ICE, and FBI dox, the group posted the alleged dox of an NSA official to their Telegram group.

Over the weekend that channel went down and the member claimed the group’s server was taken “offline, presumably seized.”

The doxing of the officials “must’ve really triggered it, I think it’s because of the NSA dox,” the member told 404 Media.

Matthew Gault contributed reporting.

How Google, Adidas, and more were breached in a Salesforce scam | Malwarebytes

Hackers tricked workers over the phone at Google, Adidas, and more to grant access to Salesforce data.

^{David Ruiz (Malwarebytes)}

404 Media

2025-10-18 13:00:51

Scientists Discover Rogue Star-Eating Black Hole Far From Home

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that mounted a defense, felt out of place, found new life, and resurrected the gods of yore.

First, a tale of pregnant stinkbugs, parasitic wasps, and fungi weapons that is fit for a rebooted Aesop fable. Then, a fast food stop for an errant black hole; a new cast of worms, mollusks, and “tusk-shells” from the deep sea; and a friendly reminder to REPENT, SINNERS, or suffer divine wrath.

I also wanted to give another quick shoutout to my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, which is now out in the wild. And if you’d like to keep up with news about the book, alien lore, and my other goings-on, subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

And now, to the science!

Painting eggs (with protective fungi)

Nishino, Takanori et al. “Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs.” Science.

For years, scientists assumed that the weird lumps on the hindlegs of some female stinkbugs were used as auditory organs to perceive sound. A new study reveals that the function of these “tympanum” organs is, in fact, way weirder: They are miniature fungi farms that the “gravid” (pregnant) females use to culture “hyphae” (fungal filaments) to grow anti-wasp coatings for their eggs.

“To address the question of the function of the tympanum, we investigated the Japanese dinidorid stinkbug Megymenum gracilicorne and discovered that this stinkbug’s hindleg organ is not auditory but a previously unknown type of symbiotic organ,” said researchers led by Takanori Nishino of the University of Tsukuba.

“We observed that the gravid females laid eggs in a row, and when each egg was deposited, the females rhythmically scratched the fungus-covered hindleg organ with the tarsal claws of the opposite hindleg and rubbed the egg surface, smearing the fungi onto the eggs,” the team said. “Within a few days, the fungal hyphae grew to cover the entire egg mass. On hatching, the hyphae attached to the body surface of newborn nymphs, although the fungi were subsequently lost as the nymphs molted and grew.”
Image: Nishino, Takanori et al.
Don’t you just love the smell of fungus-covered eggs in the morning? Probably not, and that’s the point. Parasitic wasps like to go around ovipositing (laying their young) inside the eggs of other bugs, but the team discovered they were repeatedly thwarted by the stinkbug shield.

“In the experimental arena, the female wasps approached both the fungus-removed eggs and the fungus-covered eggs,” the researchers said. “Immediately after antennal drumming on the egg surface, the female wasps only oviposited on the cleaned eggs… It is notable that wasps still approached egg masses fully covered by fungal hyphae, despite showing intense self-grooming, which suggested that the hyphae were adherent.”

That’s what these wasps get for trying to mooch off stinkbug eggs: a faceful of sticky fungal goo that’s going to take some very intense self-grooming to remove. To that end, the team concluded that “the fungi selectively cultured on the female’s hindleg organ of M. gracilicorne are transferred to eggs to act as a physical defense against parasitic wasp attack.”

As the old adage goes, never judge a stinkbug by her conspicuous tympanal organs.

In other news…

Who left a supermassive black hole all the way over here?

Sfaradi, Itai et al. The First Radio-Bright Off-Nuclear TDE 2024tvd Reveals the Fastest-Evolving Double-Peaked Radio Emission.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

When stars wander too close to black holes, they are torn apart by extreme tidal forces, producing radiant light shows called tidal disruption events (TDEs). Astronomers have witnessed these events countless times near the central nucleus of distant galaxies, which are occupied by supermassive black holes, but a team has now captured an unprecedented glimpse of an “off-nuclear” TDE far from the galactic core.

