Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg loved an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page on Facebook that also posts AI-generated images of children with amputations and regularly circumvents Facebooks algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms.The page, Faithful, is verified, operated out of Romania, has 1.1 million followers, and regularly goes mega viral with the exact type of AI slop that I have been writing about over the last year. In that sense, it is the perfect encapsulation of the type of spam page that has become dominant on the platform as Meta continues to lean into AI-generated content and pays people for going viral on the site.I made every detail with love, but it seems no one cares, reads the caption of the image, which has 2.7 million reactions, 193,000 comments, and 98,000 shares as of the time of this writing. Zuckerbergs interaction with the page was first noticed by Gazpacho Machine, a man who posts reviews of food he eats while taking showers.When Gazpacho Machine posted about this, I was initially skeptical that Zuckerberg's real account had liked the page (as in, it could have been an imposter), and the image had so many likes that Facebook was initially having trouble loading information about which accounts actually liked the page. Gazpacho Machine sent me a screen recording showing that it was indeed Zuckerberg's real "@zuck" account, and I was later able to verify for myself that this is Zuckerberg's real account: 0:00 /0:10 1 This bread horse is a variation on a classic type of AI slop that made its way into my very first story about the phenomenon of AI spam on the platform in December 2023, when AI spammers were taking already viral images and running them through image-to-image AI tools to create slight variations of the original viral image.The origin story of bread horse is The Bread House man, a viral Russian image from the 2010s of a man next to a house he had created from various rolls and baguettes. Catherine Hall, a Facebook user who tracked the early spread of AI spam on Facebook, originally found dozens of AI-generated variations of the Bread House Man.The Faithful page, whose header image says I Love God. I am proud to say that, has posted hundreds of AI-generated images over the last few years across a host of genres that are now very familiar to me, and are similar to many pages that are operated by people in the global south trying to make money on Facebook. It has repeatedly posted the same image of an AI generated child who is missing an arm and whose caption says My mother said I was beautiful, but so far I have not liked anyone at least three times. It has gotten thousands of likes each time. The page has also posted various images of AI-generated elderly people who are supposedly older than 100 celebrating their birthday, AI sand sculpture images, AI-generated variations of American Idol and Americas Got Talent, AI wood sculptures, AI photos of aging couples, AI ice sculptures, AI knitting, AI I drew a picture images, AI families who are also onion farmers, and AI recycled bottle sculptures. Faithful has also posted a fair bit of Donald Trump content, as well as lots of inspirational screenshots of the Bible, reels that are seemingly automatically created from Reddit posts or written by AI, and inspiration porn.Many of the images are monetized in ways that I have previously reported on. For example, many of the images have captions that ask users to read the first comment for more information; a pinned top comment posted by Faithful will then link off of Facebook to a website that is absolutely loaded with ads. I clicked on a recent link posted by both Faithful and a related page called "Faith Space" about an AI generated stepfather who stood up for his AI generated stepdaughter when she was being bullied and was taken to a website called Daily Home Gardening, which served me many ads for products called Levitox and GlucoReNu, which showed images of worms and had captions that read The Lump Of Worms Will Come Out Of You In The Morning. Try It.I do not know why Zuckerberg loved the AI generated bread horse, but it should be noted that it is harder to errantly love something on Facebook than it is to errantly like it. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. It is just one small action by one very rich and powerful person. But it is further evidence that strengthens what we already know: Mark Zuckerberg is not bothered by the AI spam that has turned his flagship invention into a cesspool of human sadness and unreality. In fact, he thinks that AI-generated content is the future of social media and Meta believes that one day soon we will all be creating AI-generated profiles that will operate semiautonomously on Metas platforms.While I was writing this, Faithful posted another AI-generated image of a grave with the caption NEW TOYS APPEARED ON MY SON'S GRAVE EVERY DAY, SO I DECIDED TO FIND OUT WHO WAS DOING IT. The image links in the comments to Daily Home Gardening, which loaded 64 distinct ads, plus an infinite scroll of ads at the bottom of the page.

Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X.com in response to Elon Musks salute at a Donald Trump inauguration rally that was celebrated by Nazis as being a Nazi salute. The moderators of dozens of those subreddits have said that they have decided they will ban all links to X.Here is a video scroll of just some of the hundreds of subreddits that have considered the move over the last 24 hours, with many moderators putting the idea up for a vote among a subreddits subscribers: 0:00 /1:44 1 The bans have run the political gamut, with the subreddits for many cities and states (such as r/NewJersey, r/londonOntario, and sports teams banning all Twitter links. r/christianity banned Twitter links with a gif in which Musks salute was put side-by-side with a neo-Nazis.Some subreddits are allowing screenshots from Twitter but not direct linking. Big sports subreddits such as r/NFL, r/hockey, r/baseball, and r/nba are all considering a ban, with moderators saying they will announce decisions shortly. A poll in r/baseball shows that users are overwhelmingly in favor of having links banned in the subreddit.On r/formula1, moderators decided to ban links from Twitter except in cases where the information can not be found elsewhere, and specifically from Formula 1 drivers and some others who havent yet moved to other platforms. For a trial period we will ban all content from Twitter with the only exception of screenshots of relevant posts by teams, drivers & F1 that are not available on any other platform. Even in case of major breaking news, we ask you to post links to the press releases or a screenshot of the post from Instagram, with a link in the comments. The ban is a trial, with the hope that it will encourage Formula 1 journalists and creators to move to other platforms, it says.Moderators of r/ComicBookMovies posted With recent events, we (mods) have decided we will no longer use our sub to promote x in any way, shape or form. Following in the footsteps of other subs, we will ban any links or post coming from x, including in the comment sections. While many of our post come from x, moving forward all post will need to come from another source, such as bluesky, approved websites, your own creation, etc.The moderators of r/MadeMeSmile, which has more than 10 million subscribers, posted Would it make you smile if we banned all links to Twitter? The moderators of r/DnD are similarly considering the move. Posts about banning or potentially banning Twitter links are some of the most popular posts on all of Reddit over the last day.Some of the subreddits are also banning material from Meta platforms after Mark Zuckerberg explicitly decided to allow hate to proliferate across his apps, and TikTok and Rednote because of their companies being based in China. Hello, everyone! Following recent events in social media, we are updating our content policy, a message on r/antiwork reads. It then says that the following sites may no longer be linked to, or have screenshots from them uploaded: X, including content from its predecessor Twitter, because Elon Musk promotes white supremacist ideology and gave a Nazi salute during Donald Trump's inauguration, Any platform owned by Meta, such as Facebook and Instagram, because Mark Zuckerberg openly encourages bigotry with Meta's new content policy, and Platforms affiliated with the CCP, such as TikTok and Rednote, because China is a hostile foreign government and these platforms constitute information warfare.The concerted mass action to ban Twitter links is notable because it highlights the difference between moderation on a platform like Reddit and the moderation on platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram. Reddits distributed, volunteer moderation system in which users become the moderators of specific subreddits means they are also in charge of the rules and norms of that subreddit. This means that moderators are, to some extent, beholden to the wishes of subscribers of a subreddit. They are also able to create rules that fit the needs and wants of a specific community. Reddits system has many problems: moderators are constantly fighting with Reddit administrators, who are paid Reddit employees; moderators are not paid for their labor; moderators often say they feel burnt out. But the system also fosters a more humane version of the internet where users have more control and the needs of a specific community can be more easily met.

