404 Media

2026-03-07 14:00:31

Humanity Has Altered an Asteroid’s Orbit Around the Sun

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that moved the heavens, coveted crystals, dined on lunar legumes, and got a four-star review.

First, humanity has permanently signed its name into the orbital dynamics of the solar system. Take the win! Then, we’ve got the origins of our obsession with sparkly rocks, a stint of extraterrestrial gardening, and a story of stellar significance.

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

DART delivers an orbital bullseye

Makadia, Rahil and Steven R. Chesley. “Direct detection of an asteroid’s heliocentric deflection: The Didymos system after DART.” Science.

Well folks, pack it up: Humanity has shifted the path of a celestial object around the Sun.

You may remember NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which slammed into an asteroid named Dimorphos in September 2022. Dimorphos, which is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, orbits an asteroid named Didymos, roughly five times bigger. In the aftermath of the crash, scientists determined that DART had successfully shifted Dimorphos’ path around Didymos, shortening its roughly 11-hour orbit by 33 minutes.

Now, scientists have confirmed that the mission also changed the entire binary system’s “heliocentric” orbit around the Sun. While scientists had expected the spacecraft to push this pair of asteroids off-kilter, a new study has now quantified the impact by presenting “the first-ever measurement of human-caused change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body.”

The team determined that the system’s pace around the Sun was slowed by about 10 micrometers per second as a result of the mighty spaceship wallop. It took years to refine that measurement, which the researchers calculated with radar and stellar occultations, which are observations of the system against background stars.
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But it’s worth the wait to know that we shifted a celestial object’s circuit around the Sun, even by a tiny bit—an achievement that may come in handy if we ever need to deflect an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth.

“By demonstrating that asteroid deflection missions such as DART can effect change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body, this study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,” said researchers co-led by Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign and Steven R. Chesley of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So, forget moving mountains—we’ve graduated to moving space rocks.

For anyone interested in learning more about DART, I highly recommend How to Kill an Asteroid by Robin George Andrews, which provides a fascinating inside account of the mission.

In other news…

Chimps glimpse a “big beyond”

García-Ruiz, Juan Manuel et al. “On the origin of our fascination with crystals.” Frontiers in Psychology.

It’s crystal clear: We clearly love crystals. Humans and our early hominin relatives have collected crystals for nearly 800,000 years, making them “among the first natural objects collected by hominins without any apparent utilitarian purpose,” according to a new study.

To explore the origins of this fascination, scientists gave chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, a bunch of sparkly crystals at an ape preserve in Spain. The chimps were intrigued by the offerings; indeed, one female named Sandy immediately absconded with a large crystal dubbed the “Monolith” and took it back to her group’s indoor dormitory for two days.
Chimp Toti attentively observes the quartz crystal during Experiment 1. Image: García-Ruiz et al., 2026.
“When the team of caretakers tried to retrieve the crystal, it took hours to exchange it for valuable ‘gifts’ (i.e., favored food items—bananas and yogurt—which are known from daily observations to be highly appreciated by the chimpanzees), which suggests that the crystal was highly valued,” said researchers led by Juan Manuel García-Ruiz of Donostia International Physics Center.

“Crystals may have contributed to the development of metaphysical and symbolic thinking, acting as catalysts for the conceptualization of a ‘big beyond,’” the team concluded.

Shining moonbeams on moon beans

Atkin, Jessica et al. “Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed.” Scientific Reports.

Scientists are finally addressing my dream of enjoying locally-grown falafel on the Moon. In a new study, a team experimented with planting chickpeas in lunar regolith simulant (LRS), a human-made substance that mimics lunar soil.

The results revealed that chickpeas could flower and produce seeds in the simulant, provided that it was treated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) which are fungal microbes known to protect plant health. Small additions of vermicompost also helped the Moon beans flourish.
The Moon chickpeas. Image: Jessica Atkin
“Plants seeded successfully in mixtures containing up to 75 percent LRS when inoculated with AMF,” said researchers led by Jessica Atkin of Texas A&M University. “Higher LRS concentrations induced stress; however, plants grown in 100 percent LRS inoculated with AMF demonstrated an average extension of two weeks in survival compared to non-inoculated plants.”

“We present a step toward sustainable agriculture on the Moon, addressing the fundamental challenges of using Lunar regolith as a plant growth medium,” the team concluded.

Who knows if we’ll ever live off the lunar land, but as a garbanzo fanzo, I’m hoping for heavenly hummus.

TIC 120362137 is the real quad god

Borkovits, T., Rappaport, S.A., Chen, HL. et al. “Discovery of the most compact 3+1-type quadruple star system TIC 120362137.” Nature Communications.

Three-body problems are so last season; the era of the quadruple star system is upon us. In a new study, scientists unveil the most compact quartet of stars ever discovered, known as TIC 120362137, which is about 2,000 light years from Earth.

“This inner subsystem, which contains three stars that are more massive and hotter than the Sun, is more spatially compact than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun, and is orbited by a fourth Sun-like star with a period of 1,046 days,” said researchers co-led by Tamás Borkovits and Saul A. Rappaport of the University of Szeged, Hai-Liang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Guillermo Torres of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“To our knowledge, there are no other known, similarly compact and tight, planetary-system-like 3 + 1 quadruple stellar systems,” the team added.

The researchers predicted that this fantastic foursome will eventually merge together into a pair of dead stars known as white dwarfs in about nine billion years. No planets have been found in this system, and it may be that it is too dynamically eccentric to host them. Still, it’s fun to imagine the view from such a hypothetical world, with four Suns in its sky. Eat your heart out, Tatooine.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed - Scientific Reports

Food sustainability is a significant challenge for long-term space travel. Plants can provide fresh nutrition, reducing reliance on packaged foods.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-03-06 16:26:59

Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

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

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

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Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-05 20:36:01

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester

Privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.

The records provide insight into the sort of data that Proton Mail, which prides itself both on its end-to-end encryption and that it is only governed by Swiss privacy law, can and does provide to third parties. In this case, the Proton Mail account was affiliated with the Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF) group and Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which authorities were investigating for their connection to arson, vandalism and doxing. Broadly, members were protesting the building of a large police training center next to the Intrenchment Creek Park in Atlanta, and actions also included camping in the forest and lawsuits. Charges against more than 60 people have since been dropped.

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Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-05 15:19:28

ICE Phishing: Scammers Are Sending 'Support ICE' Emails to Steal Credentials

Clients of a long-running email marketing platform are getting targeted with a phishing campaign telling them that their emails would begin automatically inserting a “‘Support ICE’ donation button” into every email they send. The strategy suggests that scammers are trying to capitalize on people’s revulsion to ICE by coming up with strategies that would cause users to quickly log into their accounts to disable the setting. In reality, clients would be revealing their username and password to hackers.

The move indicates that hackers are targeting clients of enterprise software companies with extremely controversial political emails. The scam targeted customers of Emma, a long-running email marketing platform whose clients include Orange Theory, Yale University, Texas A&M University, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Dogfish Head Brewery, and the YMCA, among others. 404 Media was forwarded a copy of the phishing email from an Emma client.

“As part of our commitment to supporting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), we will be adding a ‘Support ICE’ donation button to the footer of every email sent through our platform,” the phishing email reads. “This button will appear automatically in all outgoing emails starting next week […] all emails sent from your account will include the Support ICE footer element […] this change helps us demonstrate our platform’s civic commitment.” The email adds that it is possible to opt out of this feature, and that “we appreciate your understanding as we implement this platform-wide initiative.”

Lisa Mayr, the CEO of Marigold, which owns Emma, told 404 Media that the company “would never publish anything like this. This is a very common phishing attempt.”

Mayr is right—clients of other email sending services have recently been targeted with similar attacks. In January, programmer Fred Benenson wrote about phishing emails he had gotten that were targeting users of SendGrid, another email marketing service. At least one of the emails Benenson got used the same “Support ICE button” language and has the subject line “ICE Support Initiative.”

“If you’ve been paying any attention at all to US politics, you’ll know how insidiously provocative this would be if it were a real email,” Benenson wrote in a blog post about the email. “This phishing campaign is a fascinating example of how sophisticated social engineering has become. Instead of Nigerian 419 scams, hackers have evolved to carefully craft messages sent to professionals that are designed to exploit the American political consciousness. The opt-out buttons are the trap.”

In SendGrid’s case, Benenson found that the emails looked “real” because they were sent from other SendGrid user accounts. Basically, hackers compromised the account of a SendGrid user and then used that account to send phishing emails using the SendGrid infrastructure. “The emails look real because, technically, they are real SendGrid emails sent via SendGrid’s platform and via a customer’s reputation–they’re just sent by the wrong people and wrong domains,” he wrote.

Besides the ICE-themed phishing emails, Benenson also received an email that said SendGrid was going to add a “pride-themed footer to all emails” and another that said “all emails sent from your account will feature a commemorative theme honoring George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“The political sophistication on display here (BLM, LGBTQ+ rights, ICE, even the Spanish language switch playing on immigration anxieties) suggests someone with a deep understanding of American cultural fault lines,” Benenson wrote.

The Emma email was sent via Survey Monkey through an email address called “myemma@help-myemma.app.” When users clicked a “Settings” button that would have allowed them to opt out of the feature, they’re sent to a generic-looking site designed to steal credentials hosted at app-e2maa.net. By the time 404 Media got the email, Chrome had detected it as a “Dangerous site” and warned users not to visit it.

SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack.

For the past several months, I’ve been receiving and then ignoring a steady stream of concerning emails from Sendgrid, the popular email delivery service owned by Twilio that I use for sendin…

^{fredbenenson.com}

404 Media

2026-03-04 16:22:49

Podcast: The Depravity Economy

This week we discuss our coverage of the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran, specifically how Polymarket and Kalshi are letting people profit from death, and that Amazon data centers were on fire after missiles hit Dubai. Then Emanuel talks about how AI translations are adding 'hallucinations' to Wikipedia articles. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us about a change with Amazon wishlists that may expose your address.
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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/paHMe9kFf0w?…
0:00 - Intro

1:32 - ⁠With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom⁠

29:07 - AI Translations Are Adding Hallucinations To Wikipedia Articles

SUBSCRIBER'S STORY - ⁠Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address

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

2026-03-04 15:55:56

Polymarket Pulls Bet on Nuclear Detonation in 2026

For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not simply close down the bet, but it’s been “archived” meaning that a record of it no longer exists. It’s strange as many older and paid out bets remain on the site.

Pulling a bet like this is unusual and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for an explanation as to why. Word of the nuke bet drew wide attention online from critics already upset about Polymarket for its place in the depravity economy.
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“I have not seen anything like this before,” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told 404 Media. “As a citizen, it seems dangerous to enable people in power to place bets anonymously on things that might happen, creating an incentive to act on a basis of personal gain and not the national interest.”