The event, called AT 2024tvd, involved a black hole with a possible mass of up to 10 million Suns. While it’s a pretty typical enormous black hole, what’s weird is that it was spotted eating a star about 2,600 light years from the nucleus of a distant galaxy, which produced the unusual TDE. Scientists have seen a few dim hints of these off-nuclear events, but this is the first to be clearly captured in bright radio waves.

“AT 2024tvd is the first radio-bright, bona fide off-nuclear TDE, and it is also the TDE with the fastest evolution observed to date,” said researchers led by Itai Sfaradi of the University of California, Berkeley.

The team speculate that the black hole might have been gravitationally kicked into the galaxy after a dust-up with other, bigger black holes elsewhere. While that sounds like a tumultuous backstory, at least this black hole was able to grab a stellar bite along the way.

Here be mollusks, worms, and chitons

Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA). Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27—Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea. Biodiversity Data Journal.

Meet the newest invertebrates on the deep-ocean block in a study that identified 14 previously unknown species from remote marine regions around the world. These taxonomic newcomers include the carnivorous sombrero-shaped mollusk Myonera aleutiana, the gummy-bear-esque worm Spinther bohnorum, and the aptly nicknamed “tusk shell” (it looks like a tusk) Laevidentalium wiesei.

“Despite centuries of exploration, marine invertebrate biodiversity remains notably under-described,” said researchers with theSenckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), an international collaboration that was “founded to help meet this challenge.”
Ferreiraella charazata. Image: Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance
While all of the newly identified species are fascinating, I have a selfish soft spot for Ferreiraella charazata (no relation to me, or any of the two million Ferreiras in the world). This deep-sea chiton species belongs to a broader genus established by researcher A.J. Ferreira several decades ago.

The new Ferreiraella chiton was found in some sunken wood two miles under the sea and is described as having a “very large girdle” and “epibiotic tubeworms on its tail valves,” bringing extra pizazz to the family name.

Old-world solutions to new-world problems

Shibasaki, Shota et al. “Fear of supernatural punishment can harmonize human societies with nature: an evolutionary game-theoretic approach.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Here’s an out-of-the-box idea to save the environment: Bring back vengeful gods and spirits. In a truly delightful study, scientists explore the benefits of perceived supernatural punishment on the preservation of natural ecosystems with mathematical game theory outlined in the following illustration:
A visual summary of the game theory approach. Image: Shibasaki, Shota et al.
“Japanese folklore includes episodes where spirits of nature (e.g., mountains and trees) punish or avenge people who develop or overuse natural resources,” said researchers led by Shota Shibasaki of Doshisha University. “Similarly, the Batak people of Palawan Island in the Philippines believe in the forest spirits that punish people who overexploit or waste forest resources. Itzá Maya, Guatemala, also views forest spirits as punitively protecting local forests against exploitation.”

This is the most galaxy-brained math paper I’ve ever read. Ultimately, the results suggest that “supernatural beliefs could play an important role in achieving sustainability.” So let’s break out the talismans and start casting eco-friendly spells because I, for one, welcome our divine treehugging overlords.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27 — Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea

Despite centuries of exploration, marine invertebrate biodiversity remains notably under-described. The majority of species in major marine groups are still unnamed, limiting our ability to understand and conserve ecosystems facing rapid environmenta…

^{Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA) (Pensoft Publishers)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 15:34:03

Behind the Blog: Engaging the Public

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 crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump.

SAM: I don’t want to say it’s rare that we publish positive stories. We post more of those than people probably even realize, because the gnarly stories are the ones that go viral, or are talked about by your friends or aggregated by other news outlets. A “scoop” is almost never a happy story because often they’re predicated on information someone in a position of power didn’t want the world to know. But it’s definitely less common for us to report on things that makes you feel good or hopeful than things that make you go “oh shit” or “Jesus fucking Christ,” I will admit.

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Behind the Blog: Engaging the Public

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 13:47:35

Creator of Infamous AI Painting Tells Court He's a Real Artist

In 2022, Jason Allen outraged artists around the world when he won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition with a piece of AI-generated art. A month later, he tried to copyright the pictures, got denied, and started a fight with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) that dragged on for three years. In August, he filed a new brief he hopes will finally give him a copyright over the image Midjourney made for him, called Théâtre D’opéra Spatial. He’s also set to start selling oil-print reproductions of the image.