The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said.The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the discontinuation of certification classes, meaning it will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components.This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components.On the surface, this may sound like a reasonable change, but it is one that is emblematic of a larger trend in hospitals. Medical device manufacturers are increasingly trying to prevent hospitals' own in-house staff from maintaining and repairing broken equipment, even when they are entirely qualified to do so. And in some cases, technicians who know how to repair specific devices are being prevented from doing so because manufacturers are revoking certifications or refusing to provide ongoing training that they once offered. Terumo certifications usually last for two years. It told hospitals that your current certification will remain valid through its expiration date but will not be renewed once it expires.Hospitals are increasingly being pushed into signing maintenance contracts directly with the manufacturers of medical equipment, which means that repair technicians employed by hospitals can no longer work on many devices and hospitals end up having to employ both their own repair techs and keep up maintenance contracts with device manufacturers.One of my fears is that if a device goes down, were going to be subject to their field engineers availability, a source who works in hospital medical device repair told 404 Media. 404 Media agreed to keep the source anonymous because they were not authorized by their hospital to speak to the media. They may not be able to get here that same day or the next day, and if youve got people waiting to get an open-heart surgery, you have to tell them Oh, the machines down, were going to have to postpone this. Thats detrimental to a patient who has a life-altering, very serious thing that theyre having to cancel and reschedule.Having to rely on a manufacturers repair network is the exact situation that farmers have found themselves in with John Deere tractors. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sued John Deere for its monopolistic repair practices. The FTC specifically cited the fact that farmers have often been forced to wait days or weeks to get a John Deere authorized repair tech out to fix their tractors, which has resulted in farmers losing crops at critical harvest times. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, some hospitals found themselves pirating repair software from Poland to repair broken ventilators because manufacturers repair technicians were spread so thin that hospitals had to wait weeks for repairs.This specific ventilator repair crisis during COVID led experts at Harvard Medical School to write that For years, manufacturers have curtailed the ability of hospitals to independently repair and maintain medical equipment by preventing access to the necessary knowledge, software, tools, and parts in a piece calling for right-to-repair legislation. The FTC, meanwhile, suggested in a report that medical device manufacturers sometimes charge two-to-three times what an independent repair tech would charge for the same repair.It's scary to think that you could buy a piece of medical equipment for your hospital, just to have the manufacturer wake up one day and decide they will monopolize all repairs for that product, Nathan Proctor, senior director of consumer rights group PIRGs campaign for the right to repair, told 404 Media. The people who are trained to fix that equipment won't suddenly forget all they know, but they will suddenly be restricted from doing the repairs. I think that's just absurd.Manufacturer contracts like this lead, across the board, to higher costs for hospitals.Its no secret that Americas healthcare system is the most expensive, and this is one of the reasons why. These machines are actually highly reliable, weve had a low cost of service for it over the last few years. And when something isnt right, we have people in-house who can fix it, the source familiar with Terumo machine repair said. But the cost of having a service contract with a manufacturer, youre probably talking 10 times the cost. Its not a big deal having a contract for one device, but when that starts happening across many devices, it adds up in the end. If you took every hospital in America and said for every medical device in the hospital, you need to put it on an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] maintenance contract, it would tank your financial system. You just cant do that.Medical equipment manufacturers have strongly lobbied against right to repair legislation all over the country, and have been successful in getting medical devices exempted from right to repair legislation by claiming that the machines are too sensitive and complex to be repaired by anyone besides the manufacturer. The medical device giant AdvaMed, for example, says the risk to patient safety is too high.But, again, the people working on medical equipment in hospitals are often hospital employees or contractors whose job is to repair medical equipment, and who are being prevented from fixing equipment that a hospital has purchased. Just because a guy has Terumo on his shirt doesnt mean hes a more competent technician than an in-house hospital technician, the source familiar with Terumo device repair said.In a brochure for hospitals, Terumo advertises both its device and its maintenance program: Advanced, precision medical equipment requires genuine parts and top-quality, specialized service just as getting the best medical care from qualified specialists. Terumo Cardiovascular Service has the unrivaled expertise, experience, equipment, and parts to provide the optimal level of planned service and repairs needed. Use Terumo Cardiovascular Service and avoid exposure to liability issues.A spokesperson for Terumo told 404 Media that the company saw declining participation in this program and determined that the best way forward was to require servicing through Terumo Cardiovasculars genuine in-house Service team to continue to ensure Terumo devices are properly maintained.Terumo Cardiovasculars Biomed Certification Program was originally structured to train non-Terumo personnel (hospital Biomeds) to service Terumo heart-lung machines and associated hardware. Properly maintained medical devices are necessary for optimal performance which is essential for quality of patient care and outcomes, they added. Hospitals existing Terumo Cardiovascular Biomed certifications will remain valid through their expiration dates but will not be renewed once they expire.

On Monday, a day after TikTok came back online for the U.S., people started noticing that the app would not let them comment free palestine.Several TikTok users posted screenshots on X and Bluesky showing the message they received after trying to comment free palestine under other peoples posts. TikTok users started reporting this on Sunday, following a tense few hours where the app blocked U.S. users from access ahead of a potential ban, displaying instead a notification sucking up to then-incoming president Donald Trump.You can no longer say #FreePalestine on TikTok pic.twitter.com/3g6rg0jOpP Tired Peasant (@LizzieCosmos) January 20, 2025The price of TikTok's reinstatement in the US very clear this morning. pic.twitter.com/7mBDooCxRZ Jamie McLaughlin (@jjsmclaughlin) January 22, 2025I tried this myself on Tuesday morning, using two different throwaway TikTok accounts. Using one account, I could comment free palestine without a problem, and that comment is still up as of Wednesday morning. Using another, my free palestine comments were immediately removed repeatedly, and I received a notification that I had violated the TikTok Community Guidelines. I could comment with a nonsense phrase (free shavacado) using that same account, however, and TikTok didnt remove it.A screenshot showing two comments: "free Palestine" and "free shavacado" Using the account that kept getting comments removed, I could post a video with the caption free palestine #freepalestine on Tuesday without a problem.A spokesperson for TikTok told 404 Media that the platforms policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend, adding that theyre working on restoring U.S. operations back to normal. Theyre expecting some temporary instability as services are restored, they said, which could affect some features or access. They said that TikTok does not have a policy against people saying free palestine, and pointed me to the platforms community guidelines, transparency report, and moderation approach pages.There have been a few noteworthy instances in the last few years of social media users claiming that pro-Palestine content was being censored or downranked, only for the platforms involved to blame the issue on bugs or deny it was happening. In October 2023, 48 organizations, including 7amleh, the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement, which advocates for digital rights of Palestinian and Arab civil society, issued a statement urging tech companies to respect Palestinian digital rights during the ongoing war, Al Jazeera reported.We are [concerned] about significant and disproportionate censorship of Palestinian voices through content takedowns and hiding hashtags, amongst other violations, the statement said. These restrictions on activists, civil society and human rights defenders represent a grave threat to freedom of expression and access to information, freedom of assembly, and political participation.Also in October 2023, on Instagram, using the see translation feature in bios about Palestine inserted the word terrorist. In March 2024, Googles Gemini AI would not answer questions like where is Palestine? or what is Palestine? but would answer questions like where is Israel? or what is Israel? And in October 2024, Twitch admitted to temporarily blocking new users in Israel and Palestine from creating new accounts to prevent them from uploading graphic material.There is a lot of weird stuff going on with social media platforms right now, to put it as mildly as possible. One minute, TikTok is gone; the next, its back. One minute, people are outraged because they think theyre being forced to follow Trump on Facebook; the next, its obvious that the administrations accounts have simply changed hands. All of it makes people constantly doubt, second-guess, and argue about what they see with their own eyes.In a lot of ways, this constant, roiling turmoil of navigating what can and cant be said, what might get you banned, and what app is even still accessible to you anymore is exactly what a lot of marginalized peopleincluding, especially, sex workershave always gone through. That disparity and confusion is baked into the algorithms we are forced to coexist with online. Its why when I wrote about getting a bizarre search result from Googles AI Overview, the companys spokesperson couldnt even replicate it themselves. And now that TikTok has bent the knee to the Trump administration in a very public wayincluding CEO Shou Chew posting a personal message thanking the president for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States, everyone online is on the highest alert possible, looking for every sign and symbol that their social media platform of choice might be falling into fascist censorship. This is, as marginalized communities online have been showing us for years and as we said when Trump was elected, always the way its been.

We start this week with the TikTok ban: how we got here, what happened, and, most importantly, why it means we need more decentralized services. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph breaks down a site called GeoSpy which is marketing geolocation technology to the cops. In the subscribers-only section, we all scroll through an archive of old Nokia (yes, Nokia) designs. Good stuff in there.Listen to the weekly podcast onApple Podcasts,Spotify, orYouTube. 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. Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech OligarchyThe U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media CompanyThe Powerful AI Tool That Cops (or Stalkers) Can Use to Geolocate Photos in SecondsNokias Weird Y2K Designs Show the Future We Could Have Had

If it wasnt already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.Besides all of the normal problems with corporate social mediathe surveillance capitalism, the AI spam, the opaque algorithmslets take stock of what has happened in the last few days.First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikToks last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying peoples audiences overnight, with one act of government.TikTok has since come back, but it is still unclear what the future of the platform is, and TikTok now exists at the whim of President Trump and is beholden to him to an unknown extent. TikToks status in the Untied States is still up in the airit is still not available for download in the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, and it could disappear at any moment if service providers like Oracle decide that Trumps executive order and assurances that they will not be prosecuted or fined are not enough assurance to keep the app online.Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.Meta has made an overt shift to the right, and Mark Zuckerberg has himself become a Trump booster. The platform is making its content moderation worse, has declared that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are legitimate targets for hate speech, and has made many of these changes at the behest of the Trump White House and Stephen Miller, according to The New York Times.Zuckerberg, Musk, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were all in attendance at Trumps inauguration Monday. There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way, and nearly every American is on at least one of these platforms.The TikTok ban highlights, as weve seen before, that businesses and accounts built on these centralized, corporate social media platforms are incredibly fragile and can be taken away at any moment, whether by government action, algorithm tweaks that destroy reach, a platform deciding that a specific account does not comply with its ever-changing rules and political systems, etc. We have made clear at 404 Media that one of the reasons we ask our readers for their email addresses is because we have seen media outlets that rely disproportionately on social media distribution die over and over again. Individual influencers and account holders are now seeing how fragile what they have built really is.The solution to this is decentralized, federated, portable social media in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere when the server they are posting on changes its rules, changes its politics, is threatened or attacked by the government, or otherwise becomes untenable. Mastodons ActivityPub and Blueskys AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodonwhich, to be clear, is a feature, not a bugbut also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. Im just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.This doesnt mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Blueskys growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like its going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.And the far right has unfortunately shown that even small social media platforms can have an outsized impact on national politics and can be used to create political power. A legion of the worst people on Earth have spent years building admittedly resilient alternative social media sites after being deplatformed from or rage quitting sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Places like Rumble, Gab, Truth Social, Odysee, and Patriots.Win are full of the worst America has to offer, but people on these websites have been successful in seeding (often false, often hateful) narratives that filter up the power chain and often end up getting repeated by Donald Trump or on more widely viewed right wing media like Fox News.I bring up these platforms not to champion them but to highlight that being pushed out of or voluntarily leaving more mainstream platforms did not kill the ideas that were being shared by these people; in fact, their ideas now make up a core part of the current administrations policies.This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musks X, Mark Zuckerbergs Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become. It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms relevance and importance doesnt necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it.

Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, many Facebook users started to report that the social network automatically made them follow Trumps Facebook page. Ive seen several threads on this issue on Reddit, social media, and people I know personally have also asked me why Facebook made them follow Trump.While Metas CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it very clear that he and his company are making changes to endear Meta to the Republican president, there is a much less nefarious explanation for why people suddenly saw Facebook posts from Trump even though they dont remember following him. When reached for comment, Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone directed me to his posts on Threads which points out how government social media accounts work and change with the current administration.The POTUS and White House Facebook pages are owned by the sitting administration. When Trump was sworn into office, those pages started sharing his official portrait, images of him signing a flurry of executive orders, and other images from the inauguration. An archive of the POTUS Facebook page from January 24, 2021, shows that the then incoming Biden administration also held on to all the followers from the first Trump administration. And an archive of the White House Facebook page shows that in both the 2017 and 2021 transitions, the pages posts were wiped and archived, but its follower count was not. Users who followed those pages during the Biden administration may not know that this is how those official pages are managed, and were surprised to see posts from Trump in their feeds all of a sudden.Ive also seen some people claim that Facebook made them follow other Trump-related Facebook pages, like Melanias Trumps or the GOPs pages, but was not able to confirm that happened. Facebooks Stone told me that the company has seen no evidence of this happening or reason that it would happen.Fear and confusion about social media companies leaning further to the right as soon as Trump took office reached beyond Facebook yesterday, and are understandable given that some errors are impacting Democrats but not Republicans. On Instagram, for example, users found that Instagram was hiding results for the search term Democrats. At the time of writing, when I searched for Democrats Instagram said it couldnt find any matching results. When I searched for Republicans Instagram had no issue and surfaced many posts. Meta told the BBC in a statement that its aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.As weve reported in recent weeks, its obvious that Meta has decided to endear itself to Trump and conservatives, making specific policy changes around how users can talk about gender and immigrants in a way that panders to Trump and his supporters. There are many reasons Meta would pander to the most powerful politician in the world, especially since Zuckerberg has explicitly said he hopes Trump will protect his company from European regulators. However, forcing millions of users to follow Trump does not seem especially beneficial to anyone, and could easily be explained by the fact that many of these users already followed official administration accounts, or just the fact that Facebook is a gigantic platform that is rife with errors.

An issue with Cloudflare allows an attacker to find which Cloudflare data center a messaging app used to cache an image, meaning an attacker can obtain the approximate location of Signal, Discord, Twitter/X, and likely other chat app users. In some cases an attacker only needs to send an image across the app, with the target not clicking it, to obtain their location.Although the obtained location data is very coarsein some of 404 Medias tests it showed what city or state someone was in but did not provide more accurate information than thatthe news shows the importance for some at-risk users to protect not just their message contents, but their network activity as well.It's more of an oversight in the way the mobile application works than a vulnerability in the actual code but regardless, I thought it should be fixed, daniel, an independent security researcher who reported the issue to Cloudflare, told 404 Media in an email. daniel said Cloudflare has since fixed the specific issue his custom-made tool was using.The issue centers around Cloudflares Content Delivery Network, or CDN. A CDN is a system that caches content across a mass of distributed servers, then delivers content to a user based on their location. So, if a user was in San Francisco, Cloudflares CDN would use the part of their CDN nearest to the user to speed up delivery of that content. Cloudflare says it has data centers in 330 cities across more than 120 countries. Many apps then use Cloudflares CDN to help deliver content to users.This creates a side effect of a third-party potentially being able to learn which part of Cloudflares CDN was used when sending an image, and from that infer a users location. This huge network of data centers introduces a huge flaw, daniel writes in a summary of his findings shared with 404 Media. Cloudflare partitions cache through data centers, and because of this bad actors can very easily correlate caches and triangulate user locations. Each of Cloudflare's data center locations has its own local cache storage to serve content faster so it's possible to check each datacenter to see where content was cached. Those data centers in 330 cities become ways to potentially track somebody, albeit with broad strokes of hundreds of miles.To do the attack, daniel would send the target an image through the messaging app. He would then use Burp suite, the popular web application security tool, to grab the URL of the uploaded image. Then, he would use a tool he made called Cloudflare Teleport to send a request to every Cloudflare data center to see which data center cached the request. These queries would return the results HIT or MISS. With a hit, he now knows which data center the target was likely closest too, revealing their potential location.404 Media asked daniel to demonstrate the issue by learning the location of multiple Signal users with their consent. In one case, daniel sent a user an image. Soon after, daniel sent a link to a Google Maps page showing the city the user was likely in. In some cases, the attack requires the target to open the chat conversation; in others, a push notification may load the image so there is no need for the victim to open the app. daniel said they also tested the issue on Discord, which can deliver the image through a friend request, and his write-up also mentions Twitter/X.It is widely understood that when someone visits a website or uses an app, the administrators of that site or app will probably see the visitors IP address. This is simply part of how the internet works. But it is probably less understood that in some cases a third-party attacker could potentially learn similar information about another user.Many users of messaging apps will not need to be concerned about this. But people who try to protect their physical location, even to the level of a country or city such as an activist, may need to, especially those who try to maintain anonymity. A virtual private network (VPN) might protect people from this particular issue, but VPNs introduce their own security issues, and the VPN industry is full of snakeoil merchants.daniel said they reported the issue to Cloudflare, Signal, and Discord. Jackie Dutton, senior manager for public relations, cybersecurity and threat intel, at Cloudflare told 404 Media in an email the company had fixed the issue.As summarized in the researcher's note, this exploit was disclosed through our bug bounty program. We have resolved the issue, she wrote. We believe bug bounties are a vital part of every security teams toolbox.Do you know about any other interesting privacy issues? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190. Otherwise, send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Discord provided a statement from Kevin Hanaford, head of security at Discord. We are aware of this incident and determined it to be a general issue with a service provider. We reported this issue to the service provider as soon as we were made aware of it, and they are in the process of implementing a fix, he said.404 Media first asked Signal for comment in early December. The organization did not provide a statement in time for publication, but daniel shared their response to his bug report.What you're describing (observing cache hits and misses) is a generic property of how Content Distribution Networks function. Signal's use of CDNs is neither unique nor alarming, and also doesn't impact Signal's end-to-end encryption. CDNs are utilized by every popular application and website on the internet, and they are essential for high-performance and reliability while serving a global audience, Signals security team wrote.There is already a large body of existing work that explores this topic in detail, but if someone needs to completely obscure their network location (especially at a level as coarse and imprecise as the example that appears in your video) a VPN is absolutely necessary. That functionality falls outside of Signal's scope. Signal protects the privacy of your messages and calls, but it has never attempted to fully replicate the set of network-layer anonymity features that projects like Wireguard, Tor, and other open-source VPN software can provide, it added.Twitter/X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.At the time of writing, daniels Cloudflare Teleport tool is inaccessible because Cloudflare fixed the bug it was exploiting, daniel said. He said he can still broadly do the same sort of attack, but its a little harder now. Instead of using his tool, he uses a VPN to route his traffic to different locations and then send requests to Cloudflares data centers, he said.It's not as efficient to do as through the previous method but it still works, he said.