Polymarket doesn’t often balk at bets on violence and war. There are multiple markets covering the wars in Ukraine and Iran and also many other bets about nuclear detonations. “Will a US ally get a nuke before 2027?” and “Russia nuclear test by …?” are both still actively trading. An older version of the “nuclear weapons detonation” is still on the site and did almost $3 million in trading before closing and paying out at the end of the 2025. It’s hosted a bet on the same question every year for the past few years.

The gambling market has been under fire this week after gaining a lot of attention for its various bets on the war in Iran. Gamblers spent more than $5 million betting on the question “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” People have been caught manipulating war maps to cash in on frontline advances in Ukraine. And someone made $400,000 using inside knowledge to place bets about the capture of Maduro.

“How ghoulish. Especially given how much insider trading apparently goes on with current events bets,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian and creator of the NUKEMAP, told 404 Media.

Wellerstein said that betting on nuclear war isn’t unprecedented, but that it’s usually tongue-in-cheek and conducted by insiders. “The thing that immediately comes to mind is Fermi's ‘side bet’ that the Trinity test would destroy the atmosphere in 1945—which was a joke, as nobody would be able to collect if it had happened,” he said.

“A flip of this is in Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, in which he eschewed paying into a pension in the early 1960s because he thought the odds of a future nuclear war were so high that it was better to spend the money sooner rather than later. So another kind of bet, but a private one,” Wellerstein added. “And whenever experts give ‘odds’ on nuclear use (which the intelligence community does, apparently), they are to some degree indulging in this kind of impulse. But not for the hope of personal profit—usually it is because they want to avoid such an outcome.”

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has repeatedly called the site “the future of news,” and has suggested that prediction markets give the public a more clear picture of events because money is on the line. The reality is that the financial incentives pervert reality. Nuclear war, it seems, was a bit too dramatic for Polymarket to host a wager on. But Polymarket has few moral qualms, has not told anyone why it "archived" the bet, and it’s possible it did so for some arcane technical reason and not because it got squeamish. Polymarket did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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

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

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-04 14:00:52

AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance model.

The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.

“We do so by providing monthly stipends to full-time contributors and translators,” OKA’s site says. “We leverage AI (Large Language Models) to automate most of the work.”

The problem is that editors started to notice that some of these translations introduced errors to articles. For example, a draft translation for a Wikipedia article about the French royal La Bourdonnaye family cites a book and specific page number when discussing the origin of the family. A Wikipedia editor, Ilyas Lebleu, who goes by Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia, checked that source and found that the specific page of that book “doesn't talk about the La Bourdonnaye family at all.”

“To measure the rate of error, I actually decided to do a spot-check, during the discussion, of the first few translations that were listed, and already spotted a few errors there, so it isn't just a matter of cherry-picked cases,” Lebleu told me. “Some of the articles had swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while 1879 French Senate election added paragraphs sourced from material completely unrelated to what was written!”

As Wikipedia editors looked at more OKA-translated articles, they found more issues.

“Many of the results are very problematic, with a large number of [...] editors who clearly have very poor English, don't read through their work (or are incapable of seeing problems) and don't add links and so on,” a Wikipedia page discussing the OKA translation said. The same Wikipedia page also notes that in some cases the copy/paste nature of OKA translators’ work breaks the formatting on some articles.

Wikipedia editors investigated how OKA was operating and found that it was mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South, and that these contractors were instructed to copy/paste articles to popular LLMs to produce translations.

For example, a public spreadsheet used by OKA translators to keep track of what articles they’re translating instructs them to “pick an article, copy the lead section into Gemini or chatGPT, then review if some of the suggestions are an improvement to readability. Make edits to the Wiki articles only if the suggestions are an improvement and don't change the meaning of the lead. Do not change the content unless you have checked that what Gemini says is correct!”

Lebleu told me, and other editors have noted in their public on-site discussion of the issue, that these same instructions previously told OKA translators to use Grok, Elon Musk’s LLM, for the same purpose. Grok, which also produces an entirely automated alternative to Wikipedia called Grokepedia, is prone to errors precisely because it does not use humans to vet its output.

“The use of Grok proved controversial, notably given the reasons for which Grok has been in the news recently, and a recent in-house study showed ChatGPT and Claude perform more accurately, leading them to switch a few days ago, although they still recommend Grok as ‘valuable for experienced editors handling complex, template-heavy articles,’” Lebleu told me.

Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule.

“OKA translators who have received, within six months, four (correctly applied) warnings about content that fails verification will be blocked without further warning if another example is found,” the Wikipedia editors wrote. “Content added by an OKA translator who is subsequently blocked for failing verification may be presumptively deleted [...] unless an editor in good standing is willing to take responsibility for it.”

A job posting for a “Wikipedia Translator” from OKA offers $397 a month for working up to 40 hours per week. The job listing says translators are expected to publish “5-20 articles per week (depending on size).”

“They leverage machine translation to accelerate the process. We have published over 1500 articles and the number grows every day,” the job posting says.

“Given this precarious status, I am worried that more uncertainty in the translator duties may lead to an overloading of responsibilities, which is worrying as independent contractors do not necessarily have the same protections as paid employees,” Lebleu wrote in the public Wikipedia discussion about OKA.

Jonathan Zimmermann, the founder and president of OKA, and who goes by 7804j

on Wikipedia, told me that translators are paid hourly, not per article, and that there is no fixed article quota.

“We emphasize quality over speed,” Zimmerman told me in an email. “In fact, some of the problematic cases involved unusually high output relative to time spent — which in retrospect was a warning sign. Those cases were driven by individual enthusiasm and speed rather than institutional pressure.”

Zimmerman told me that “errors absolutely do occur,” but that OKA’s process includes human review, requires translators to check their content against cited sources, and that “senior editors periodically review samples, especially from newer translators.”

“Following the recent discussion, we have strengthened our safeguards,” Zimmerman told me. “We are now rolling out a second, independent LLM review step. Translators must run the completed draft through a separate model using a dedicated comparison prompt designed to identify potential discrepancies, omissions, or inaccuracies relative to the source text. Initial findings suggest this is highly effective at detecting potential issues.”

Zimmerman added that if this method proves insufficient, OKA is considering introducing formal peer review mechanisms

Using AI to check the output of AI for errors is a method that is historically prone to errors. For example, we recently reported on an AI-powered private school that used AI to check AI-generated questions for students. Internal testing found it had at least a 10 percent failure rate.

“I agree that using AI to check AI can absolutely fail — and in some contexts it can fail at very high rates. We’re not assuming the secondary model is reliable in isolation,” Zimmerman said. “The key point is that we’re not replacing human verification with automated verification. The second model is a complement to manual review, not a substitute for it.”

“When a coordinated project uses AI tools and operates at scale, it’s going to attract attention. I understand why editors would examine that closely. Ultimately, the outcome of the discussion formalized expectations that are largely aligned with our existing internal policies,” Zimmerman added. “However, these restrictions apply specifically to OKA translators. I would prefer that standards apply equally to everyone, but I also recognize that organized, funded efforts are often held to a higher bar.”

'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School

Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do "more harm than good."

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-04 00:01:04

The Sun Is 'Glitching.' Scientists Investigated and Solved a Cosmic Mystery

Scientists have peered inside the Sun and observed subtle shifts and “glitches” that have occurred over four decades, shedding light on the enigmatic long-term vibrations of our star, reports a study published on Tuesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Sun goes through a roughly 11-year cycle that includes a period of high and low activity, known as solar maximum and minimum. The past few cycles have revealed changes in solar behavior that could have implications for predicting space weather and unraveling the internal dynamics of our Sun, along with other Sun-like stars.

To drill down on this mystery, researchers with the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network (BiSON), a network of telescopes that have monitored the Sun since the 1970s, compared the last four solar minima using this unique 40-year dataset and focused on internal vibrations that make the sun subtly oscillate.

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument,”said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who co-authored the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“For this particular study, we were interested in seeing whether there are differences in what the Sun is doing in its structure when you focus on the periods or epochs when the Sun is very quiet,” he continued. “The last few cycles have seen some quite marked changes in behavior.”

For example, scientists have been perplexed for years by an unusually long and quiet solar minimum between cycle 23 to 24, which occurred from 2008 to 2009. Chaplin and his colleagues were able to use BiSON’s long record of asteroseismology—the study of stellar interiors—to directly contrast the interior vibrations of the Sun during this minimum to others.

“There were hints that there were things that were different” about this cycle, said Chaplin. “But now that we have the cycle 24-25 minimum—the last one in about 2019—in the bag, then we thought, ‘okay, now's the time to actually go back and look at this.’”

The team specifically looked for an acoustic wave “glitch” caused by an interior layer in which helium atoms lose electrons, producing a detectable change in the Sun’s internal structure. This glitch was significantly stronger during the 2008–2009 minimum, suggesting that the Sun’s outer interior was slightly hotter and allowed sound waves to travel faster at that time of magnetic weakness.

“The ionizing helium affects the speed at which the sound waves move through that region,” explained Chaplin. “It leaves a characteristic imprint.”

“It's not just that there is a difference with the other cycles, but it's starting to tell us about what physically has really changed beneath the surface,” he added. “They're quite subtle changes, but it's nevertheless giving us clues as to what is actually happening beneath the Sun during this very quiet period.”

The results confirm that the Sun doesn’t return to the same minimum baseline at the end of every cycle, and its activity varies within timescales of decades and centuries. For example, Chaplin pointed to one bizarrely long quiet period from 1645 to 1715, known as the Maunder Minimum.

Astronomers during this time marvelled at the prolonged lack of visible sunspots on the Sun’s surface, a sign of extremely low solar activity. Centuries later, BiSON and other solar observatories are allowing scientists to study the interior dynamics behind these shifts in depth for the first time.

“This is the first step in actually demonstrating that there are changes,” Chaplin said. “Does this mean that there are systematic changes in the way that the Sun is generating its field? It's really only now, because we have this long dataset, that we can start to ask questions like that. Previously, we just didn't have enough data to say.”

Scientists hope to keep recording the long-term behavior of the Sun with projects like BiSON so that we can better understand its mercurial nature over time. This is interesting work on its own merits, but it is also useful for refining forecasts of space storms that can wreak havoc on power grids and space assets (while also producing pretty auroras).

Chaplin also nodded to the European space telescope PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), due for launch in 2027. This mission will search for analogous oscillations in stars beyond the Sun, building on similar work conducted by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope.

Studying the vibrations of the Sun and other similar stars is not only important for life here on Earth; it also has implications in the search for extraterrestrial life, because local solar activity is one key to assessing the habitability of star systems similar to our own.

“The data that we have on other stars from Kepler has really helped to understand and get a better picture of the cyclic variability of other stars, like the Sun,” Chaplin concluded. “But it's still not an entirely clear picture; let's put it that way. Seismology now enables you to do really detailed analysis of stars that you can't do by other means.”