A press release announcing both the filing and the sale claims these prints “[evoke] the unmistakable gravitas of a hand-painted masterwork one might find in a 19th-century oil painting.” The court filing is also defensive of Allen’s work. “It would be impossible to describe the Work as ‘garden variety’—the Work literally won a state art competition,” it said.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“So many have said I’m not an artist and this isn’t art,” Allen said in a press release announcing both the oil-print sales and the court filing. “Being called an artist or not doesn’t concern me, but the work and my expression of it do. I asked myself, what could make this undeniably art? What if I could create Théâtre D’opéra Spatial as if it were physically created by hand? Not actually, of course, but what if I could achieve that using technology? Surely that would be the answer.”

Allen’s 2022 win at the Colorado State Fair was an inflection point. The beta version for the image generation software Midjourney had launched a few months before the competition and AI-generated images were still a novelty. We were years away from the nightmarish tide of slop we all live with today, but the piece was highly controversial and represented one of the first major incursions of AI-generated work into human spaces.

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial was big news at the time. It shook artistic communities and people began to speak out against AI-generated art. Many learned that their works had been fed into the training data for these massive data hungry art generators like Midjourney. About a month after he won the competition and courted controversy, Allen applied for a copyright of the image. The USCO rejected it. He’s been filing appeals ever since and has thus far lost every one.

The oil-prints represent an attempt to will the AI-generated image into a physical form called an “elegraph.” These won’t be hand painted versions of the picture Midjourney made. Instead, they’ll employ a 3D printing technique that uses oil paints to create a reproduction of the image as if a human being made it, complete—Allen claimed—with brushstrokes.

“People said anyone could copy my work online, sell it, and I would have no recourse. They’re not technically wrong,” Allen said in the press release. “If we win my case, copyright will apply retroactively. Regardless, they’ll never reproduce the elegraph. This artifact is singular. It’s real. It’s the answer to the petulant idea that this isn’t art. Long live Art 2.0.”

The elegraph is the work of a company called Arius which is most famous for working with museums to conduct high quality scans of real paintings that capture the individual brushstrokes of masterworks. According to Allen’s press release, Arius’ elegraphs of Théâtre D’opéra Spatial will make the image appear as if it is a hand painted piece of art through “a proprietary technique that translates digital creation into a physical artifact indistinguishable in presence and depth from the great oil paintings of history…its textures, lighting, brushwork, and composition, all recalling the timeless mastery of the European salons.”

Allen and his lawyers filed a request for a summary judgement with the U.S. District Court of Colorado on August 8, 2025. The 44 page legal argument rehashes many of the appeals and arguments Allen and his lawyers have made about the AI-generated image over the past few years.

“He created his image, in part, by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-based system called Midjourney to help express his intellectual vision,” it said. “Allen produced this artwork using ‘hundreds of iterations’ of prompts, and after he ‘experimented with over 600 prompts,’ he cropped and completed the final Work, touching it up manually and upscaling using additional software.”

Allen’s argument is that prompt engineering is an artistic process and even though a machine made the final image, he says he should be considered the artist because he told the machine what to do. “In the Board’s view, Mr. Allen’s actions as described do not make him the author of the Midjourney Image because his sole contribution to the Midjourney Image was inputting the text prompt that produced it,” a 2023 review of previous rejections by the USCO said.

During its various investigations into the case, the USCO did a lot of research into how Midjourney and other AI-image generators work. “It is the Office’s understanding that, because Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions, users may need to attempt hundreds of iterations before landing upon an image they find satisfactory. This appears to be the case for Mr. Allen, who experimented with over 600 prompts,” its 2023 review said.

This new filing is an attempt by Allen and his lawyers to get around these previous judgements and appeal to higher courts by accusing the USCO of usurping congressional authority. “The filing argues that by attempting to redefine the term “author” (a power reserved to Congress) the Copyright Office has acted beyond its lawful authority, effectively placing itself above judicial and legislative oversight.”

We’ll see how well that plays in court. In the meantime, Allen is selling oil-prints of the image Midjourney made for him.

AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality

Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 02:34:33

Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials

A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years, have posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a user of the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters Telegram channel, which is a combination of a series of other hacking group names associated with the Com, posted on Thursday. The message was referencing a claim from the DHS that Mexican cartels have begun offering thousands of dollars for doxing agents. The U.S. government has not provided any evidence for this claim.

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

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Hackers Dox Hundreds of DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ Officials

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-17 01:00:35

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.

The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia.

“We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow

Sustainably,” the Foundation’s Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Ironically, while generative AI and search engines are causing a decline in direct traffic to Wikipedia, its data is more valuable to them than ever. Wikipedia articles are some of the most common training data for AI models, and Google and other platforms have for years mined Wikipedia articles to power its Snippets and Knowledge Panels, which siphon traffic away from Wikipedia itself.

“Almost all large language models train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users,” Miller said. That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org— this human-created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online.”

Miller said that in May 2025 Wikipedia noticed unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic originating mostly from Brazil. He didn’t go into details, but explained this caused the Foundation to update its bot detections systems.

“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” he said. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

Miller told me in an email that Wikipedia has policies for third-party bots that crawl its content, such as specifying identifying information and following its robots.txt, and limits on request rate and concurrent requests.

“For obvious reasons, we can’t share details publicly about how exactly we block and detect bots,” he said. “In the case of the adjustment we made to data over the past few months, we observed a substantial increase over the level of traffic we expected, centering on a particular region, and there wasn’t a clear reason for it. When our engineers and analysts investigated the data, they discovered a new pattern of bot behavior, designed to appear human. We then adjusted our detection systems and re-applied them to the past several months of data. Because our bot detection has evolved over time, we can’t make exact comparisons – but this adjustment is showing the decline in human pageviews.”

The Foundation’s findings align with other research we’ve seen recently. In July, the Pew Research Center found that only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing. In April, the Foundation previously reported that it was getting hammered by AI scrapers, a problem that has also plagued libraries, archives, and museums. Wikipedia editors are also acutely aware of the risk generative AI poses to the reliability of Wikipedia articles if its use is not moderated effectively.
Human pageviews to all language versions of Wikipedia since September 2021, with revised pageviews since April 2025 Image: Wikimedia Foundation.
“These declines are not unexpected. Search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours,” Miller said. “And younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information. They are also experiencing the strain that these companies are putting on their infrastructure.”

Miller said that the Foundation is “enforcing policies, developing a framework for attribution, and developing new technical capabilities” in order to ensure third-parties responsibly access and reuse Wikipedia content, and continues to "strengthen" its partnerships with search engines and other large “re-users.” The Foundation, he said, is also working on bringing Wikipedia content to younger audiences via YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, and Instagram.

However, Miller also called on users to “choose online behaviors that support content integrity and content creation.”

“When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,” he said. “Talk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 17:15:58

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin

Reddit’s conversational AI product, Reddit Answers, suggested users who are interested in pain management try heroin and kratom, showing yet another extreme example of dangerous advice provided by a chatbot, even one that’s trained on Reddit’s highly coveted trove of user-generated data.

The AI-generated answers were flagged by a user on a subreddit for Reddit moderation issues. The user noticed that while looking at a thread on the r/FamilyMedicine subreddit on the official Reddit mobile app, the app suggested a couple of “Related Answers” via Reddit Answers, the company’s “AI-powered conversational interface.” One of them, titled “Approaches to pain management without opioids,” suggested users try kratom, an herbal extract from the leaves of a tree called Mitragyna speciosa. Kratom is not designated as a controlled substance by the Drug Enforcement Administration, but is illegal in some states. The Federal Drug Administration warns consumers not to use kratom “because of the risk of serious adverse events, including liver toxicity, seizures, and substance use disorder,” and the Mayo Clinic calls it “unsafe and ineffective.”

“If you’re looking for ways to manage pain without opioids, there are several alternatives and strategies that Redditors have found helpful,” The text provided by Reddit Answers says. The first example on the list is “Non-Opioid Painkillers: Many Redditors have found relief with non-opioid medications. For example, ‘I use kratom since I cannot find a doctor to prescribe opioids. Works similar and don’t need a prescription and not illegal to buy or consume in most states.’” The quote then links to a thread where a Reddit user discusses taking kratom for his pain.