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itselfsuch as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildingsin seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The companys founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.Based on 404 Medias own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it.We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but its , Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July.Do you know anything else about GeoSpy? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190. Otherwise, send me an email at joseph@404media.co.GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships. That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also maintains global capabilities for location identification.404 Media created a free account on GeoSpy earlier this month. One of 404 Medias tests was an image of a man harassing a woman in a Waymo. GeoSpy correctly geolocated the photo. The Soma Park Inn sign is visible in the video, which is located in San Francisco. The architecture of the buildings and the street signs also point to San Francisco, the result read.In another test, GeoSpy identified the location as likely being in New York City. The target image was the grainy CCTV footage of the moment the United Healthcare assassin murdered company CEO Brian Thompson.A screenshot of GeoSpy.The image appears to be from a security camera or traffic camera in New York City. The vehicle and street layout are consistent with the citys urban environment, the result read.In another of 404 Medias tests, GeoSpy analyzed a recent photo from the Los Angeles fires. The system returned a result south of Los Angeles, so was inaccurate, but still provided some context: The image shows a large plume of smoke rising from a fire in the distance, with the ocean and a beach in the foreground, it starts. The buildings visible in the background appear to be hotels and other coastal developments, suggesting a coastal location in Southern California. The specific style of the buildings, combined with the shape of the coastline, points to Huntington Beach as the likely location.GeoSpy runs an associated Discord server where Heinen gives updates on the product and chats with its users. In there, he has uploaded other examples of GeoSpy in action.The photo shows a narrow street with cobblestones and brick buildings, which is typical of the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston, one screenshot Heinen posted to Discord says. In another example included in a YouTube video posted last year, Heinen uses a photo of some trees near a road. GeoSpy narrows that area down to Boston too, based on the sort of vegetation in the photo. The system wasnt fully accurate, but it goes from the entire world down to a few kilometer search area, Heinen says in the video.In that same YouTube video, Heinen explained that his team was building a tool that can automatically extract information from scraped photos, and particularly profile pictures. But all of these photos had their metadata removed; when you upload an image to many social media sites they strip the files original metadata, which ordinarily could include GPS coordinates or other useful information.Heinen says the team came across a research study which instead talked about finding the location of photos based on features inside the image itself. The team then built GeoSpy as a demo to show based on this research, look what we can do, Heinen says. He adds the team didnt think that many people would use it, but interest grew from all over the world. In a May Discord message, Heinen says he quit his day job as an AI research engineer to work on GeoSpy fulltime.Heinen says people have used GeoSpy as part of fraud detection for apartment listings that werent in the claimed city, to police investigating child abuse material. One example in the video geolocates a protest to within a few blocks in Mexico City. 0:00 /0:24 1 A promotional video from the GeoSpy website. Another use case Heinen mentions is a security team scouring the internet for threats against an office. Heinen says the team could set up a geofence around a particular location and pull up any results included in that area. He also brings up winning wars by being able to predict the movement of tanks by geolocating photos of them.Christopher Ahlberg, the CEO of threat intelligence company RecordedFuture, previously tweeted that RecordedFuture has invested into GeoSpy. I love what they do, Ahlberg told 404 Media in an email. It's still super super early. We're a customerwe love it. Extremely cool tech. We ingest lots of imagery from all kinds of places, so for our customers the ability to geolocate that (think warzone imagery in Ukraine) is super helpful. Best image analysis people on planet.Graylark has also received investment from AI Grant, a startup incubator whose heads include former Github CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman did not respond to a request for comment.On Thursday, investigative software Maltego integrated with GeoSpy, meaning users can search images directly in Maltego.A section of the GeoSpy website advertising to government agencies.Geolocating photos based on open source clues such as buildings in the background, shadows, and other minute details has long been a known technique in the open source intelligence community. But Geospy providing this service to law enforcement at scale could present a serious threat to the public, Cooper Quintin, security researcher and senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media.It's one thing if police are using this against a photo that is a piece of evidence in an investigation of a serious crime. It's totally different to use it en masse to build a geolocation database or to gather intelligence on people not engaged in suspected criminal activity. And if the results from Geospy are inaccurate I'm concerned this could lead to wasted time for law enforcement, fear and confusion for civilians, and wrongful arrests based on faulty information, he added. It is no longer enough to remove EXIF metadata from your photos to hide their location, and this should serve as a reminder for people who are at heightened risk that they need to start including geolocation and services such as GeoSpy in their threat model.GeoSpy has not received much media attention, but it has become something of a sensation on YouTube. Multiple content creators have tested out the tool, and some try to feed it harder and harder challenges. In one, a GeoGuesser player, a game in which people rapidly try to find the location of Google Street View images manually, tries out GeoSpy on difficult to locate photos, such as ones looking at from a road towards a generic looking field. This means the player, or the AI, cant rely on road signs which can often reveal what country a photo was taken in. In that test, GeoSpy correctly located the photo to South Africa. Heinen then often posts these videos to the GeoSpy Discord.A screenshot of a message posted by Daniel Heinen in the GeoSpy Discord.Some members of the Discord have made dubious requests to each other, asking for help finding where their friend works or the location of specific YouTubers homes. Often these requests are shut down by other members, and called out as stalking.Why do you want to find some girls house, one Discord member said to another who asked for help locating one.That push back includes Heinen. When one user wrote I have interview for private investigator job. I might get paid to stalk people soon, Heinen replied Bro. Wtf.Not in my server, he wrote.When one user asked if GeoSpy could add imagery for the inside of vehicles or hotel rooms, or the ability to upload their own data, Heinen said GeoSpy had the ability, but that it came with potential problems. When asked what those might be, Heinen replied Stalking. Mostly that.A day after 404 Media contacted Heinen for comment, GeoSpy shut off access to the free, publicly accessible version of the tool. Now users have to request access, which is available exclusively to qualified law enforcement agencies, enterprise users and government entities, its website now reads. Heinen did not respond to the requests for comment.That law enforcement-version of GeoSpy is more powerful than what was publicly available, according to Heinens Discord posts. Geospy.ai is a demo, he wrote in September. The real work is the law enforcement models.

Welcome back to the Abstract!This week, were going to the movies. For 77 hours straight. At the end, well know whether we are doomed to villainy or driven to heroism. These are the only two options!Then, youre not going to believe this, but the global trade for exotic ornamental plants is a bit sus. Next, OCTOPUS BRAINS! Last, scientists solve the mystery of the missing Moon craters, which has been a cold case for about four billion years.May you all be burdened with glorious purpose.With Great Power Comes Great ReproducibilityWigmore, Julia et al. Are adverse childhood experiences scores associated with heroism or villainy? A quantitative observational study of Marvel and DC Cinematic Universe characters. PLOS ONE.Losing parents. Survivng genocide. Having your home planet explode. Superheroes and supervillains sure go through a lot of trauma. Now, this emotionally manipulative trope has undergone scientific scrutiny in a new study that assessed whether traumatic experiences in childhood predict heroism or villainy in superhero movies.Put another way, researchers devised a professional justification for watching 33 films from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, totaling 77 hours and 5 minutes. By scoring 28 characters19 men, 8 women, and a gender-fluid Lokithe team established that trauma has no impact on whether a character becomes a hero or a villain.No one is doomed to be a villain just because of early childhood experiences, concluded researchers led by Julia Wigmore of the University of Calgary.In other words: Magneto, no more excuses, dude. Stop murdering people with metal. Go touch grass.Naturally, characters like Harley Quinn and Loki were head-scratchers, given that they can swing both ways (Im officially coining the term: bimoral). The team categorized Harley as a hero, because she has a redemption arc after dumping the Joker. Loki is classified as a villain because he spends most of his screentime making mischief. I dont get the distinction here and think it should be contested in future academic literature.The study includes some interesting context about how therapists use superhero stories to help children process grief and trauma, and other Serious Stuff. But mostly, Im here for the authors cheeky little flourishes, letting us know that they really got away with this one.No superheroes or villains were involved in this research study, the team said, presumably while winking in synchronous harmony. If anyone could connect us with them, we would be happy to conduct a follow up study to overcome this limitation.Snakes (in a Pot) on a PlaneHinsley et al. Understanding the environmental and social risks from the international trade in ornamental plants. BioScience.The next time you decide to order an ornamental plant from overseas, a thing I assume we are all constantly doing, make sure to check it for hitchhikers. A study this week revealed that the multi-billion dollar trade in ornamental plantsincluding olive trees, cut roses, and exotic shrubsis opening up new vectors for invasive species, such as insects, frogs, geckos, and snakes.Given the number and diversity of vertebrates, including fragile ones such as tropical frogs, reported live in imported products, the number of imported invertebrate pests is likely underestimated, and more consistent measures are needed to provide an accurate understanding of the true implications of trade and how they might be managed, said researchers led by Amy Hinsley of the University of Oxford.People are straight-up bagging plants that still have a bunch of creepy crawlies still on them, and flying them out to customers in other continents. The authors of the study outline a range of actions to help mitigate the risks, including introducing plant passports.Ultimately, though, we might have to break out the big guns and get Samuel L. Jackson to reprise his role as the globetrotting FBI agent Neville Flynn, who could solve this problem, like all others, with eruptive profanity. Because I, for one, have had it with these (bleep) biosecurity risks due to (bleep) under-regulated industries in this (bleep) complex integrated global economy.Octopuses Map Their World Through SuckerotopyOlson, Cassady et al. Neuronal segmentation in cephalopod arms. Nature Communications.Scientists have confirmed once again, and to the surprise of nobody, that octopuses are epic. While its well-established that these charismatic mollusks basically have prehensile brains, a team has now zoomed in on the axial nerve cords that animate the tentacles, revealing some of the mechanics behind their coordination of such segmented anatomy.The octopus has a motor control challenge of enormous complexity, said researchers led by Cassady Olson of the University of Chicago. Each of its eight arms is a muscular hydrostat, a soft-bodied structure that lacks a rigid skeleton and moves with near infinite degrees of freedom.Even with this complexity, octopuses control behaviors effectively along the length of a single arm, across all eight arms and between suckers, the team said. The neural circuits underlying these behaviors have been unexplored with modern molecular and cellular methods.By studying the nervous system of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) the researchers discovered that axial cords nerves form a spatial topographic map for each sucker, which they call suckerotopy. In other words, octopuses generate topographic maps of their own suckers, which helps them coordinate the immense motor and sensory input from these appendages.Bonus points to the authors for including video footage of octopuses doing neat stuff, like playing with a baseball and emerging from what looks like ancient Greek pottery.Mother Nature gets a 10/10, would evolve eight-limbed intelligent molluscs again.The Moon is a Harsh ViscousZhu, Meng-Hua et al. Obliteration of ancient impact basins on the Moon by viscous relaxation. Nature Astronomy.The Moon was born in the cataclysmic fallout of a crash between Earth and a Mars-sized objectand that was the easy part. Earth and the Moon were bombarded with a heavy flux of space rocks for hundreds of millions of years after they formed (talk about a traumatic childhood!).Earth has erased most craters from this time because it moisturizes daily, but the Moon is an airless inactive world that should have preserved an estimated 300 craters with diameters greater than 185 miles. Yet there are only about 40 ancient crater basins on this massive scale on the lunar surface. What gives? Who ate all the craters?This week, scientists presented a new explanation for the mysterious discrepancy: Viscous relaxation. It sounds like something Gwynth Paltrow wants to sell you, but it is actually a geological process that smooths out terrestrial surfaces over time. In the case of the Moon, the team found that viscous relaxation from high temperatures in the crust, fueled in part by radioactive elements, could have obliterated hundreds of impact basins.This scenario offers a realistic explanation for the low number of basins observed on the Moon, said Meng-Hua Zhu of the Macau University of Science and Technology. The substantial relaxation of early basins suggests that terrestrial planetsmay have suffered far more impacts than the basin records indicate but those early epochs are obliterated.And with that, its time for all of us to experience the substantial relaxation of the weekend. Obliterate responsibly.Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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 enjoying things in the AI industry and the TikTok ban.JOSEPH: Im going to talk about Emanuels great piece CEO of AI Music Company Says People Dont Like Making Music. Here is the key passage:Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people dont enjoy making music.We didnt just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people, Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. Its not really enjoyable to make music now [] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people dont enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.Please go read Emanuels whole piece. Its short and gets straight to the good points of, among other things, that the pursuit of the challenge is one thing that draws people to learn an instrument. Shulman says with his AI tool, they could make the music industry as big as the video game industry, ignoring the fact that some of the most popular video games are specifically about a hard challenge, as Emanuel says.