404 Media

2026-03-03 19:57:20

The FBI Discusses the Potential to Use AI to Hack Targets

Update: after this article was published, the national press office for the FBI said in a statement that “Hemmen was discussing hypothetical FBI application of AI technology in the context of positive and negative outcomes resulting from the technology's development.” For clarity, 404 Media has updated the headline, included the FBI’s full statement below, but left the original article intact so readers can see the comments made at the conference. An FBI spokesperson told 404 Media that “DAD Hemmen was discussing hypothetical FBI application of AI technology in the context of positive and negative outcomes resulting from the technology's development. FBI's current deployment of AI is inventoried, reviewed, and reported per Executive Order requirements, OMB guidance, and guidance from other relevant authorities. All FBI operations are conducted in accordance with the Constitution, applicable statutes, executive orders, Department of Justice regulations and policies, and Attorney General guidelines.”

The FBI is using artificial intelligence in what it describes as “remote access operations,” FBI parlance for hacking, according to an FBI official.

The comments, given at a national security and AI conference 404 Media was attending, give an unusually candid admission of the FBI’s use of hacking tools, which are often shrouded in secrecy.

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The FBI Discusses the Potential to Use AI to Hack Targets

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-03 19:42:41

X Will Stop Paying People for Sharing Unlabeled AI-Generated War Footage

X said it will temporarily demonetize accounts that share AI-generated war footage without a label. The decision comes days after the US and Israel launched airstrikes in Iran and AI-slop war footage flooded social media timelines across the internet.

“Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program. During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies, it is trivial to create content that can mislead people,” Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said in a post on X.
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Many of the AI-generated videos currently on X purport to show Iranian ballistic missiles hitting sites in Israel. One video shared thousands of times on X showed missiles slamming into the ground near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem while a computer generated voice said “Oh my god, hear they come.” X users community noted the video, but the account that shared it has a Bluecheck and is eligible for a financial payout for engagement as part of X’s content creator program.

Up to now, the Iranians have been deliberately firing their older missiles and drones, using them as expendable bait to drain US and Israeli air defenses.
That strategy clearly worked.

Now they’re escalating, rolling out their more advanced ballistic missiles and drones.

So… pic.twitter.com/0w1RiT0guC
— Richard (@ricwe123) March 3, 2026

Tel Aviv, stripped of illusion, as you have never witnessed it. pic.twitter.com/HE3ckjBMti
— Abdulruhman Ismail (@a_abdulruhman) March 3, 2026

Bier said today that X will stop people from making money on unlabeled AI war footage, but won’t stop accounts from sharing it.

“Starting now, users who post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict—without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI—will be suspended from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days. Subsequent violations will result in a permanent suspension from the program,” he added. “This will be flagged to us by any post with a Community Note or if the content contains meta data (or other signals) from generative AI tools. We will continue to refine our policies and product to ensure X can be trusted during these critical moments.”

Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program.

During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies,…
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) March 3, 2026

Fake war footage shared on social media isn’t a new problem. For several years every new conflict would be met with a flood of fake videos. Old war footage passed off as coming from the current war was popular, but so was recordings of video games run through filters to make it look low-resolution. The same three clips from milsim video game Arma 3 were shared at the outbreak of every new conflict for a decade. The Government of Pakistan even shared Arma 3 footage once in a post that’s still live on X.

What is new is the proliferation of easy to use AI video-generation tools. AI image and video generation has come a long way in the past few years and it’s trivially easy to remove the watermark that’s supposed to distinguish them from the real thing. X’s verification system—which rewards accounts for engagement—has also created incentives for Bluecheck accounts to publish fast, verify later (if ever), and rake in the cash. So in the hours and days after the war with Iran began, fake footage of airstrikes and conflict spread on X.

The way X is handling the problem gives the game away. According to Bier, the site will rely on the community to police itself and the punishment is a 90 day suspension not from the site but from the monetization program.

Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web

Bypassing Sora 2's rudimentary safety features is easy and experts worry it'll lead to a new era of scams and disinformation.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-03 19:22:26

New Podcast Alert: The Globe-Spanning, Multi-Newsroom Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes

Mr. Deepfakes was the biggest website in the world for sharing AI-generated abuse imagery, swapping tips and tricks for more realistic results, and posting endless, fake, nonconsensual videos of everyone from celebrities to everyday people. In a new podcast by the CBC, I got to tell the tale of how deepfakes started, what targets go through, and where we go next.

It's called Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire. It's about the decades-long rise of non-consensual deepfake porn, the targets who are fighting back, and what it takes to stop its proliferation. Check it out here and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The first three episodes are already up, so you can binge them all before the finale next Tuesday.

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In the first episode, "The Dawn of Fake Porn," you’ll get a fascinating history of the decades of cultural and technological standards that set the stage for AI-generated nonconsensual imagery as we know it today. I learned a lot in this episode myself, including about a guy who went by “Lux Lucre” who ran two Usenet groups dedicated to fake nudes of celebrities in the 90s. This stuff goes so much farther back than you might realize.

In episode two, “So You’ve Been Deepfaked,” I got the chance to talk to Taylor, who discovered she’d been targeted by AI images while at university, working in a male-dominated field. Instead of hoping it’d go away, she set out to find her harasser, and found his other targets in the process. It all led back to one place: the biggest deepfake site in the world, Mr. Deepfakes.

Episode three just came out today: “The Notorious D.P.F.K.S.” is a romp through the investigative highs and lows that led a team of journalists scattered around the world to the door of Mr. Deepfakes himself. I was so thrilled to talk to investigative journalist Ida Herskind, OSINT specialist Zakaria Hameed, and Bellingcat’s Ross Higgins in this episode. Come for the How I Met Your Mother references, stay for the gripping chase.

Episode four, the series finale, launches next week. It’s a true crime story with CBC reporters on stakeouts and infiltrating hospitals, and legal and social experts breaking down what it all means now that we’re in a post-Mr. Deepfakes world—but far from a post-AI abuse landscape. Follow the Understood feed wherever you listen to get it when it comes out on Tuesday.

If you liked this season, head back to catch up on another series I hosted with the CBC: Pornhub Empire, on the rise and fall of the porn monolith.

Tune in and let me know what you think!

The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Pornhub

In a new series by CBC Podcasts, hosted by 404 Media's Sam Cole, former employees, performers, and the new owners themselves speak out about Pornhub's influence on the industry and beyond.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-03 14:03:26

CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements

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

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations. Following 404 Media’s revelation of that ICE purchase, on Tuesday a group of around 70 lawmakers urged the DHS oversight body to conduct a new investigation into ICE’s location data buying.

💡
Do you work at CBP, ICE, or a location data company? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

This sort of information is a “goldmine for tracking where every person is and what they read, watch, and listen to,” Johnny Ryan, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Enforce, which has closely followed the sale of advertising data, told 404 Media in an email.

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CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements

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404 Media

2026-03-02 15:59:51

Amazon Data Centers on Fire After Iranian Missile Strikes on Dubai

Amazon’s cloud services are down in some of the Middle East after “objects” hit data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) causing “sparks and fire.” Around 60 services tied to AWS are down in the region, affecting web traffic in the UAE and Bahrain. The outage comes following Iranian attacks on the UAE as retaliation for US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Customers in Bahrain and the UAE began to report outages tied to the mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 clusters in AWS’ ME-CENTRAL-1 Region on March 1 after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck targets in and around Dubai. Amazon did not confirm that AWS was down in the Middle East due to an Iranian attack and instead referred 404 Media to its online dashboard.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire,” AWS said on its health dashboard. “The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ.”

As of this morning at 9:22 AM ET, the damage had spread. “We are expecting recovery to take at least a day, as it requires repair of facilities, cooling and power systems, coordination with local authorities, and careful assessment to ensure the safety of our operators,” AWS said. “We recommend customers enact their disaster recovery plans and recover from remote backups into alternate AWS Regions, ideally in Europe.”

Amazon later shared more information about the attack and confirmed it was the result of drones. “Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” it said. “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.”

On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury and struck targets inside of Iran, killing several political and military leaders including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Leader. In retaliation, Iran launched drone and missile attacks against Israel and multiple US-allied targets in the Middle East.

According to the Emirati defense forces, Iran attacked the country with two cruise missiles, 165 ballistic missiles, and more than 540 drones. The UAE and its capital city Dubai are often seen as a safe and stable destination in the Middle East. The country hosts wealthy people from across the region and influencers from across the world. Footage shared on social media showed the neon towers of the UAE backlit by missiles and munitions.

It’s unclear how long it will take for Amazon to restore services to the region or how far the damage will spread. Amazon’s dashboard is promising to bring things back up in “at least a day” but the war is far from over. Iran continues to strike targets in the Middle East and it’s unclear what America’s plan of attack is or how long this war might grind on.

Update 2/2/26: This story has been updated with more specifics about the attack from Amazon.

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

View the overall status and health of AWS services using the AWS Health Dashboard.

^{health.aws.amazon.com}

404 Media

2026-03-02 13:00:57

How to Detect Phone Spying Tech (with Cooper Quintin)

Joseph speaks to Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Quintin is one of the people behind Rayhunter, an easy to install tool that can detect nearby IMSI-catchers. This tech, sometimes known as Stingrays, poses as a fake cellphone tower to track a phone’s location, intercept calls and texts, and can sometimes even deliver malware.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA9…
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/vEFPPaOn0ts?…
Rayhunter GitHub

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

2026-02-28 20:48:27

Scientists Reveal the Surprising Sex Lives of Neanderthals and Early Humans

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that exposed prehistoric hookups, marched toward death, feasted on their own bodies, and found a buried legend in the Sahara.

First, Neanderthal males had lots more babies with human females than human males had with Neanderthal females. What’s up with that?! Then, strap in for a stellar swan song, antlers for breakfast, and a timeless style icon from the Cretaceous.

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

Dad’s a Neanderthal, Mom’s a human, I’m in therapy

Platt, Alexander et al. “Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased.” Science.

Humans and our close relatives, Neanderthals, produced children together many times before the latter went extinct about 40,000 years ago. As a result, the vast majority of people living today carry a pinch of Neanderthal DNA—the enduring proof of past copulations between our species.

Now, scientists have proposed that these prehistoric partnerships overwhelmingly occurred between Neanderthal males and females of our own species, Homo sapiens, with far fewer couplings between Neanderthal females and human males. This strong sexual bias provides the most "parsimonious” explanation for the uneven distribution of Neanderthal alleles (variants of specific genes) in modern human genomes, according to a new study.

“One of the notable features evident in alignments of Neanderthal genomes to those of modern humans is the presence of ‘Neanderthal deserts’ within modern human genomes: genomic regions where Neanderthal alleles are conspicuously rare in the modern human (and ancient modern human) gene pool,” said researchers led by Alexander Platt of the University of Pennsylvania.
This meme, provided by lead author Alexander Platt, is NOT part of the scientific study. But perhaps somebody should consider founding a journal where memes are acceptable figures.
In particular, the team noted that Neanderthal deserts show up on the human X chromosome, which they think hints at a strong sex bias toward breeding between Neanderthal males and human females.