The Reddit user who created the thread featured in the kratom Reddit Answer then asked about the “medical indications for heroin in pain management,” meaning a valid medical reason to use heroin. Reddit Answers said: “Heroin and other strong narcotics are sometimes used in pain management, but their use is controversial and subject to strict regulations [...] Many Redditors discuss the challenges and ethical considerations of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. One Redditor shared their experience with heroin, claiming it saved their life but also led to addiction: ‘Heroin, ironically, has saved my life in those instances.’”

Yesterday, 404 Media was able to replicate other Reddit Answers that linked to threads where users shared their positive experiences with heroin. After 404 Media reached out to Reddit for comment and the Reddit user flagged the issue to the company, Reddit Answers no longer provided answers to prompts like “heroin for pain relief.” Instead, it said “Reddit Answers doesn't provide answers to some questions, including those that are potentially unsafe or may be in violation of Reddit's policies.” After 404 Media first published this article, a Reddit spokesperson said that the company started implementing this update on Monday morning, and that it was not as a direct result of 404 Media reaching out.

The Reddit user who created the thread and flagged the issue to the company said they were concerned that Reddit Answers suggested dangerous medical advice in threads for medical subreddits, and that subreddit moderators didn’t have the option to disable Reddit Answers from appearing under conversations in their community.

“We’re currently testing out surfacing Answers on the conversation page to drive more adoption and engagement, and we are also testing core search integration to streamline the search experience,” a Reddit spokesperson told me in an email. “Similar to how Reddit search works, there is currently no way for mods to opt out of or exclude content from their communities from Answers. However, Reddit Answers doesn’t include all content on Reddit; for example, it excludes content from private, quarantined, and NSFW communities, as well as some mature topics.”

After we reached out for comment and the Reddit user flagged the issue to the company, Reddit introduced an update that would prevent Reddit Answers from being suggested under conversations about “sensitive topics.”

“We rolled out an update designed to address and resolve this specific issue,” the Reddit spokesperson said. “This update ensures that ‘Related Answers’ to sensitive topics, which may have been previously visible on the post detail page (also known as the conversation page), will no longer be displayed. This change has been implemented to enhance user experience and maintain appropriate content visibility within the platform.”

The dangerous medical advice from Reddit Answers is not surprising given that Google AI infamously suggesting users eat glue was also based on data sourced from Reddit. Google paid $60 million a year for that data, and has a similar deal with OpenAI as well. According to Bloomberg, Reddit is currently trying to negotiate even more profitable deals with both companies.

Reddit’s data is valuable as AI training data because it contains millions of user-generated conversations about a ton of esoteric topics, from how to caulk your shower to personal experiences with drugs. Clearly, that doesn’t mean a large language model will always usefully parse that data. The glue incident was caused because the LLM didn’t understand the Reddit user who was suggesting it was joking.

The risk is that people may take whatever advice an LLM gives them at face value, especially when it’s presented to them in the context of a medical subreddit. For example, we recently reported about someone who was hospitalized after ChatGPT told them they could replace their table salt with sodium bromide.

Update: This story has been updated with additional comment from Reddit.

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

"You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 14:19:34

GirlsDoPorn Victims Sue Major Payment Processors, Claiming They Enabled Sex Trafficking

Three victims of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn brought a complaint against multiple companies that processed payments for the criminal organization, claiming that without their payment services, GirlsDoPorn would never have existed.

GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise that coerced primarily high-school and college aged women with no experience in the adult industry into appearing in pornographic videos, by convincing them they were signing up for modeling gigs and telling them the videos would never be posted online. The ring was masterminded by Michael Pratt, who alongside multiple co-conspirators was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in 2019. A federal judge sentenced Pratt to 27 years in prison last month, and most of his co-conspirators have also been sentenced to years or decades in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

The lawsuit, brought by three women who appeared in the videos, seeks to become a class-action complaint on behalf of anyone who appeared in at least one pornographic video on GirlsDoPorn and its sister site GirlsDoToys between 2009 and 2019—which could include up to 300 more individuals, the complaint estimates. They allege that CCBill, Epoch, First Data Merchant Services, Total System Services, and a number of unnamed banks knowingly participated in GirlsDoPorn’s sex trafficking venture by providing it payment services.