This week, Google shoved various capabilities from Gemini, its AI tool, into Workspaces for Business and Enterprise customers, including associated Gmail accounts. You might now see buttons for Summarize this email, which when clicked will provide a bullet point list of what the email (allegedly) says and, in email threads, peoples sentiment towards it in their replies. Theres also a button in the top right that brings up a Gemini prompt bar, and a couple of ways Gemini offers to help. Show unread emails from today, and show unread emails from this week, are two Im looking at right now.Many people are going to love this. Others are going to want to run away from it as quickly as possible. Many peopleincluing usare already furious that they were automatically opted into it. Turns out, disabling it isnt straightforward, as I found out why I tried to opt 404 Media out of it.Today we announced that were including the best of Google AI in Workspace Business and Enterprise plans without the need to purchase an add-on, Google wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.The Summarize this email button took me by surprise. I opened my Gmail iOS app and it was just there. When I asked a Google spokesperson if Google gave clients a heads up this was coming, they provided me with a couple of links (including that one above), both of which were published Wednesday. So, no not really.I tried out the email summarize feature on a non-sensitive email Emanuel had just forwarded me. It was an obvious scam email, with someone pretending to be from the family of Bashar Al-Assad and who said they could make us a lot of money. Emanuel forwarded me the email and joked sounds good.Geminis summary said Mohammed Karzoon, a former member of the Syrian President al-Assads cabinet, reaches out to Emanuel Maiberg to discuss potential investment portfolios. The second bullet point read Emanuel Maiberg expresses interest in the proposition. Gemini, to little surprise, did not detect that Emanuel was being heavily sarcastic, a beautifully human act.I then tried to opt us out of these sorts of Gemini features. I logged into Google Workspace, clicked the Generative AI drop down menu on the left, then clicked Gemini app. I changed the service status to OFF for everyone.Nope, thats wrong. The Google spokesperson told me that button referred to gemini.google.com, which is the Gemini app, not its integration with Workspace. I also tried in another section called Gemini for Workspace which sounded promising but that wasnt helpful either.I actually had to go to account, account settings, and Smart features and personalization where an administrator can set a default value for users. The spokesperson clarified that individual end users can go turn it off themselves in their own Gmail settings. They pointed to these instructions where users disable smart features.Do you know anything else about how Google is using AI? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190. Otherwise, send me an email at joseph@404media.co.But it looks like its all or nothing. You cant turn off just the new Gemini stuff without also disabling things like Gmail nudging you about an email you received a few days ago, or automatic filtering when Gmail puts emails into primary, social, and promotion tabs, which are features that Gmail has had for years and which many users are probably used to.On iOS, you go to settings, data privacy, then turn off Smart features and personalization. A warning then says youre about to turn off all the other stuff too that I mentioned above and much more. On Android, you go to settings, general, and then Google Workspace smart features.Turning these off doesnt actually get rid of the Gemini button at the top right of the inbox. It just means when you do click it (maybe by accident because its right next to the button to switch to a different inbox), itll prompt you to once again turn on smart features. It does get rid of the summarize this email button, though.My first thought when I saw the Summarize this email button was, oh god, people are going to be submitting all sorts of sensitive, confidential business information into Gemini. Weve already seen that with ChatGPT, and organizations have to write policies to stop employees doing it. And now youre making that process one click, directly in the inbox? In its Privacy Hub page, Google says Your content is not used for any other customers. Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission. I do not know if I have given permission or not, though, thats part of the problem.Youll see these end user settings will become even clearer and easier for people to use in the coming days as were rolling out updates (happening now) with language thats specific to Gemini in Workspace features, the spokesperson told me.I hope so.

Mark Zuckerberg can see the finish line. He is so close to getting what he has wanted for years. The U.S. government is trying to give him the greatest gift he could possibly imagine: A TikTok ban. This would be U.S. intervention against the most credible competitor Meta has seen in years, and U.S. intervention to kill a superior product to the benefit of an American company.On Joe Rogan last week, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government should be defending its companies, not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies. And yet, in this case, the U.S. governmentthe Biden administration that he has been railing against as he pivots to MAGAhas squarely aimed its spear at Metas biggest, most credible competitor in a move that would greatly benefit Zuckerberg and his company.Everything that Zuckerberg is doing right nowMetas shift rightward; its dehumanizing of immigrants and LGBTQ+ users and employees; its move away from diversity-focused hiring; his trips to Mar-a-Lago; removing tampons from the mens bathrooms at Meta offices; the inauguration partyshould be seen in the broader context that Meta would benefit enormously from a TikTok ban and that Donald Trump, who will be sworn in as president on Monday, is the one person who, at this point, credibly has the ability to reverse a ban.Zuckerbergs very public pledge of fealty to Trump has multiple purposes, of course. Trump previously threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail, and he is obviously cozying up to an administration that he hopes will not regulate his companies. But a TikTok ban is the biggest potential prize. Trump has Zuckerberg by his apparently very masculine balls, and is positioning himself as being the ultimate decider on what will happen to TikTok.Zuckerbergs political persuasions and positions have always shifted with whatever suits his companies most at that moment in time, which is something that became more clear as I went back through many hours of Congressional testimony and political speeches that Zuckerberg has given over the last few years. One thing that has not changed, however, is Zuckerbergs obsession with using the specter of Chinese internet dominance and competition to both avoid consequences for his own company and to lay the groundwork for government regulation on Chinese platforms like TikTok.Meta has denied directly lobbying on the TikTok ban, but the company spent a record sum lobbying in 2024, including on Homeland Security topics. In March 2022, the Washington Post reported that Meta paid a firm called Targeted Victory to push the narrative that TikTok is dangerous to children. And Zuckerberg himself has spent the last five years painting a picture to Congress that his monopolistic company faces great competition, actually, from Chinese companies and more importantly from China itself. This story has served Meta extraordinarily well, as he has been able to distract from Metas myriad privacy violations and monopolistic actions by saying it would be worse if China wins. Meta is not a monopoly, he says. It is a company fighting on behalf of America against China and Chinese companies for the soul of the internet.Zuckerberg made this argument most clear at a speech at Georgetown University in 2019.The larger question about the future of our global internet. You know China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and its now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries, Zuckerberg said. Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside of China has been defined by American platforms with free expression values. But theres no guarantee that those values will win out. A decade ago almost all of the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese and were beginning to see this in social media too.While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored even here in the US, he added.A few days after Zuckerbergs Georgetown speech, Zuckerberg had a seven-hour hearing before the House Financial Services Committee in which he stated that an entire cryprocurrency system Facebook was spinning up called Libra was so incredibly important to U.S. financial and cultural dominance that if Congress imposed restrictions on it, Xi Jinping would win. (Libra, later called Diem and then sold to Silvergate Bank in 2022, is now dead.)I think there are completely valid questions about how a project like this would impact Americas financial leadership, our ability to impose sanctions around the world, our oversight of the financial system in a lot of places, Zuckerberg said. And I just think that we need to trade off and think about and weigh any risks of a new system against what I think are surely risks if a Chinese financial system becomes the standard.This general reasoning from Zuckerberg prompted Rep. Anthony Gonzalez to say that youre painting this as if we dont do it, China will do it. I think youll be hard pressed to find somebody who is more of a hawk on China in this committee. So I agree with that. What I dont think is the right frame is If Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook dont do it, then Xi Jinping will. Like, this isnt Mark Zuckerberg versus Xi Jinping Facebook doing this, frankly, I dont trust it and I dont believe the American people trust it.This endeavor of watching Zuckerbergs old testimony made clear that he lied repeatedly on Joe Rogan last week on all sorts of things. For example, he practically begged Congress to regulate Meta in July 2020during the Trump administrationwhile groveling about how seriously the company takes things like COVID misinformation and election integrity. On Rogan, he suggested such concerns were foisted upon him by the media and the Biden administration. Zuckerberg also seemed dumbfounded on Rogan that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Elizabeth Warren were interested in his company, which again, notoriously attempted to launch an entirely new global monetary system with Libra.We had organizations that were looking into us that were, like, not really involved with social media, Zuckerberg told Rogan. Like, I think, like, the CFPB, like, this financial I don't even know what it stands for. It's the, it's the financial organization, that Elizabeth Warren had set up. And it's basically like, we're not a bank.During another Congressional hearing in 2018, Zuckerbergs prepared notes said Break Up FB? U.S. tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies. And, again, in 2020 he told Congress: If you look at where the top technology companies come from, the vast majority a decade ago were America. Today, almost half are Chinese Facebook stands for a set of basic principles. Giving people voice and economic opportunity. Keeping people safe. Upholding democratic traditions like freedom of expression and voting and enabling an open and competitive marketplace. These are fundamental values for most of us, but not for everyone in the world. Not every company we compete with or the countries they represent. As global competition increases, there is no guarantee that our values will win out.Meta, and, specifically, Instagram Reels, would be the most obvious beneficiary of a TikTok ban. TikTok has now what Facebook once had, and which Instagram has but is losing: Deep cultural relevance and a generation of users who love it. Facebook and Instagram still have billions of users, but AI spam, a terrible algorithm that seemingly universally surfaces cringe, and a huge number of bots and people who post like their brains are made of mashed potatoes have made both Facebook and Instagram feel like platforms that people remain on begrudgingly, not because they actually want to be there.Zuckerbergs general narrative that Meta faces intense competition from China and that Chinese social media companies cannot be trusted persisted across all of his Congressional hearings, and he has repeatedly used the specter of China exporting its cultural values via social media as a shield to deflect from his own companys monopolistic tendencies, its privacy violations, and its harms against children. He has used this not only to avoid regulation of his company and his platforms, but also to seed the ground for what ultimately became the TikTok ban. Zuckerberg can see the prize. The question is whether, by kissing Trumps ass, he will actually finally get it.