The team compared Neanderthal genomes with genetic data from some sub-Saharan African populations that have no Neanderthal ancestry. This approach allowed them to track ancient gene flow from anatomically modern humans (AMHs)—in other words, our ancient Homo sapiens ancestors—into Neanderthal populations.

The results revealed that the Neanderthal X chromosomes had a 62 percent relative excess of DNA from AMHs. In other words, not only are there Neanderthal deserts on human X chromosomes, there are corollary “floods” or “oases” (whatever metaphor you like) of human DNA on Neanderthal X chromosomes.

This discovery is strong evidence that humans were contributing more alleles to the Neanderthal X chromosome, and Neanderthals were contributing less to the human X chromosome, due to an unexplained asymmetry in mate preference.

Overall, the genetic patterns the team observed “were likely colored by a persistent preference for pairings between males of predominantly Neanderthal ancestry and females of predominantly AMH ancestry over the reverse,” the researchers concluded. “The bias that we inferred seems to have remained consistent across admixture events separated by 200,000 years.”

Men prefer blondes; women prefer Neanderthals? I don’t know. This is just wildly interesting.

In other news…

A (hypergiant) star is born

Muñoz-Sanchez, Gonzalo et al. “The dramatic transition of the extreme red supergiant WOH G64 to a yellow hypergiant.” Nature Astronomy.

We’ve all been there: One day, you’re an extreme red supergiant, and the next, you’re a yellow hypergiant. A new study reports that WOH G64, one of the biggest known stars in the sky, went through this “dramatic transition” sometime in 2014 (or at least, that’s when astronomers first captured this spectral shift in the star, which is located about 163,000 light years from Earth).
Concept art of WOH G64, a cosmic eye of Sauron. Image: ESO / L. Calçada
If the Sun were as big as WOH G64, it would stretch to the orbit of Saturn. This late-stage stellar titan offers an ultra-rare opportunity to see how red supergiants (RSGs) end their lives, a process that is shrouded in mystery—often literally, as these stars tend to be obscured by a lot of circumstellar gas.

“The apparent lack of luminous RSGs detected as supernova progenitors has sparked an ongoing debate over the fate of these stars,” said researchers led by Gonzalo Muñoz-Sanchez of the National Observatory of Athens. “WOH G64 thus provides critical insight into post-RSG evolution and the formation of dense circumstellar environments seen in core-collapse supernovae.”

It could be that WOH G64 does detonate. In fact, this may have already happened, but the light show hasn’t reached us yet. It may also collapse directly into a black hole with no supernova to show for it. We’ll just have to keep watching this space! This has been Big Star News.

That’s deer-licious

Gaetano, Madison et al. “A Gnawing Question: How Do Caribou and Other Arctic Mammals Exploit Shared Bone Resources?” Ecology and Evolution.

Antlers in deer are usually a male ornamentation that allows females to judge potential mates based on the quality of their head-bling. Caribou females, however, buck this trend as the only female deer with antlers. So, as a folktale might ask: How did the caribou get her antlers?

One answer is that antlers make a great post-partum snack, according to a new study. In migratory populations, female caribou shed their antlers when they reach calving grounds, usually just days before they give birth, which may give nursing mothers a much-needed vitamin boost.
Percentages of antlers (light gray) and skeletal bones (dark gray) modified by caribou (ruminants), rodents, or carnivorans. Image: Gaetano, Madison et al.
“Pervasive antler consumption by caribou suggests that synchroneity between birthing and antler shedding evinces the importance of nutrient (calcium, phosphorus) transport for supporting calf survival,” said researchers led by Madison Gaetano of the University of Cincinnati. “Though intriguing, additional research will be important to more explicitly evaluate the dietary and fitness benefits (for both females and their calves) of antler-derived nutrients.”

Given that caribou also eat their placentas, it’s really impressive how these new mothers nourish themselves and their young with the fruits of their own bodies. Hardcore. Respect.

New spinosaur just dropped

Sereno, Paul C. et al. “Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.” Science.

Speaking of animals with rad headgear, we’ll close with a shoutout to Spinosaurus mirabilis, a newly-discovered species of giant carnivorous dinosaur that rocked an epic scimitar-shaped skull crest. Move over, rock band T. Rex—this killer is the new wave of dinosaurian glam.
Spinosaurus mirabilis, pictured with a guinea fowl N. meleagris, a much smaller and less frightening modern analog. Scale bar, 20 cm for S. mirabilis and 3 cm for fowl. Image: Flesh rendering and layout by Dani Navarro; Adult skull cast by the Fossil Lab; helmeted guinea fowl images by Todd Green
“Spinosaurus mirabilis…discovered in the central Sahara alongside long-necked dinosaurs in a riparian habitat, is distinguished by a scimitar-shaped bony crest projecting far above its skull roof,” said researchers led by Paul C. Sereno of the University of Chicago.

Spinosaurus stock has gone through the roof in recent decades as new finds have confirmed that they were the biggest land predators of all time, dethroning T-rex from a tyrant king to a mere tyrant vassal. As the ultimate charismatic megafauna, spinosaurs are popular in dino-blockbusters. Indeed, one of my favorite gags in cinematic history is when a Spinosaurus swallows a satellite phone in Jurassic Park III, so you know it’s lurking when you hear the Nokia ring tone. Pure dinosaurian comedic gold.
youtube.com/embed/cVA4BO2v7zs?…
In any case, the new study sheds new light into the semi-aquatic nature of this majestic hunter, suggesting that this particular species was “a wading, shoreline predator with visual display an important aspect of its biology.” While this animal was no doubt visually captivating, it’s best to view it from a safe distance of about 94 million years.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-02-27 16:27:13

Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss wishes made, god complexes, and the point of it all.

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

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

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Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

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404 Media

2026-02-27 16:10:27

Lawmakers Demand DHS Define ‘Domestic Terrorist’ As It Uses Vast Array of Surveillance Tools

A group of more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have demanded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provide its definition of “domestic terrorist,” after the agency labelled U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, which DHS officers killed, as such. The move also comes as DHS and its various components purchase and deploy a wide range of surveillance technologies and demand sensitive information from tech companies to unmask people criticizing ICE.

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Lawmakers Demand DHS Define ‘Domestic Terrorist’ As It Uses Vast Array of Surveillance Tools

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson and a host of other Democrats made the demand in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “Your actions are abhorrent, blatantly unconstitutional, and corrosive to the functioning of a peaceful society.”

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-26 17:02:16

Company Helps Men Scrub Negative Posts About Them from Tea App

Tea App Green Flags, a service that claims it can “protect your digital reputation,” will remove negative posts about men from private online groups where women share “red flags” about men they’ve dated in order to help other women.

The service is another escalation in the age of online dating, women attempting to protect each other from other men in the dating pool, and instances of men fighting against those efforts. It also shows how some of these allegedly private women’s groups, especially the Tea app, are regularly infiltrated and manipulated by men.

When I reached out to an email listed on Tea App Green Flags’s site, I got a call from a man behind the operation who identified only as Jay. He said he started the service about two years ago, and that he initially focused on the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. For the past year, he’s been offering services specifically for the Tea app, a “dating safety” app for women that suffered a devastating breach last year, and which my investigation revealed, was founded by a man who wanted to monetize the Are We Dating the Same guy phenomenon. The site also claims it can remove posts from Tea app copycat for men TeaOnHer, as well as posts on Instagram.

Jay declined to say how much revenue the site generates, but claims he gets about 50 to 60 calls a day and currently has six employees. On its website, Tea App Green Flags claims it has removed more than 2,500 posts on the Tea app for 759 clients. Jay said that most of his clients are men, but that some are women who are trying to take down posts about their husbands or boyfriends.

Potential clients can pay $1.99 to report one account and up to $79.99 to report 25 accounts.

“We just want to take down posts about people who are being defamed,” Jay told me. “And when I say defamed, it means like, ‘this guy has a small penis,’ or ‘this guy smells.’ That doesn't fit the mission statement of what the Tea app was for, which is to warn women against people who are harmful, who are abusive, who are cheaters. We've noticed that a lot of the individuals that come to us, almost all of them, come to us for little stupid things.”

Clients interested in Tea App Green Flags’s services go to the site and fill out a form with their information and information about the posts they want removed. The company reviews the case and then starts the “takedown process,” which can take between 21-30 days. Tea App Green Flags says it will then continue to monitor posts about the client and remove them for three months.

💡
Were you impacted by the Tea hack? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at ‪@emanuel.404‬. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

When I asked Jay how this “takedown process” works he said “I can’t give that info. That’s the business.”

Jay told me that he would not work with clients who have been accused of sexual assault by multiple people on the Tea app, or by one person in one of the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups who used their real name and face in a profile picture.

“Sometimes we find along the process that there are pedophiles or people who actually did what they did, and they're very bad,” Jay said. “So we say, we're not doing this. We can't take a rap for that. We're ethical. We just want to take down people who are being defamed.”

Jay told me he understands why Facebook groups like Are We Dating the Same Guy are necessary and thinks they are a good idea, but the anonymous nature of the Tea app "causes a cesspool of defamation.”

When I asked Jay what he thinks about the fact that some women don’t feel safe sharing information about some dangerous men unless they can do so anonymously, he said it would be better if women showed their face, or if the Tea app at least gave women that option.

“I have a Tea app account. I'm a dude. All my reps have Tea app accounts. They're men,” Jay said. “How much can you trust these people and what they're doing?”

One reason the Tea app hack was so dangerous is because the app used to ask women to upload a picture of their face in order to verify that they are women. Those images were posted all over the internet because of the hack, putting those women at risk and leading to more harassment.

Tea App Green Flags is far from the first attempt from men trying to fight back against these types of groups. In 2024, for example, we wrote about a man who tried to sue women who posted about him in Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. His first case was dismissed, and he refiled days later as a class action lawsuit; later that year, he was sent to prison for tax fraud.

Tea did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

'Are We Dating the Same Guy' Guy Imprisoned for Tax Fraud

After suing 27 women and multiple platforms because people he'd dated warned others not to date him, he filed a class action lawsuit against them. Now, he's headed to federal prison.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-26 15:48:40

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys

It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.

Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

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The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys

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404 Media

2026-02-26 15:45:29

The Islamic State Is Using AI to Resurrect Dead Leaders and Platforms Are Failing to Moderate It

The Islamic State’s online warriors are still posting. It’s been almost a decade since the group lost the Battle of Raqqa and saw its IRL territorial ambitions thwarted. Unable to hold territory in the real world, the group renewed its focus on posting and has started using AI to resurrect dead leaders. And, because social media platforms have gutted their content moderation operations, the terror group’s strategy is working.

The Islamic State’s online success is detailed in a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent research institution that studies extremist movements. For the study, researchers tracked IS accounts on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Element, and SimpleX. It found videos posted in Discord channels dedicated to video games and tracked how the groups have modified old content to fit on new platforms.
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Like many others posting online in 2026, the Islamic State has found success by talking about the Epstein Files, using AI to create new videos of dead leaders, and has begun taking its message to video games like Minecraft and Roblox.