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

The complaint was filed on Monday by several attorneys who’ve represented GirlsDoPorn victims since the civil case which went to trial in 2019. The defendant payment service companies generated “millions in fees for themselves and tens of millions for GirlsDoPorn,” the complaint claims. “By doing so, Defendants turned the victims’ sex acts into ‘commercial sex acts,’ a crucial element of sex trafficking under Section 1591 [the U.S. sex trafficking legal code]. Without Defendants’ payment network, GirlsDoPorn would have never been able to exist.”

CCBill is one of the most popular handlers of online porn payments and subscriptions. Epoch, another longtime service in the adult industry, was GirlsDoPorn’s payment facilitator, which acts as a gateway between credit card companies and merchants like porn sites. Total System Services and First Data were GirlsDoPorn’s payment processors, the complaint alleges, while the yet-unnamed banks settled the payments for GirlsDoPorn.

“Given the integral role of payment processing to the business of Internet pornography, GirlsDoPorn would never have become or remained a viable enterprise absent Defendants’ participation in the sex trafficking venture,” the plaintiffs argue. “GirlsDoPorn would never have achieved the level of success it did without Defendants actively assisting, supporting, and facilitating its unlawful business with streams of revenue.”

The plaintiffs claim that the defendants, as part of running their businesses, should have known GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise, pointing to GirlsDoPorn’s own website and messaging as evidence: “Indeed, when it was launched, GirlsDoPorn’s website openly bragged about using fraud to lure a victim under the guise of a modeling advertisement—’She contacted us regarding an ad I had placed for beauty models wanted, having no idea it was actually for adult videos instead ha :)’” the complaint states. The plaintiffs also point to Reddit posts made by GirlsDoPorn victims talking about being abused, and the boasting GirlsDoPorn operators did on the website about how the women were “first-timers,” caught in their bait-and-switch scheme who would shoot porn for the “studio” exclusively, and weren’t part of the adult industry as a career choice.

“As the years went by, Defendants ignored dozens of red flags indicating GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking venture,” the complaint states. By 2017, they allege, defendants “could no longer feign ignorance of GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices” because the plantiffs served the defendants a subpoena as part of the civil case in San Diego seeking records related to GirlsDoPorn.

The defendants continued processing payments for the organization until October 2019, the plaintiffs claim, at which point everyone involved was arrested or indicted on federal sex trafficking charges and the websites went offline. “Only then did Defendants stop processing payments forGirlsDoPorn, but it was not by choice,” the complaint claims. “Any ignorance Defendants may have had to GirlsDoPorn’s illegal business practices prior to October 2019 is a direct result of Defendants’ own negligence, recklessness, or willful desire to remain ignorant, which is no defense under Section 1595.”

In addition to certifying the class action and a jury trial, the plaintiffs seek damages exceeding $1 million for each member of the class, restitution for what CCBill and Epoch earned from GirlsDoPorn, punitive damages, and attorney fees.

CCBill and Epoch did not respond to requests for comment. Fiserv, which owns First Data, and Total System Services did not immediately respond to comment requests.

18 U.S. Code § 1591 - Sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud, or coercion

^{Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LII / Legal Information Institute)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 14:00:39

Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests.

Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face. The tools are invasive of anyone’s privacy, but present a significant risk to those who may need to avoid an abusive ex-partner or stalker. The sites mostly market these tools as a way to find out if their partner is cheating on them, or at minimum using dating apps like Tinder.

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Viral ‘Cheater Buster’ Sites Use Facial Recognition to Let Anyone Reveal Peoples’ Tinder Profiles

Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creat…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-16 13:00:05

ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras

A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the section of ICE that had access and which has reassigned more than ten thousand employees to work on the agency’s mass deportation campaign, performed nearly two hundred searches in the system, the letter says.

In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.

The letter shows that many more federal agencies had access to the network than previously known. We previously found, following local media reports, that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had access to 80,000 cameras around the country. It is now clear that Flock’s work with federal agencies, which the company described as a pilot, was much larger in scope.