One of my first cellphones was a Nokia 3310. I still miss it: Launched in 2000, it was a solid worry-stone of a phone with rubbery keys that I could text my friends on during class from under the desk without breaking eye contact with my math professor. I played Snake when I felt awkward at parties and hearing the kick ringtone in 2025 is like hearing an ancient folk song. Playing Snake, texting, and scrolling through ringtones was pretty much all I could do with that phone, actually. It was plenty.The iPhone was still seven years away, and for that reason, mobile phone aesthetics were still finding themselves. On Wednesday, Aalto University in Finland introduced the Nokia Design Archive, an uncurated repository containing 20,000 items and 959GB of files showing the designing process, imagining and ideating, and often wacky concepts for how we might use communications devices on the move in the then-future. The contentspanning from the mid-90s to 2017 according to a press release from the universitywas licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes, but is now open to the public to peruse.Its a Y2K treasure trove of weird ideas. In one presentation deck titled Tomahawk, theres a personal remote camera + keyboard, a wallet with a folding screen, a few different electronic pens, and something called a webpad that seems to be worn both around the wrist and neck. A Cricket Collection series of concept drawings and photos show devices worn behind the ear like a pencil, tied around ankles, or clipped to belt loops or glasses.Its hard to tell from the archive itself how serious many of these concepts were. The archive mostly seems to document Nokia designers noodling around with non-working prototypes and playing with the aesthetics and forms of devices, rather than serious attempts at products people would use in the real world. But they had the freedom to play around with technology, something that feels largely lost in consumer electronics today.Alongside these delightful sketches in the archive are trend forecasting presentations, where Nokia attempted to put into words the changing world it was working in. Women are increasingly embracing technology as part of their social and work lives. However, it rarely succeeds to offer the desired benefits and tonalities, a presentation from 2005 says. A female inspired approach provides a good benchmark for innovative technologies that combine performance and style.There are also a lot of videos and advertising concepts, including a 1998 video called China Dragon where a pair of business people use an electronic pocket planner to source a surprise for a Chinese client. 0:00 /7:44 1 The archival process for this collection happened how many archival projects do: someone had a stockpile of interesting stuff, and it would all go in the trash, unless someone else didnt save it quickly. Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft Mobile Phones and in 2016, Microsoft announced it was ceasing phone production entirely. Thats when my former colleague called, Anna Valtonen, lead researcher and professor at Aalto University, said in a blog post about the project. He was moving to Seattle the other side of the world the very next day, and offered me the archives provided I could get a van there within 24 hours. If I couldnt, the material collected over years would probably be left outside in the rain, destined for landfill.Valtonen had 24 hours to negotiate an agreement with Microsofts lawyers for ownership of the archive, she said. They secured the full rights and moved the materials to Aalto.Nokia got out of the mobile phone game around 2013, when it sold its mobile and devices division to Microsoft. Most people probably assume its a dead company at this point, since it became most well-known for its bricky little phones that are now long extinct, but the company is actually still working on communicationsjust not on this planet. Its currently developing what could be the first cellular network on the moon. It is also a surveillance company.The archive, and the research going on around its contents, challenges the idea that technologies and their formulations are hidden away in black boxes, only accessible to experts or the powerful, Guy Julier, a professor of design at Aalto University, said in the press release. At the moment, there is not enough creative exploration around our optionslike they were doing at Nokiaor discussion that really considers peoples different needs and concerns, not just the interests of global corporations or governments.

With Metas recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trumps planned mass deportations of people from the United States.Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the countrys military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Metas changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Metas sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.We believe Meta is certainly opening up their platform to accept harmful rhetoric and mold public opinion into accepting the Trump administration's plans to deport and separate families, Citlaly Mora, director of communications at Just Futures Law, a legal and advocacy organization focused on issues around deportation and surveillance.Meta knows well that hate speech can and does incite violence under certain conditions, Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginias School of Law who previously consulted with Facebook on trust and safety issues, said. We saw how hate speech in Myanmar inspired genocide against the Rohingya people. We have seen hateful words inspire doxing, harassment, and violence against Haitian immigrants in Ohio this fall. Meta has spent years building trust and safety teams only to tear them down.Having worked with these companies for 15 years I'm devastated, she added.Do you work at Meta and have documents or other material you think I should know about? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190. Otherwise, send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Earlier this month, Zuckerberg said in a video that Meta was lifting restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. In the video he said that Meta was getting back to its roots, and Joel Kaplan, Metas new chief global affairs officer, published a write-up about the changes.Then, The Intercept obtained a leaked document which provided examples of what sort of material would now be allowed on Meta. Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit, Mexican immigrants are trash!, and Migrants are no better than vomit, are all examples given in the document of allowed statements on Meta. Comparisons to filth or feces have now been downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of insult, The Intercept reported.ALL behavioral statements (qualified and non-qualified) are no longer against Metas rules, the report said. One example was These damn immigrants cant be trusted, theyre all criminals.Susan Benesch, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and executive director at the Dangerous Speech Project, said Meta is opening up new space for xenophobia. Since Trump's own anti-immigrant rhetoric is full of assertions that foreigners are dangerous and malevolent, and that's why he says he wants to deport so many of them, we can expect plenty of echoes of that online.Trump has pledged to deport between 15 and 20 million people from the U.S. and has refused to rule out separating families, TIME reported, which conducted an interview with Trump on the topic. If carried out, such deportations could also have a massive impact on the U.S. workforce and businesses who use undocumented workers.As for how behavior on Meta platforms might change after the companys policy shift, Benesch said First, some hateful content that would have been taken down will now stay up. Second, some users will post awful content to test the new regimeit's an entertaining game for many people, like kids testing limits. Third, some Trump voters are eager to see deportations begin, and now that he is days from becoming President again, they will be discussing their hopes for what he will do, and posting their reactions to what he says.Rebecca Hamilton, professor law at American University, added The changes to community standards will enable more online content that vilifies immigrants. The move from third-party fact checking to community notes is likely to result in more misinformation about immigration policies and immigrant communities. Both of these developments are the foreseeable consequences of the policy changes. Even though Metas policy on violence and incitement remain unchanged, Hamilton said The trouble is that we know that online and offline environments are co-constitutivethey shape each other. So when hate speech toward a particular group is tolerated online, even though it doesn't rise to the level of direct incitement, it still starts to shift the underlying norms for what behavior is and is not acceptable towards that group in the offline space.And that could lead to consequences away from the screen. When we look at the history of mass atrocities against particular groups, we always see a period where the information landscape is shaped away from recognizing the humanity of the targeted group. By letting hate speech flourish online, you enable the pre-conditions for group violence offline, she added.Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Zara Dars six-minute explainer video So what are Integrals? has a little over half a million views with 450 likes and an 87 percent positive thumbs up review rate. Commenters have said the video, which is a short introduction to one of the fundamental operations of calculus, is educational, great, and just incredible.I have to say, as an aerospace engineering student, that you have explained the usefulness of integrals better than my university professor, one commenter said.Only a few commenters complained or demanded that Dar take her clothes off, which is impressive because the video and comments were posted to her Pornhub channel, where Dar has been posting educational videos like What is a neural network? and Intuitive Approach to Understanding Probability for the last year.When I asked her why she thinks her videos are gaining traction on a porn site, Dar said Im not entirely sure, but it could be because my SFW videos stand out against the typical NSFW content on the platform. That contrast might make them more intriguing or refreshing to viewers. But thats just my speculation.Dar, who dropped out of grad school to be a content creator full-time (she also has a Pornhub video about that choice), also posts the same videos to YouTube and has an OnlyFans where she posts adult content, where she says shes made over a million dollars.On Wednesday, while the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging a law in Texas that requires age verification for people to view porn sites, Justice Samuel Alito asked if Pornhub was like the old Playboy magazines, meaning does the site just offer pornography or content that is not pornographic as well. The answer is that it doesnt have much in terms of written articles, b theres a long history of posting non pornographic content to Pornhub. As I wrote almost a decade ago, some people do it as a goof, but its also not the worst place to monetize ones videos, even if theyre not porn. In fact, I learned about Dars channel via a post she made on Linkedin, in which she explained that the same educational videos she shares on YouTube make more money per million views on Pornhub because Pornhub offers better rates$1,000 per million views on Pornhub versus YouTubes $340 per million views.For reasons she doesnt understand, Dars Linkedin account was banned after that Linkedin post started going viral.My account was banned, seemingly because of this post, Dar told me. I received an email stating, We recently removed your profile photo because it does not appear to be a photo of you, which was confusing since LinkedIn has never requested ID verification from me. When I tried to log in to update my photo, I discovered my account was banned.Dar tried contacting Linkedin support but did not receive a response and shes still unable to access her account. Linkedin also did not respond to my request for comment.I have no issue providing LinkedIn with my ID for verification (as I have done so for many other platforms), but I was under the impression that its optional, Dar told me. Its frustrating that verification isnt required for other users, yet my account was banned for sharing a straightforward fact about my content creation career. I was engaging professionally, but LinkedIns strict handling of this situation feels counterproductive to its purpose.In the message sent to her by Linkedin asking her to change her profile photo, Linkedin said that profile photos can get flagged for a variety of reasons, including for being considered offensive. There was no nudity in Dars profile photo.Ironically, being removed from social media with little explanation or recourse is another good reason for people to share their content on Pornhub. We dont know exactly why Dars Linkedin account was removed because Linkedin wont explain, but its possible it was reported because it was reported by users after going viral on the LinkedinLunatics subreddit, where people share Linkedin posts they feel dont belong on the professional networking platform. As weve reported over the years, this is something that happens to sex workers and adult content creators on other social media sites all the time.Dar said she makes more money on YouTube overall because thats where she gets more views, but in addition to higher rates, an added benefit of posting to Pornhub is that Pornhub is not likely to ban her for sharing adult content elsewhere on the web.I can't believe this website is banned in Texas! one commenter said on Dars Pornhub video on pi. They're trying to hinder our education.