“They are very adept at exploiting platforms [and] spreading messages,” Moustafa Ayad, a researcher at ISD and author of this study, told 404 Media. He noted that the group has been active online for 10 years and that part of their success is a willingness to experiment.

Ayad said that Facebook remains a central hub for IS, despite its push into new spaces. His research discovered 350 IS accounts on Facebook that generated tens of thousands of views. One video of an IS fighter talking to camera had more than 77,000 views and 101 shares. The Islamic State branding is blurred to defeat the site’s auto-moderation.

According to Ayad, Islamic State’s engagement numbers are up across the board. “Trust and safety teams have been rolled back over the past few years…a lot of this is outsourced to third party companies who aren’t necessarily experts in understanding if a piece of content came from the Islamic State,” he said.

Social media companies like Meta used the election of Donald Trump as an excuse to cut back on moderating their platforms. Meta said this would mean “more speech and fewer mistakes.” No policies around terrorism have changed, but broadly speaking the largest social media platforms are doing a worse job at moderating their sites. In practice it’s turned Facebook into a place where a group like the Islamic State can spread its message without falling afoul of content moderation teams. Even three years ago, IS influencers wouldn’t have lasted long on the site.

This rollback of moderation has coincided with a spike in views for IS accounts, the report argues. “Individual IS ‘influencer’ accounts are experiencing higher engagement rates on terrorist content than previously recorded by ISD analysts,” the report said. “It is unclear if this uptick is due to moderation gaps, platform mechanics or specific tactical adjustments by IS supporters and support outlets and groups.”

“We’re not talking about content where there’s a gray area,” Ayad said. “It’s very clearly branded Islamic State…supports violence, supports the killing of minorities, the celebration of bombings, the pillaging that is happening in Sub Saharan Africa.”

Something new is the adoption of AI systems to resurrect dead leaders. Ayad described a video where the deceased IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered speeches again.

“It’s a sanctioned version of using AI for a ‘beloved leader’ or taking him out of context and placing him in a meadow, surrounded by beautiful flowers, paying homage,” he said. “Some of these circles are strange.”

Another popular topic in current IS propaganda is the Epstein Files. According to Ayad, an AI-generated photo of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton canoodling in bed makes frequent appearances on IS accounts across platforms. The picture is, supposedly, pulled from the Epstein files but it’s a popular fake. Ayad said Epstein has been a perfect springboard for IS to talk about “western degeneracy.”

Ayad has also seen Islamic State videos created using Minecraft and Roblox. “They’re creating these virtual worlds that mimic the Islamic State’s caliphate, literally calling it something like Wilayat Roblox [the Province of Roblox] … and they’ll completely mimic the video styles of well-known Islamic State Videos using Roblox characters. This includes faux executions. It includes Arabic and English voiceover in the same cadence as an Islamic State narrator.”

One of the most famous pieces of Islamic State propaganda is a film called Flames of War: The Fighting Has Just Begun. Ayad has seen multiple 1 for 1 recreations of the film using Roblox characters. “They’re often tied to Discords where a number of users are creating this content. They always claim it’s fake or a LARP,” he said. “To see them in this video game skin is odd, to say the least.”

What drives an Islamic State poster? “It’s done very much for the love of the game,” Ayad said. It’s done for the fact that, as a user, ‘I might not be able to participate in physical Jihad but I can participate in electronic Jihad.’”

Keeping Islamic State off of major social media platforms is a constant battle, but one frustrating finding of the study is that the tactics for avoiding moderation haven’t changed much.

“Techniques included the use of alternative news outlets to rebrand IS news, as well as purchasing or hijacking channels with high subscriber bases. These were then repurposed to share IS content. IS supporters, groups and outlets also use coded language: they sometimes referred to the group as ‘black hole’ or the ‘righteous few’ to confound moderation efforts.”

To fight back against IS online, Ayad said that platforms needed to be better at coordination. Often a group is kicked off of Facebook so it moves to TikTok or another platform where it flourishes. He also said that all the companies need to be more transparent about who they’re kicking off their platform and why.

“Europol does these big takedown days and they’re effective to a certain degree but the fact of the matter is that the Islamic State is spread across an expanse of different platforms and messaging applications,” he said. “They’re able to shift operations to another place, wait it out and regenerate on that platform…it’s not like you’re dealing with an average user, you’re dealing with a user that’s determined to spread their ideology and exploit your platform to their own ends.”

And then there’s the old problem of language. “There needs to just be better moderation of under-moderated languages,” Ayad said. Facebook and other platforms have long been terrible at moderating non-English languages. A lot of rancid content online gets a pass because it’s in Arabic or Bengali.

More Speech and Fewer Mistakes

We're ending our third party fact checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.

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404 Media

2026-02-25 15:19:36

Podcast: Ring Is Just Getting Started

This week we start with Jason’s follow up to Ring launching its ‘Search Party’ feature. It turns out, according to a leaked email he got, the feature is only starting with finding lost dogs. After the break, Emanuel explains why we’ve learned nothing about amplification when it comes to the recent looksmaxxing trend. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how Grok produced the real name of a sex worker who performs pseudonymously.
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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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1:11 - ⁠Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs⁠⁠

30:26 - ⁠⁠We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons⁠⁠

⁠⁠Grok Exposed a Porn Performer’s Legal Name and Birthdate—Without Even Being Asked⁠⁠

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 …

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404 Media

2026-02-25 15:16:52

FBI Got Grok to Hand Over Prompts Used to Create Nonconsensual Porn

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.

The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

“For example, in one prompt, TUCK queried: ‘In a sensual sports style, a confident blonde woman playfully undresses on a tennis court, starting with her white crop top pulled up to expose her bare breasts. She has long wavy hair, a toned athletic body, and a flirtatious smile, wearing a short navy pleated skirt and holding a racket. She slowly lowers her top, revealing full nudity, tosses her hair, and swings the racket teasingly, with a surprising clumsy spin like a comedic twirl,’” the affidavit says.

The FBI says that Tuck also allegedly used Grok to create a complaint about the woman’s husband that was then filed to the company he works for.

The actions described in the affidavit are extreme and horrifying, but are not terribly out of the ordinary for harassment cases that we have reported on before. What’s notable here is that this case shows that law enforcement is looking at chats with AI bots as potential sources of evidence and that X is complying with these requests.

Most importantly, it highlights X’s role in allowing Grok to create nonconsensual sexual material in a criminal case that involves extreme cyberstalking and real life harm. According to the affidavit, Tuck used Grok to create this nonconsensual sexual material at the same time that Grok was being heavily criticized for creating child sexual abuse material. This all happened during the “undress her” phenomenon, which showed just how terribly Grok’s content moderation is. Last week, we also reported that Grok was used to reveal the real name of an adult performer.

Correction: This piece originally said the FBI issued Grok with a subpoena. It was a search warrant.

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2026-02-25 14:41:23

What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

There’s a new agentic AI called Einstein that will, according to its developers, live the life of a student for them. Einstein’s website claims that the AI will attend lectures for you, write your papers, and even log into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in discussions.

Educators told me that Einstein is just one of many AI tools that can do homework for students, but should be seen as a warning to schools that are increasingly seen by students as a place to gain a diploma and status as opposed to the value of education itself.
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If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

But humans aren’t horses. “This is much bigger than Einstein,” Matthew Kirschenbaum told 404 Media. “Einstein is symptomatic. I doubt we’ll be talking about Einstein, as such, in a year. But it’s symptomatic of what’s about to descend on higher ed and secondary ed as well.”

Kirschenbaum teaches English at the University of Virginia and has written at length about artificial intelligence. He’s also a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) where he serves as member of its Task Force on AI Research and Teaching. Einstein isn’t the first agentic AI to do the work of a student for them, it’s just one that got attention online recently. Kirschenbaum and his fellow committee members flagged their concerns about these AIs in October, 2025.

“Agentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI ‘agents’ that can navigate [learning management systems] and complete assignments without any student involvement,” the MLA’s statement from October said. “The recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes—with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better.”

The statement called on educators, lawmakers, and learning management system providers like Canvas, too cooperate in order to give academic institutions the abilities to block AI agents like Einstein.

Canvas did not respond to a request for comment.

Einstein is explicit in its pitch: it will log into Canvas (one of the most popular and ubiquitous pieces of education software) and do your classwork for you, just like Kirschenbaum and his fellows warned about last year.

The attractiveness of agentic AIs is a symptom of a decades-long trend in higher education. “Universities…by and large adopted a transactive model of education,” Kirschenbaum said. “Students see their diploma as a credential. They pay tuition and at the end of four years, sometimes five years, they receive the credential and, in theory at least, that is then the springboard to economic stability and prosperity.”

Paliwal seems to agree. He told 404 Media that he attempted to change the university from the inside while working as a TA, but felt stymied by politics. “The only way to force these institutions to evolve is to bring reality to their face. And usually the loudest critics are the ones who can't do their own job well and live in fear of automation,” he said.

For Paliwal, agentic AIs are a method of freeing people from the labor of education. “I think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us,” he said. “We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We've been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?”

Kirschenbaum said that programs like Einstein are the inevitable conclusion of viewing higher education as a certification and transactive process. “What we’re finding is that if forms of education can be transacted then we’ve just about arrived at the point where autonomous software AI agents are capable of performing the transaction on your behalf,” he said. “And so the whole educational paradigm has come back to essentially bite itself in the ass.”

He said that one solution he’s seen work is to retreat from devices entirely in the classroom. “Colleagues who have done it report that students are almost universally grateful. They understand the reasoning. They understand the logic,” he said. “And they appreciate the opportunity to be freed from the phones and the screens and to focus and engage with other people in a meaningful dialogue.”

But the abandonment of EdTech platforms and screens won’t work for every student. Anna Mills, an English professor at the College of Marin and a colleague of Kirschenbaum’s on the MLA AI task force, compared the fight against agentic AI in education to cybersecurity. “We could decide that bots need to be labeled as bots and that we need to be able to distinguish human activity from AI activity online in some circumstances and that we want to build infrastructure for that,” she said. “That would be an ongoing project, as cybersecurity is.”

Mills is not a luddite. She’s an expert in artificial intelligence systems as well as English, frequently uses Claude, and has been documenting the rise of agentic AIs in EdTech on her YouTube channel for months. She said that using agentic AI like Einstein was cheating, full stop, and academic fraud. “This is in direct violation of these foundational agreements that we make in order to use technology for human communication, human exchange, and human work online,” she said. “And yet that’s not obvious to us. It seems like it’s just another tool, right? But it’s not.”

Mills said she understands Paliwal’s frustrations with education. “But what you need to understand is that online learning spaces are critical for students to access any kind of education,” she said. For her, the proliferation of tools like Einstein do more than help a student bypass the labor of the classroom. They poison the educational well. Online learning has been a boon to many kinds of non-traditional students and that the rise of agentic AI is a threat to that not just because it trivializes traditional forms of education, but because it hurts the credibility of EdTech itself and other online platforms.