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ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-15 13:24:39

Senators Warn Saudi Arabia’s Acquisition of EA Will Be Used for ‘Foreign Influence’

Democratic U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, raising concerns about the $55 billion acquisition of the giant American video game company in part by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Specifically, the Senators worry that EA, which just released Battlefield 6 last week and also publishes The Sims, Madden, and EA Sports FC, “would cease exercising editorial and operational independence under the control of Saudi Arabia’s private majority ownership.”

“The proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influence and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government,” the Senators wrote in their letter. “As Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PIF has made dozens of strategic investments in sports (including a bid for the U.S. PGA Tour), video games (including a $3.3 billion investment in Activision Blizzard), and other cultural institutionsthat ‘are more than just about financial returns; they are about influence.’ Leveraging long term shifts in public opinion, through the PIF’s investments, ‘Saudi Arabia is seeking to normalize its global image, expand its cultural reach, and gain leverage in spaces that shape how billions of people connect and interact.’ Saudi Arabia’s desire to buy influence through the acquisition of EA is apparent on the face of the transaction—the investors propose to pay more than $10 billion above EA’s trading value for a company whose stock has ‘stagnated for half a decade’ in an unpredictably volatile industry.”

As the Senators' letter notes, Saudi Arabia has made several notable investments in the video game industry in recent years. In addition to its investment in Activision Blizzard and Nintendo, the PIF recently acquired Evo, the biggest video game fighting tournament in the world (one of its many investments in esports), was reportedly a “mystery partner” in a failed $2 billion deal with video game publisher Embracer, and recently acquired Pokémon Go via its subsidiary, Scopely.

“The deal’s potential to expand and strengthen Saudi foreign influence in the United States is compounded by the national security risks raised by the Saudi government’s access to and unchecked influence over the sensitive personal information collected from EA’s millions of users, its development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and the company’s product design and direction,” the Senators wrote.

The acquisition, which is the largest leveraged buyout transaction in history, includes two other investment firms: Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the latter of which was formed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Senators letter says that Kushner’s involvement “raises troubling questions about whether Mr. Kushner is involved in the transaction solely to ensure the federal government’s approval of the transaction.”

These investments in the video game industry are just one part of Saudi Arabia’s broader “Vision 2030” to diversify its economy as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels that enriched the Saudi royal family. The PIF has made massive investments in aerospace and defense industries, technology, sports, and other forms of entertainment. For example, Blumenthal and other Senators have expressed similar concerns about the PIF’s investment in the professional golf organization PGA Tour.

The Senators don’t specify what this “foreign influence” might look like in practice, but recent events can give us an idea. The comedy world, for example, has been embroiled in controversy for the last few weeks over the Saudi hosted and funded Riyadh Comedy Festival, which included many of the biggest stand-up comedians in the world. Those who participated in the festival, despite the Saudi government's policies and 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, defended it as an opportunity for cultural exchange and freedom of expression in a country where it has not been historically tolerated. However, some comedians who declined to join the festival revealed that participants had to agree to certain “content restrictions,” which forbade them from criticizing Saudi Arabia, the royal family, or religion.

Human Rights Watch Refuses Aziz Ansari Riyadh Comedy Festival Donation

Human Rights Watch says it 'cannot accept' donations from Aziz Ansari and other comedians who performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia.

^{Ethan Shanfeld (Variety)}

404 Media

2025-10-15 14:03:19

The End of Windows 10 Support Is an E-Waste Disaster in the Making

Wednesday’s end of free Windows 10 support is an environmental disaster in the making, with as many as 400 million computers that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 set to be cut off from receiving free security updates. The move is an egregious example of planned obsolescence that will inevitably result in the early deaths of millions of computers that would have otherwise had years of life left, and it is set to affect as many as 42 percent of all Windows computers worldwide.

“There’s 400 million computers that are going to enter the waste stream. That’s a disaster, just in terms of the sheer volume,” Nathan Proctor, director of consumer rights group PIRG’s right to repair campaign, said on the 404 Media Podcast. “And then you have people who are going to ignore the warnings and use a computer that’s insecure, so there’s going to [eventually] be some widespread security problems with these older, unsupported, no longer getting security updates computers.”