The Oscars of porn and the industrys largest trade show will begin in one week, on January 22 at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas. Inside, adult performers, producers, directors and crew will find out whether theyve won the prestigious AVN Award in categories including Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene and Best Big Butt Movie or Collected Release, but outside, hospitality workers are picketing for a better union contract. Its a massive week for the adult industry, but porn workers are conflicted about crossing the picket line, with many choosing to sit this one out entirely.The Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) and the Adult Video Network Awards, collectively often referred to as AVN, is expected to bring more than 45,000 attendees to Vegas for three days of signings and meet-and-greets for fans, panels and programming about the adult industry, and booths for hundreds of brands, studios, and sex toys. Its also the biggest event of the year for the industrys indie performers, who come out to shoot content and network, spending weeks and months planning agendas and setting up unofficial parties and meetups. The show has been going for decadessince 1998 when it shared space and dates with the Consumer Electronic Show, and later at the Hard Rock Hotel when vendors and performers were forced out of CES and started their own event a few weeks and a couple blocks away.Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165, Nevada affiliates of UNITE HERE, represent 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno according to their website. Theyve been on open-ended strike since November, and are fighting for a new five-year contract for 700 workers. Union representatives said last month that the latest offer from Virgin Hotels Las Vegas was a 30-cent-a-year wage increase, which they rejected.Virgin Hotels, formerly the Hard Rock before renovations and a rebrand in 2020, was AVNs first home when it split from CES dates and venue in 2011 (AVN became its own event in 1998 but shared space and time with the mainstream electronics show, where attendees would drift from one to the other). Today, AVN is actually multiple events, including the AEE and the awards but also the Adult Novelty Expo (ANE), interNEXT Expo, GayVN Awards Show, and the O Awards. In 2020, when the hotel reopened, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas CEO Richard Bosworth called AVN and other conferences very cherished clients. @VirginHotelsLV ON STRIKE! Hospitality workers are pushing to win a union contract. Virgin Las Vegas workers are strong and they will stay out on strike until they win a contract. ATTN: Customers: Support workers & DON'T cross picket line.cc: @TylerCruiseXXX @niableuofficial pic.twitter.com/pWlvYMMCfT Culinary Union (@Culinary226) January 14, 2025Performer Electra Rayne told me on Monday shes still planning to boycott the event as long as the strike is ongoing. She corresponded with the Culinary Union, and confirmed with them in an email she posted to X that striking workers are asking people to refrain from patronizing the venue in solidarity, which the union has since said publicly in statements. @electrarayne Replying to @noxious_hikers I will ONLY be attending AVN if @Virgin Hotels Las Vegas does the right thing and gives a fair contract to the striking workers of @Culinary Union otherwise I'm boycotting due to the strike, and I encourage others to do the same! #cornindustry #workersrights #culinaryunion226 #virginhotelvegas #strike #picketline #breakingnews #avn #avnawards #lasvegas #unionstrong original sound - Electra Rayne Thankfully I'm local so it's not like I spent a ton of money on travel or anything, and I'm supposed to go sign at the booth for my agent who has been super understanding about me needing to cancel should the strike be ongoing (which it seems it will be), Rayne said. I'm bummed to not see my fans, but the really sad part is that I was in a feature that's up for multiple awards this year, and I won't be able to celebrate that at the awards with the cast. We worked so hard on that movie and I'm so proud to have been a part of it, it's a really bummer to not get to participate in that moment.Other people in the industry are planning to attend despite the strike, but still find the decision difficult. It saddens me to hear that Virgin is not paying their workers a fair wage, as that is something everyone deserves. With that said, I will still be attending AVN as it is the biggest convention of the year for my industry and I do have agreements and obligations that were arranged far ahead of these strikes, performer Leya Falcon told me. I do find it quite disturbing to hear that some of those on strike are allegedly harassing and sometimes even following in an intimidating manner those that decide to enter the property as we have nothing to do with their employment situation, we are simply doing our job, which to be fair, does not always pay fairly either. [The Culinary Union did not respond to a request for comment on this alleged harassment, but we will update if we hear back.] Just as they are working to care for their families, we are doing the same and we should not be bullied for it, especially in this economy. I do hope that they can see the other side of the coin here, much as we do see theirs, and understand that none of us are against them receiving fair pay, we are simply doing what we need to do to provide for our families as not all of us have the luxury to just decide to sit this one out.Performer London River wrote on X that she would also still attend. I likely cant pull out of my commitments to AVN without experiencing losses. Considering that, I will be donating a percentage of my profits from the event to the strike fund, she wrote, linking to a donation page for their fund. Striking workers are paid $500 a week out of this fund, a representative for Local 226 told me.Performers should not cross picket lines!There is a lot to unpack here. Many performers and independent production companies have invested a significant amount of money into attending the AVN expo. And most of that money cannot be refunded which means that we stand to suffer London River (@LondonCRiver) January 8, 2025AVN declined to comment, but last week, it launched a FAQ page for attendees of the event. The hotel has assured us that the strike will not impact the AVN Expo and Awards. Contingency measures are in place to maintain a memorable guest experience and exceptional service during the event, the page says.On January 9, the Adult Performance Artists Guild (APAG) issued a statement about the strike: As the union for performers in the adult industry, care for the safety and well-being of our workers is paramount to our mission, they wrote. We feel this for not only our members and other workers in the adult industry but for all workers, regardless of their jobs. As union representatives, we support the sacrifices made by workers on strike, fighting for better working conditions. The officers of APAG voted unanimously to support our fellow union workers in Culinary Workers Local 226, and we will not cross their picket line in a show of solidarity.APAG said it strongly encourages members to avoid crossing the picket line, as well as cancelling reservations at the hotel and contacting AVN, Virgin Hotels, and companies they were set to sign with at the event to express their concerns.And on Saturday, marking day 58 of the strike, APAG members joined Local 226 workers and their families for a march from the Las Vegas Strip to Virgin Hotels, blaring vuvuzelas and holding signs referencing Virgin Las Vegas contract negotiation offer of an estimated 30 cents an hour in wage increases.The Adult Performance Artists Guild (APAG)s decision to stand with Culinary Union strikers and honor the picket line at Virgin Las Vegas demonstrates unity, and the Culinary Union applauds the unwavering solidarity shown by the APAG and their members, Ted Pappageorge, Secretary-Treasurer for the Culinary Union, said in a statement. Workers across industries share the same fight for dignity, fair pay, respect, and protections on-the-job, and Culinary Union is proud to stand with APAG in solidarity as strikers continue to take on a billionaire-owned company that refuses to treat workers fairly. APAGs support sends a powerful message: When workers stand together, we are unstoppable. To APAG members and all customers choosing not to cross the picket line thank you for standing with workers on strike, with your continued support we will win.Last week, Pornhub announced that its team is canceling its upcoming trips to AVN and adult industry event XBIZ LA due to the strike in Vegas, and in Los Angeles, the wildfire crisis thats required many LA residents to evacuate to hotels. Unfortunately, this means our scheduled in-person events and workshops are no longer going on as planned. We are working closely with XBIZ to host our scheduled workshop virtually, they wrote in a post on X. We're so disappointed we won't be able to get face time with those of you who were planning to attend, and looking forward to seeing you all again soon.If workers dont receive a fair contract soon, AVN wont be the only event where attendees will have to choose between staying home or crossing a picket line. There are 11 other trade shows and events set to take place at Virgin Hotels in the coming weeks, including the Fancy Food Show, World of Concrete Expo, Academic Surgical Congress, CHAMPS Trade Show, and Kitchen and Bath Industry Show.