The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.

Students aren’t horses and there is no greater freedom they can buy themselves by using AI tools to cheat in the classroom. And worse, the more these tools proliferate, the more suspect the entire enterprise becomes. It’s one thing to cheat yourself out of an education, it’s quite another to muddy the waters of EdTech platforms and online learning for everyone else.

AI Is Ushering in a Textpocalypse

Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.

^{Matthew Kirschenbaum (The Atlantic)}

404 Media

2026-02-23 16:24:02

Meta's AI Patent to Simulate Dead People Shows the Dangers of 'Spectral Labor'

Last week, Business Insider reported on a Meta patent describing a system that would simulate a user’s social media activity after their death.The patent imagines a world where you’d be able to chat with a deceased friend’s Facebook or Instagram account after their death, and have a large language model simulate their posting or chatting behavior.

Meta first filed the patent in 2023, but the patent made headlines this week because of its dystopian implications. And while Meta told Business Insider that “we have no plans to move forward with this example,” a recently published paper from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Leipzig University shows that generative AI is increasingly being used to puppeteer the likeness of dead people. The paper argues that the practice raises “urgent legal and ethical questions around posthumous appropriation, ownership, work, and control.”

“Meta’s patent is big, and might even be a turning point,” Tom Divon, the lead author on Artificially alive: An exploration of AI resurrections and spectral labor modes in a postmortal society, told me in an email. “What makes it different is the scale. In our research, most of the AI resurrections we examined were quite bespoke, projects started by families, advocacy groups, museums, or startups, usually tied to very specific emotional, political, or commercial contexts. Even when they existed as apps, they were optional and limited, not built into the core structure of a platform. Meta’s proposal feels different because it imagines posthumous simulation as something woven directly into social media infrastructure.”

Using technology to animate the dead or simulate communication with them is not new, but the practice is becoming more common because generative AI tools are more accessible. Divon and co-author Christian Pentzold analyzed more than 50 real-world cases from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia where AI was used to recreate deceased people’s voices, likeness, and personality, to see how and why technology was used this way.

They say that the examples they studied fell into three categories:

• Spectacularization: “the digital re-staging of famous figures for entertainment.” For example, a live tour of an AI-generated Whitney Houston.
• Sociopoliticization: “the reanimation of victims of violence or injustice for political or commemorative purposes.” We recently covered an example of this with an AI-generated dead victim of a road rage incident giving testimony in court.
• Mundanization: “the most intimate and fast-growing mode, in which everyday people use chatbots or synthetic media to ‘talk’ with deceased parents, partners, or children, keeping relationships alive through daily digital interaction.”

The paper raises questions about this growing practice more than it proposes solutions. How does the notion of identity change when multiple versions of oneself can exist simultaneously, and what safeguards do we need to prevent exploitation of people after their death?

“The legal and ethical frameworks governing issues such as consent, privacy, and end-of-life decision-making demand reevaluation to accommodate the challenges posed by afterlife personhood,” the paper says. “In particular, to date, there is no clear line for governing the intricate intertwining of an individual’s data traces and GenAI applications.”

Divon told me that thinking about these issues is especially relevant when it comes to Meta’s patent. “Spectral labor describes how the dead can be made to ‘work’ again through the extraction and reanimation of their data, likeness, and affect. At small scale, this already raises ethical concerns. But at platform scale, we think it risks turning posthumous presence into an ongoing source of engagement, content, and value within digital economies [...] Meta’s patent makes us wonder, will individuals be given the ability to define their post-life boundaries while still alive? Will there be mechanisms akin to a digital DNR [do not resuscitate]?”

Divon explained that the current legal frameworks are not well equipped to address this technology because “digital remains” are typically approached either as property to be inherited or privacy interests to be protected. AI turns those materials into something interactive that can change and generate revenue in the present. Legislators, he said, should focus on getting explicit and informed “pre-death” consent requirements for posthumous AI simulation. Some laws that address this issue are already in progress.

“At its core, we believe the primary concern here centers on authorization,” he said. “Most individuals have not provided explicit, informed consent for their digital traces to power interactive posthumous agents. If such systems become embedded in platform infrastructure, inaction could quietly function as implicit agreement [...] We believe it is crucial to ask whether individuals should continue to generate social and economic value after death without having meaningfully agreed to that form of use.”

'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident

How the sister of Christopher Pelkey made an avatar of him to testify in court.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-23 15:44:28

Podcast: Privacy Under Pressure (With Harlo Holmes)

In this week’s interview, Sam is joined by Harlo Holmes. Harlo is the Chief Security Programs Officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She’s a media scholar, software programmer, and activist.

Harlo and Sam discuss the important work she does every day, and why it’s only becoming more crucial. They also get into how to fight back against privacy nihilism, digital security practices everyone can be implementing regardless of their threat model, and the recent arrests and raids of journalists in the U.S.
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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’re 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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• 404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation Sue DHS
• FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled

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 …

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404 Media

2026-02-23 14:51:52

How ICE and CBP Use Free Walkie-Talkie App ‘Zello’ to Power Their Operations

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, including a CBP officer who was on the scene when another officer shot a U.S. citizen, are using a free walkie talkie app called Zello to coordinate their operations, 404 Media has found.

The findings give insight into the sort of technology that ICE and CBP are relying on during the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation effort. Zello was previously criticized for allowing at least two January 6 insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol to coordinate on the app that day, and for hosting hundreds of far-right channels.

404 Media reviewed multiple pieces of bodycam footage from Chicago which showed CBP officials using the app. We also confirmed that multiple Zello user accounts on the app are associated with ICE email addresses, with some usernames containing acronyms such as ERO, which stands for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, and verified that multiple ICE group channels exist on the platform. Some of these channels have names mentioning immigration operations, “surveillance,” and “strike team.”

💡
Do you know anything else about Zello? Do you work at ICE or CBP? 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.

Zello is a smartphone app that acts much like a push-to-talk walkie-talkie. Users can communicate directly with one another, or create and join larger channels with groups of participants. On its website, the app claims to have 5 million active monthly users. The app offers a free version that anyone can download and start using, and a paid “Zello Work” option which has more features.

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How ICE and CBP Use Free Walkie-Talkie App ‘Zello’ to Power Their Operations

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404 Media

2026-02-21 14:00:56

At the World’s Largest General Science Meeting, Surviving Trump Is the Topic

Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we have a very special edition of the newsletter packed with everything I saw and heard at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, held in Phoenix from February 12 to 14.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members. It operates with the mission of advancing “science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people," according to its website. It’s also the publisher of Science, a leading collection of journals that have graced this newsletter many times.

The overarching theme this year was the damage inflicted on the U.S. science sector by the Trump administration and how to best respond to it. Since Trump returned to office, his team has terminated or frozen 7,800 research grants, laid off 25,000 scientists and personnel from research agencies, and proposed budget cuts of 35 percent to federal science funding, amounting to $32 billion, according to Nature.

It’s an epic own goal for American science leadership that is also reverberating through the global scientific community. But experts at the meeting highlighted the bright spots in the darkness, as the world learns to respond to the new normal.

Excuse the quality of my pictures; I’m untalented as a photographer at the best of times and I also refuse to part with my six-year-old iPhone SE. Without further ado, here are the highlights from the meeting.

The state of state science

State-Level Science Policy: A Conversation with Expert Practitioners

With the U.S. federal science sector in crisis, scientists working at the state, regional, and local levels have a unique opportunity and obligation to fill in the gaps. During one Friday session, two politicians on opposite sides of the aisle shared their thoughts on how to build public trust in science at the local level.

Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat state senatorwho represents about 250,000 people in New Jersey’s 16th Legislative District, said action on local levels is often smoother because the “hyper-partisanship that you read about or maybe have personally experienced in Washington [D.C.] rarely happens in the states.” Zwicker, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, also expressed hope because his younger constituents are interested in scientific policy, particularly on climate change “because they see it as an existential threat to their own future.”

Roger Hanshaw, a Republican who serves as the speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, said he represents “the opposite end of that bell curve” as his district (WV-62) contains 17,500 people and does not have “a stoplight, a Walmart, or a McDonald's.” Hanshaw, who has a background in environmental law, advised citizens to remain consistently engaged with their representatives at all times, not just when the issues they care about are a flashpoint in the news.

How screwed are we?

America @250: Redesigning the Scientific Enterprise
Arthur Daemmrich (right) and Mahmud Farooque during their talk. Image by author.
I tuned into a talk by Arthur Daemmrich and Mahmud Farooque, the director and associate director, respectively, of the Arizona State University Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO). They outlined how the United States came to be such a global powerhouse in science, and how that leadership role has been upended by Trump’s threats against academic universities, the massive cuts implemented by DOGE, and the loss of personnel and expertise across the U.S. science sector.

“This is a very concerted attack on these institutions,” Daemmrich said. “This is really a turning point and we’re in a historical transition at present.”

To help come up with solutions, CSPO has launched a new project to engage the public on the future of American science policy, including through a series of one-day public forums this summer that will take place in Arizona, West Virginia, and Massachusetts. After the talk, I asked the pair if they would tailor those forums to address science issues that are specific to the diverse interests of those very different states.

“What we want to do is create national-level baseline data,” Farooque replied. “We do this on one Saturday. In the past, we have done a national and local question that is different. We will take that into the design, but we will see what is possible. That will be another value proposition for the different states to get interested in answering the questions that are relevant to them.”

Daemmrich added that “a lot of our forums begin with a kind of open framing session where people are identifying hopes and concerns for their community before they are getting into the substance of how the U.S. science funding system works, what science has done for your community, or questions about how would you think about allocating science. They have this opportunity to articulate what they see in their community and we collect all that data as well.”

Fighting misinformation in a hostile environment

Rigor and Transparency: Editors-in-Chief on the Role of Scientific Journals

At this session, the editors-in-chief of three major scientific journals discussed their responses to an administration that is hostile to many scientific fields, as well as the challenges of combating the dissemination of bad scientific information on social media or podcasts.

During the Q&A, I asked Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, how, and if, scientists and science communicators can compete with celebrity personalities like Joe Rogan, who often air misinformation on their platforms.

“Well, for sure, you don't want me doing it,” Thorp replied. “I'm way too blunt.”

“I believe that the answer probably isn't going to come from science communication the way we think about it,” he said. “I think that the people who can move the meter are the primary care physicians, the emergency room docs, the nurse practitioners, the pharmacists, the social workers, the teachers, and the people who folks have a personal relationship with.”

“That's a lot of burden to put on those folks because they're not the most powerful people in the ecosystem,” he continued. But he said that these on-the-ground practitioners who have direct personal relationships with the public “have a much better chance” to persuade people “than one of us would have going on Joe Rogan.”