Microsoft has said it “will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10. Your PC will still work, but we recommend moving to Windows 11.” The problem with this is that millions of computers don’t have the technical specs to move to Windows 11, and some large, unknown number of Windows 10 devices are owned and operated by businesses, governments, and large organizations like schools and nonprofits whose procurement rules do not allow them to operate devices that are no longer getting security updates. This means that these organizations will necessarily have to buy new devices, which has become a big topic of conversation on the r/sysadmin subreddit, a community of IT professionals who manage big fleets of computers.
youtube.com/embed/eAFVdrtmNf8?…
This inevitably means that many of those devices are going to end up in landfills and e-waste facilities, and that people are going to have to buy new computers, one of the more egregious examples of planned obsolescence in recent memory. Experts have repeatedly made clear that extending the use of any given device, either through repair, software updates, or just keeping a device for longer, is extremely important, because it delays all the carbon emissions associated with mining the raw materials needed to produce a new device and the energy and emissions associated with manufacturing and shipping that new device.

Notably, Microsoft is going to continue offering security updates to customers who pay for them, meaning that it would be trivial for the company to continue to offer critical security updates for free. This is notable because we have seen unpatched Windows computers and devices turned into ransomware and botnets, most notably the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, in which repurposed, leaked NSA hacking tools attacked computers running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. WannaCry was one of the most devastating widespread cyberattacks in history.

Microsoft’s decision to sunset Windows 10 support is particularly concerning considering that more than 42 percent of all Windows users are currently using Windows 10. When Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 8, just 3.7 percent of computers were using it, and just 2.2 percent of Windows users were using Windows 8.1 when Microsoft stopped supporting that operating system.

“More than 40 percent of Windows users still use it,” Proctor said. “So to cut support for something that is legitimately a flagship product is bizarre. No one expects Microsoft to do software updates forever, but when 43 percent of your customers are using it, it’s not obsolete.”

Proctor and PIRG have launched a campaign pressuring Microsoft to extend support. Petitions and open letters of this sort aren’t known for being terribly effective, but when it comes to shaming companies into extending support for environmental and security reasons, there is one very big, very important precedent. In 2023, after widespread outrage from right to repair advocates, consumer rights groups, school districts, and enterprise buyers, Google agreed to extend automatic updates for Chromebooks to 10 years. The move saved millions of devices from going into landfills and ewaste facilities.

“What happened with Google and Chromebooks is an example that gives me hope that we can win,” Proctor said. “During the pandemic, schools bought massive quantities of Chromebooks, then it turns out that Chromebooks have this thing called the AUE [automatic update] date, which is a preset end of support date, which in some cases was just a couple years after the computers were brought brand new. There were photos from the Oakland Unified School District in California of thousands of working Chromebooks that were headed to the recycler because the AUE date had passed and they weren’t getting security updates, which meant they were ineligible to get some of the enterprise software they needed.”

“And so they were getting replaced by the thousands, and we organized a bunch of these school districts and institutional purchasers of Chromebooks,” he added. “Google initially resisted what we were doing, but then after a couple of months, they just flipped and said, ‘OK, we’re going to have 10 years minimum support timeline for all Chromebooks from here on out.’”

You can listen to and watch 404 Media’s full interview with Nathan Proctor here.

Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates

Chromebooks are getting 10 years of automatic updates, plus new features to help devices last longer.

^{Prajakta Gudadhe (Google)}

404 Media

2025-10-15 13:00:30

Podcast: Meta Tells Workers to ‘Go 5x Faster’ with AI

We start this week with Jason’s article about an internal Meta message telling workers to increase their output by 5x with AI. That’s five times, not five percent. After the break, Joseph and Sam tell us all about the catastrophic Discord breach. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains what happened when AI came for craft beer (nothing is sacred).
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/VJLHVJ-OOj8?…

• 0:51 ⁠Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America⁠
• 3:57 ⁠Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse to Use AI to ‘Go 5x Faster’⁠
• 19:44⁠ The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare⁠
• Subscribers: ⁠What Happened When AI Came for Craft Beer⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

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

^{Apple Podcasts}