Helping corals beat the heat

Rebuilding Coral Resilience Through Cellular Biochemistry and Nanotechnology
Liza M. Roger during her talk. Image by author
Not everything at the meeting revolved around the president. Corals are the foundation of the most biodiverse regions in the oceans, but marine heatwaves—which are intensifying due to human-driven climate change—are already killing off many of these vital reefs worldwide.

I stopped by the Arizona State University (ASU) expo booth to hear a short talk by Liza M. Roger, an assistant professor of molecular sciences at ASU who is developing nanomedicines that could help boost the resilience of reefs. After her talk, I asked her how often these therapies would need to be applied to ensure coral survival.

“It would need to be a combination—like a cocktail of nanomedicine together—and then finding what time you would have to dose the system so that it responds the way that you want it to respond,” she replied. “Most likely, it would be a cyclical thing because the heatwaves are seasonal.”

“It’s a case where you have got to know your environment and when the waters are starting to warm, then you could eventually treat the corals, and wait for the heatwave to pass,” she said. “Then maybe, next summer you have to do it again.”

The fireside chats of prehistory

Cat Hobaiter: Storytelling Apes
Cat Hobaiter during her talk. Image by author.
What separates human language from gestural communication between our closest relatives, the great apes? Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, speculated on the role of fireside storytelling as a driver of our human capacity for complex language and abstract thinking.

She noted that once our early human relatives had mastered controlled fires, they were able to extend their hours late into the dark evenings, perhaps reflecting on the events of the day and anticipating the outcomes of tomorrow. These stories and conversations would necessitate the development of more symbolic concepts and complicated communication.
Hobaiter demonstrating ape gestures during her talk. Image by author.
Hobaiter also shared some amazing videos of ape communication in the wild, including chimpanzees that beat distinct drum patterns on tree trunks with their hands, creating vibrations of which can be heard for more than a mile. During the Q&A, I asked Hobaiter about her team’s process for obtaining these observations of wild apes in various parts of Africa.

“We have really well-established field camps,” she said. “My camp in northern Uganda has houses with beds, and a hot shower—if you like fire under the shower bucket. There are other camps where we go hiking. You drive three days until the road runs out, you hike two more days, and you’re in tents for the next few months.”

“Camera traps are amazing these days,” she added. “We’re starting to use various different computer science AI models to help us handle tens of thousands of camera trap videos. But we’re also really committed to manual coding because one of the things we’ve learned is that you can’t train a model to look for the thing that you don’t know is there. So it’s lots of different ways that are coming together.”

Do look up—with these fancy asteroid missions

Sizing Up the Asteroid Threat
Kelly Fast gives her talk. Image by author.
As if we don’t have enough to worry about here on Earth, there’s always the outside risk that some random rock from space might wallop us into oblivion. At this session, three scientists outlined how experts are working to mitigate the threat of death-by-asteroid while also assuring attendees it is not something that keeps them up at night.

Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, provided an overview of her office’s goal to identify as many potentially hazardous asteroids as possible. In particular, she spotlighted the upcoming mission NEO Surveyor, due for launch no later than 2028, which is designed to spot asteroids over 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter.

Nancy Chabot, the chief scientist of the Space Exploration Sector at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, walked the audience through the results of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a spacecraft that slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, shifting its trajectory.

Last, Daniella DellaGiustina, principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-APEX Mission, outlined her team’s plan to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis after it makes a very close approach with Earth in spring 2029.

During the Q&A, I asked the panelists about the popularity of asteroid impacts in science fiction, especially action movies, and whether those depictions are a hindrance or a help in their research and public engagement.

“I think it’s a help,” said Chabot. “The fact that this is something that people relate to, that people are interested in, does make it easier to have that conversation.”

“So it really can be this great gateway and if it comes about from Armageddon, Deep Impact, Don’t Look Up, or whatever your favorite one happens to be—I’ve seen them all multiple times,” she added. “ I think it’s something to lean into, personally.”

“I have obviously watched these films and see a lot of flaws in some of the basic premises,” said DellaGiustina, “but it’s great to use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to engage the public.”

Last, Fast weighed in, saying: “It can be challenging sometimes, engaging on science. I think in a way, we have it easy. We can have fun with it. When we can come out and speak, we can at least redirect to: here’s how it really works, and here’s what we really know.”

Conversations at the Expo

In addition to attending talks and sessions, I also wandered around the expo interviewing people at the booths. Here are my favorite three conversations.

That’s one small step for a dog…

Jeffery Bennett at his booth. Image by author.
Jeffrey Bennett, a Colorado-based astrophysicist and former NASA scientist, is the author of a children’s series about his Rottweiler dog, Max, who travels all around the solar system. His series was the first to be selected by NASA to go to space with astronauts onboard the International Space Station for a literacy program called Story Time From Space. Since 2011, many ISS crew members have filmed themselves reading about Max’s space adventures to encourage kids to get interested in reading, science, and space exploration.

"Hopefully, we start reading books from the Moon,” Bennett told me. ”Kids really get excited about watching these videos. We've had millions of views, most of them probably in classrooms with lots of kids watching all around the world, because it's all free.”

“I think the more that this can be done, the more it gives kids a chance to get engaged with astronauts and with space and with real science.”

A visit to the arXiv…

The arXiv booth. Image by author.
ArXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University, is in many ways the connective tissue of the global science community. Given how often I have personally relied on this server as a reporter, I was delighted to see its booth at the expo. I spoke with Steinn Sigurdsson, arXiv’s scientific director, about its mission.

“It delivers a thousand new papers every day and we have an archive of three million papers covering the last, actually, more than 35 years because some people backdated their papers to before arXiv started,” he added.

Sigurdsson said arXiv’s primary purpose “is to get the research circulating early because things happen fast.” The server has been essential in rapidly disseminating news about everything from astronomical discoveries to emerging Covid research early on in the pandemic. Long live arXiv!

Interactive Interactions

Genzer with his colleagues at their booth. Image by author.
The eye-catching Interactions.org booth was decorated with artistic photographs from the Global Physics Photowalk, a recent photo contest that showcased particle physics facilities around the world. Pete Genzer, the co-chair of the Interactions Collaboration, told me that the organization’s mission is to encourage “peaceful promotion of particle physics globally” and “to try to make particle physics, which should be very complicated, more accessible to the public.”
A close-up of the photo contest finalists. Image by author.
“We also do a dark matter day every October,” said Genzer, who also serves as manager of the media and communications office at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “We tie it to Halloween because, you know, dark matter is kind of spooky, and it's a good time. We've been doing that for several years now, and there's a series of events and lectures at these labs all around the world on dark matter, what we're doing to try to figure out what it is, and what place it plays in our universe.”

Vera Rubin is groovin’

Closing Plenary: Robert Blum of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in conversation with astronomer Jennifer Wiseman
Robert Blum’s plenary speech. Image by author.
The conference capped off with a plenary speech from Robert Blum, the director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new telescope that began operating last year. Blum walked the audience through the genesis of the telescope as a literal napkin doodle in the 1990s, to its meticulous construction on a hilltop in the Atacama Desert of Chile, to the exciting moment when it captured its first light in 2025.

He ended his talk with a quote from the telescope’s namesake, Vera C. Rubin (1928-2016), who was the first astronomer to describe dark matter as well as a passionate advocate for the participation of women and other under-represented groups in astronomy. I think it also serves as a fitting end for this newsletter that hopefully provides some inspiration in a time when science is under threat.

“Don't shoot for the stars, we already know what's there,” Rubin said. “Shoot for the space in between because that's where the real mystery lies."

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NEO Surveyor

NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.

^{NASA Science Editorial Team (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 17:38:06

The U.S. Military Is Reviving Microbes from 40,000-Year-Old Ice

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Scientists with the U.S. military have revived microbes frozen in Alaskan permafrost that dates back nearly 40,000 years—leading to the discovery of 26 new species—as part of an effort to pioneer technologies to help the military endure extremely cold environments, according to a new release from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).

Researchers with ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) discovered the novel microbes in its Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Some of these microbes were frozen into the ice 38,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals still walked Earth, though the samples contain species from many different eras across tens of thousands of years.

“Microbes are the best chemists,” said Robyn Barbato, senior research microbiologist and leader of CRREL’s soil microbiology team, in a call with 404 Media, noting that the permafrost cores are cold and extremely salty.

“We purposefully thought of permafrost and terrestrial ice as a great habitat to think about ice and to discover ice modulation properties,” she added. “If we can learn what they're doing, how they're doing it, then we can take that as a biotechnology and apply it to real world problems out there.”
Barbato in a Tyvek suit taking cores from the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Image: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL)
Digging up ancient lifeforms from permafrost is a busy field, with researchers reviving viruses that have been dormant for nearly 50,000 years in some cases, as well as recently discovering millennia-old bacteria that are resistant to many common antibiotics. But why is the U.S. Army interested? Some of the possible military applications of CRREL’s research include the development of frostbite prevention creams for soldiers working in extreme environments, novel antifreeze formulas, and techniques for de-icing vehicles and other equipment. Microbial research could also lead to new methods for creating stable ice so that, for example, vehicles could pass safely over melted or thawed ground.

“For the military, frostbite is a huge, huge problem when you're in extreme weather conditions in the Arctic,” Barbato said, noting that cold conditions can also stop batteries and other items from working. “You want to write with a pen—guess what? Your ink froze. You actually have to write with a pencil.”

“When you think about military operations in the cold, you have to think of all these practical things,” she continued. “To link it back to the microorganisms, they've developed these properties and materials that we can use to advance the opportunity of staying in the cold longer, and not having as many medical emergencies due to frostbite.”

Barbato and her colleagues at CRREL are funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s project called Ice Control for Cold Environments. Their research demonstrates that “permafrost microorganisms have diverse stress responses and survival adaptations relevant to biotechnology,” according to a study the team published last year in the journal Applied and Industrial Microbiology.

“We have a rich history of doing cold regions research,” Barbato said. “We have technical reports that, for the 60 years that we've been around, are still referenced today on how to collect ice cores in the middle of nowhere under freezing conditions. That initial research was just incredible, and is still used today, which is cool. Pun intended.”

Barbato noted that while her team develops technologies for the military, the discoveries are also applicable to civil spheres. In addition to practical technologies such as de-icing or frostbite prevention, these projects are uncovering novel proteins that may lead to biomedical breakthroughs.

“We're looking at it from a range of biotechnology applications,” Barbato said. “Specific to the DARPA work is we're now down-selecting 50 of those bacteria and seeing the top performers, and then starting to apply the technology for military use.”

The samples that the team collects contain spores that may have been frozen in stasis for as long as the ice itself, meaning they date back tens of thousands of years. But some of the younger bacteria in the permafrost has managed to remain metabolically active, reproducing slowly over thousands of years, and even consuming other bacteria in the environment.

These samples are carefully transported back to the CRREL’s soil microbiology laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they are revived, cultured, and added to CRREL’s Innovative, Collaborative, Exploratory Cold Regions Organism Library for Discovery in Biotechnology (ICE COLD) library.

“In permafrost, there's about ten million cells of bacteria in one gram, so there's a tremendous biodiversity that has been frozen in time,” Barbato concluded.

5,000-Year-Old Bacteria Strain Found in Ice Cave Resistant to 10 Common Antibiotics

The discovery of an antibiotic-resistant microbe locked in Romanian cave ice highlights both the risks of a warming world and an unexpected source of future medicines.

^{Jenny Lehmann (Discover Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 16:54:17

Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.

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

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

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Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 17:38:18

We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons

Almost a decade ago Jason and I sat in the roof garden in VICE’s Brooklyn office to talk to Whitney Phillips, a professor and expert on digital communications and ethics. The media, academics, and political pundits were still trying to wrap their minds around the fact that Donald Trump won his first presidential election, and Phillips was talking to us for a postmortem she was writing about how the media mostly failed in covering the new, far right, and extremely online politics that had taken over the culture in the years leading up to the 2016 election.

Politics in the United States and globally careening to the far right over the last 10 years is not a problem that can be blamed entirely on technology, the internet, or the media. It is a complicated, multifaceted, multi generational issue that spans economics, geopolitics, demographics, and more. But the problem, broadly speaking, which Phillips identified and named her research after, was the concept of “amplification.”

The idea, as laid out in her paper, The Oxygen of Amplification, is that many media outlets of all sizes and across the political spectrum, interviewed and covered people, most of them young white men, in the rising movement that at the time was often referred to as the “alt right.” The issue was that this coverage amplified their message even if it didn’t explicitly endorse it, and without framing their politics as inherently evil and detrimental to people and society.

Since Phillips’ report was published and often cited as one good explanation for how 4chan’s tiny political vanguard was able to seize such an outsized role in culture and politics, “amplification” has become a widely bandied about accusation. Initially this happened against media coverage that still “platformed” bad people, but eventually and erroneously, accusations of “amplification” got lobbed against pretty much any type of coverage someone didn’t like. For example, when we cover bad actors we often get criticized for amplifying them, even when that coverage leads to internet platforms enforcing their policies and those bad actors being banned.

But despite the concept of amplification being widely cited and adopted by the media and media knowers, it has been eight years since Phillips published her report, Trump is president again, and many Americans are too nihilistic or busy trying to prevent their neighbors from being deported to care that we are in the middle of an amplification renaissance.

There is no better example of this than the current obsession with Braden Peters, a so-called “looksmaxxer” who streams on Kick as Clavicular. I’ve known about the looksmaxxing community for years because it neighbors other online Superfund sites like 4chan and watering holes for self described involuntary celibates. Peters entered the mainstream media bloodstream by attaching himself to more famous racists and misogynists like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who livestreamed themselves hitting the club scene in Miami with Peters. This group in turn attached itself to the only racist who could rival Trump in terms of fame, Kanye West, when it sang along and Sieg Heiled to his Nazi anthem “Heil Hitler.”

Who is this other, square jawed racist in the sprinter van next to these other, well established and by now boring racists? you might ask yourself if you saw one of the clips of this group Miami making the rounds online. The answer came from the New York Times, Piers Morgan, GQ, The Adam Friedland Show, and others.

When you get past the novelty of Clavicular’s fresh face and lingo, the answer is profoundly uninteresting. Clavicular floated to the surface of the cesspool which is the looksmaxxing community. Primarily, it’s a forum where a bunch of young men who can’t get laid riled themselves up and created a theory of the world which views romantic life as a zero sum game they are losing. Sex with women is a fungible commodity that is most easily accessed by achieving an arbitrary definition of physical attractiveness, which by extension makes life better and easier in every way imaginable. Jobs are easier to get, consequences can be avoided, and other men can be “mogged” into submission by sheer aesthetic superiority. These looksmaxxers will stop at nothing to improve their appearance, including hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to change the shape of their face, taking various steroids, and doing DIY surgery.

As Werner Herzog said when he intensely stared into the eyes of a chicken, when I view an interview with Peters, I am overwhelmed by the enormity and stupidity of his flat brain. In a recent interview for his podcast, Adam Friedland ironically needled Peters and got him to proudly admit that he only lasts a minute in bed; the moment was funny but also revealing of how pathetic Peters is.

But let me be clear because much of the coverage of Peters hasn’t been about this particular point: Peters is a bad person to wield any cultural capital because the lifestyle he’s promoting is deeply misogynistic, racist, and dangerous. Looksmaxxing is a strategy that emerged among “incels,” who themselves emerged out of the pick up artist (PUA) community. All of these philosophies are founded on a resentment of women, which they view as having easier lives because they think they have easier access to sex, and that they hate because they think women deny them that sex. Peters has claimed looksmaxxing transcends politics, but this foundational discrimination against women is inherently regressive and right wing, which is why Peters is being boosted by the likes of Nick Fuentes, who doesn’t believe women should have the right to vote. This philosophy is maybe somewhat normalized by a broader obsession in Silicon Valley and beyond to optimize the human body with supplements, peptides, and figures like Bryan Johnson who aims to live forever.

The good news is that these looksmaxxing people are freaks and losers. They are a tiny and insignificant group that has no power in numbers. The bad news is that the entire point of amplification is that it can give a tiny group of people incredible power by shaping culture. It is fine and fair to document the freak show, and it’s important to explain why it is bad, but even if we start by doing it ironically, adopting the vocabulary of “mogging,” “looksmaxxing,” “jestering,” “cortisol spikes,” etc, allows the small freak show to shape our world in its image. We’ve already lost such battles around terms like “sigma,” which emerged from the same misogynistic culture, and is now so acceptable even Dora the Explorer is saying it.

As Phillips wrote in her report on amplification:

“No matter the specific framing, stories should avoid deferring to manipulators’ chosen language, explanations, or justifications. Joel Stein’s TIME magazine interview with avowed neo-Nazi and serial online abuser Andrew Auernheimer, discussed in Part One of the report, provides one example. Not only did Stein frame his subject as a ‘troll’ throughout (thereby minimizing the embodied impact of Auernheimer’s targeted attacks), he explicitly described him as ‘probably the biggest troll in history,’ a tag line Auernheimer could have written himself.”

And as I told Phillips at the time:

“Beyond this specific example, employing manipulators’ framings has the effect [...] of allowing manipulators to set the narrative and linguistic agenda, carve the world up into categories of their choosing, and appear to wield much more influence than they actually do. They don’t have the numbers to steer the cultural conversation on their own, and they should not be given any assistance, inadvertent or otherwise, in these efforts.”

Dora the Explorer Teaches About ‘Sigma,’ an Extremely Toxic Male Aspiration

Nickelodeon’s cartoon character tells kids why it’s cool to be a kind of toxic male that comes from the darkest corners of the manosphere.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-19 14:24:44

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation

Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.

“I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Oreglia’s Pinterest account is where she keeps reference material for her work, including human anatomy photos. In the past few months, she’s noticed an uptick in seemingly innocuous photos of women being flagged by Pinterest’s AI moderators. Oreglia told 404 Media there’s been a clear pattern to the reference material the site has a problem with. “Female figures in particular, even if completely clothed, get taken down and I have to keep appealing those decisions,” she said. This pattern is common on many social media platforms, and predates the advent of generative AI.

“We publish clear guidelines on adult sexual content and nudity and use a combination of AI and human review for enforcement,” Pinterest told 404 Media. “We have an appeals process where a human reviews the content and reactivates it when we’ve made a mistake.” It also confirmed that the site uses both humans and automated systems for moderation.

Oreglia shared some of the works Pinterest flagged including a photo of a muscular woman in a bikini holding knives, a painting of two clothed women in an intimate embrace, and a stock photo of a man holding a gun on a telephone that was flagged for “self-harm.” In most cases, Oreglia can appeal and get a decision reversed, but that eats up time. Time she could be spending making art.

And those appeals aren’t always approved. “The worst case scenario for this stuff is that you get your account banned,” Oreglia said.

r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins...every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest.

The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.

“I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and ‘no AI,’” they said. “On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled ‘Hand Drawn’ but simultaneously marked as ‘AI modified,’ it creates confusion and undermines that positioning.”

Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they’ve seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as “AI modified” despite being older than image generation tech. “There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected,” she said. “Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI.”

Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. “I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it,” said another post. “I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.”

Artist Eva Toorenent told 404 Media that she’s been able to cull most of the AI-generated content from her board, but that it took a lot of time. Whenever she saw what she thought was an AI-generated image, she told Pinterest she didn’t want to see it and eventually the algorithm learned. But, like Oreglia fighting auto-moderation and Zakuga fighting to get the “AI modified” label taken off her work, training Pinterest’s algorithm to stop serving you AI-generated images eats up precious time.

AI boosters often talk about how much time these systems will save everyone. They’re pitched as productivity boosters. Earlier this month, Pinterest laid off 15 percent of its work force as part of a push to prioritize AI. In a post on LinkedIn, one of the former employees shared part of the email CEO Bill Ready sent out after the lay offs. “We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach—prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working.”

Toorenent removed all her own art from her Pinterest account after hearing the news that the site would use public pins to train Pinterest Canvas, the company’s proprietary text-to-image AI. But she has no control over other users uploading her artwork. “I have already caught a few of my images still on Pinterest that I did not upload myself…that makes me incredibly mad,” she told 404 Media. “It used to be a great way to get your work seen among other people, but it’s being used to train their internal AI.”

Oreglia told 404 Media that the flood of AI has changed her relationship to a site she once used to prize. “It's definitely affected how I search things and I'm always now very critical about where something came from... although I've always been overly pedantic about research,” she said. “It does make you do your due diligence but it sucks to constantly have to question and check if something is authentic or synthetic.”

She’s thought about leaving the platform, but feels stuck. “I just want to be able to take all my references with me. I've been on the platform for about ten years and have very carefully curated it. It's really nice to be able to just go to my page and search for something I saved instead of having to save everything to folders although I also do that,” she said. “More and more I'm trying to curate and collect physical references too but some of that can take up space I don't have so it can be difficult. Having a physical reference library just seems more and more necessary these days…artists have to be adaptable to this kind of thing these days. It's annoying but not unmanageable.”

Ready has been vocal and proud about the company’s commitment to forcing AI into every aspect of the user experience. “At Pinterest…we’re deploying AI to flip the script on social media, using it to more aggressively promote user well being rather than the alternative formula of triggering engagement by enragement,” Ready said in a January column at Fortune. “Social media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users’ willingness to share creative and original ideas.”

Pinterest CEO: the Napster phase of AI needs to end

I believe AI can benefit our 600 million users for years to come and at a fraction the cost that many associate with the technology.

^{Bill Ready (Fortune)}

404 Media

2026-02-18 17:42:59

Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Palantir says that increased regulation of immigration may impact the company’s ability to hire the talent it needs. At the same time, Palantir provides the technological infrastructure for the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission.

As 404 Media has shown, Palantir considers Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a “mature” partner, and is working on a tool called ELITE that ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid.

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

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Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}