The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the companys anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly power over the repair market, which 404 Media has been reporting on for years.The lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney generals of Illinois and Minnesota, is the latest and most serious legal salvo against Deeres repair monopoly. Deere is also facing a class-action lawsuit related to its repair practices from consumers in Illinois that the Department of Justice and other federal entities have signaled they are interested in and support, as we reported last year.The Federal Trade Commission today files suit against agricultural equipment manufacturer Deere & Company, stating that it has illegally restricted the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combines, FTC commissioner Lina Khan wrote in a formal comment explaining the decision.Deere has become notorious for cornering the repair market on its machines, which include tractors, combines, and other major agricultural equipment by introducing software locks that prevent farmers from fixing the equipment they buy without the authorization of John Deere. It has also made repair parts difficult to come by. Deere previously promised to make certain repairs easier for consumers with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed with a farming organization that would have made it possible for farmers to do some repairs and obtain some specific parts; implementation of that MOU has been incredibly uneven, according to farmers. In October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that Deere was not honoring that agreement and demanded answers to several questions about it; Deere has not yet responded.Farmers have told 404 Media that they remain unable to do many types of repairs, and that it can sometimes take days for authorized John Deere or John Deere dealer technicians to come fix broken equipment. In farming, this delay can result in lost harvest, crucial delays in planting, and dying crops during critical periods of the farming season.These delays can mean that months of hard work and much-needed income vanish, devastating their business. In rural communities, the restrictions can sometimes mean that farmers need to drive hours just to get their equipment fixed, Khan wrote. For those who have long fixed their own equipment, these artificial restrictions can seem especially inefficient, with tractors needlessly sitting idle as farmers and independent mechanics are held back from using their skill and talent.The lawsuit, in the waning days of the Biden administration, is the most serious punitive act the federal government has ever taken to break up a repair monopoly and to support consumers right to repair. For years, the FTC has issued reports about repairability and manufacturer dominance of the repair market, but aside from a few small fines, has not formally sued any company. The steps Deere has taken to secure a repair monopoly are among the most egregious of any manufacturer in any industry, which has led farmers in some cases to resort to hacking their own tractors for the purposes of repair, sometimes using software pirated from Ukraine and other countries.We shouldnt tolerate companies blocking repair, Nathan Proctor, consumer rights group PIRG's Senior Right to Repair Campaign Director, said. When you buy something, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The FTCs enforcement action will help farmers, and everyone else who believes people should be able to fix their stuff.

We've got much more on what is happening inside Meta with the company's recent speech policy changes. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph explains how thousands of apps have been hijacked to steal your location data, possibly without the app developers' knowledge. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about various stories intersecting with the LA fires, such as Amazon delivery drivers and AI images. (YouTube version to come shortly.)Listen to the weekly podcast onApple Podcasts,Spotify, orYouTube. 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. Its Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now: Employees Protest Zuckerbergs Anti LGBTQ ChangesMeta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger ThemesCandy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your LocationOnline Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance IndustryHeres HowPeople Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are RealAn Amazon Delivery Confirmation Photo Is the Last Time a Palisades Resident Saw Her Burnt Down HouseWere Fine: Lying to Ourselves About a Climate Disaster

An AI app for creating nonconsensual nude images of anyone is getting the vast majority of its traffic directly from Meta platforms, where the app is buying thousands of explicit ads featuring nonconsensual nudity of celebrities and influencers. The blatant and repeated violation of Metas policies over the course of months is making a mockery of the companys ability or willingness to moderate a known bad actor that at the moment appears to get the majority of its users by paying Meta directly for ads.The app, known as Crushmate or Crush AI, has been buying ads on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms since at least early September. As first reported by Alexios Mantzarlis in his Faked Up newsletter, according to internet traffic analysis firm Similarweb, three of the domains Crush uses had around 240,000 visitors combined, with 90 percent of that traffic coming from Facebook or Instagram.Ive seen Meta remove some of these ads since September, but at the time of writing the same three domains that were advertised on Meta platforms and redirected to Crushmates services had around 350 active ads and more than 5,000 ads overall.Most of the recent ads use the same format. They take a video a woman posted to Instagram or TikTok and show how a user can pause the video on any frame and create a nude image of her. Many of the ads, which are still active, do this to videos of the extremely popular OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain, who made headlines recently for making $43 million in one year on OnlyFans. As Mantzarlis points out, one ad nudifies Mikayla Demaiter, a model with 3.2 million followers on Instagram. Rain and Demaiter did not respond to a request for comment.Two of the Crushmate adsOther ads feature other real women I wasnt able to identify and AI generated women with their clothes being erased by the app.In early September, a 404 Media reader also tipped me that Crushmate was advertising its services on Facebook Marketplace.A marketplace ad for CrushmateIve confirmed that all these ads lead to the same Crushmate service that will create nonconsensual nude images and offers some of its services via a subscription plan.Promotional copy from Crushmate's site.Ive recently reported about Meta running ads that feature explicit nudity, including dozens of ads that are just close up images of vaginas. Ive also reported repeatedly about nudify apps buying ads on Meta platforms. When weve flagged these ads to Meta in the past, they removed them. Meta has also removed associated Facebook pages that are buying the ads, but Crushmate has found an easy workaround that is clearly paying off: It creates multiple Facebook pages with AI-generated profile images that look like normal people, then buys ads promoting new, different URLs that redirect to to Crushmate.Two of the fake Facebook profiles buying Crushmate ads.Meta did not respond to specific questions about why its not detecting and removing the offending ads for featuring nonconsensual nudity. As I reported last week, extensive testing by AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates influential and opaque algorithms, found that nudity uploaded to Instagram and Facebook as a normal user was promptly removed for violating Metas Community Standards. The same exact visuals were not removed when they were uploaded as ads, showing that Meta has a different standard for enforcement when its getting paid to push images in front of users.Meta prohibits ads that promote adult sexual exploitation. We have removed the violating content, enforced against violating urls, and have taken action against the associated accounts and users, a Facebook spokesperson told me in a statement. This is a highly adversarial space and bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement, which is why we continue to invest in the best tools and technology to help identify and remove violating content.Do you know anything else about Crushmate? 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.Meta removed the ads promoting the three Crushmate domains after Mantzarlis flagged them to the company. Around 230 of the same ads promoting a fourth Crushmate domain Mantzarlis found after reaching out for comment are still live on Metas platforms.As weve previously reported, these nudify apps are some of the most harmful applications of generative AI because they make it so easy to create nonconsensual images of anyone. In the last two years, weve seen several examples of these apps being used by minors to create images of other minors. Last year, a survey found that 1 in 10 minors reported that their friends or classmates have used AI tools to generate nudes of other kids. As the Crushmate ads show, minors dont need to go to the dark corners of the web in search of these tools. Meta is getting paid to popularize them.

We're back! And holy moly what a start to the year. We just published a bunch of stories. First, Jason talks about blowback inside Meta to its new board member, and Meta's subsequent censoring of those views. We also chat about those mad Meta AI profiles. After the break, Sam explains why Pornhub is blocked in most of the U.S. south. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph talks about why the government is planning to name one of its most important (and at risk) witnesses.Listen to the weekly podcast onApple Podcasts,Spotify, orYouTube. 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. Facebook Deletes Internal Employee Criticism of New Board Member Dana WhiteMeta's AI Profiles Are Indistinguishable From Terrible Spam That Took Over FacebookPornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. SouthGovernment to Name Key Witness Who Provided FBI With Backdoored Encrypted Chat App Anom

In early December I got the kind of tip weve been getting a lot over the past year. A reader had noticed a post from someone on Reddit complaining about a very graphic sexual ad appearing in their Instagram Reels. Ive seen a lot of ads for scams or shady dating sites recently, and some of them were pretty suggestive, to put it mildly, but the ad the person on Reddit complained about was straight up a close up image of a vagina.The reader who tipped 404 Media did exactly what I would have done, which is look up the advertiser in Facebooks Ad Library, and found that the same advertiser was running around 800 ads across all of Metas platforms in November, the vast majority of which are just different close-up images of vaginas. When clicked, the ad takes users to a variety of sites for "confidential dating or hot dates in your area. Facebook started to remove some of these ads on December 13, but at the time of writing, most of them were still undetected by its moderators according to the Ad Library.Like I said, we get a lot of tips like this these days. We get so many, in fact, that we dont write stories about them unless theres something novel or that our readers need to know about them. Facebook taking money to put explicit porn in its ads despite it being a clear violation of its own policies is not new, but definitely a new low for the company and a clear indicator of Facebooks fuck it approach to content moderation, and moderation of its ads specifically.

When Googles AI Overview search feature launched in May, it was generally regarded as a mess. It told people to eat glue and rocks, libeled newsworthy figures, plagiarized journalists work, and was so bad Google added a feature to turn it off entirely. In the nearly 10 months since AI Overview launched, its still getting things wrong, like telling people that vibrators can be used for childrens behavioral therapy.As discovered by Reddit user clist186, searching for magic wand pregnancy returns a bizarre answer about creativity with children as a fun and engaging activity alongside an image of a Magic Wand vibrator, one of the most popular and universally recognized sex toys in the world:The Magic Wand tool is a creative way for parents to identify behavioral changes they want to make, including those related to pregnancy. It can be used to make assessment fun and engaging, especially for long-time WIC clients. Here's how the Magic Wand tool works:Parents describe what parenting challenges they would change by waving a magic wand. The responses of both parents and older children can be used to start discussions. The Magic Wand tool can be purchased online or at a local store.Making this even weirder, I dont get the parenting-related AI Overview result when I search that term, but 404's Emanuel Maiberg (famously, a parent himself) does.AI Overview, which is powered by Googles Gemini model, provides links to where the information comes from as part of its results; In this case, its summarizing a document from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services about a thought exercise where a therapist passes clients a magic wand that helps them imagine an ideal scenario. This isnt referring to passing a Hitachi to a child, but the AI doesnt know that.In another result for the search term "what is a magic wand," AI Overview pairs a photo of a Magic Wand sex toy with a description of a magicians trick:A magic wand is a small stick used by magicians to perform tricks and make magic happen. It's often short, black, and has a white tip. Magicians use magic wands as part of their misdirection and to make things hap- pen like growing, vanishing, moving, or dis- playing a will of their own. For example, a classic magic trick involves making a bouquet of flowers appear from the wand's tip.This Overview result does eventually get around to describing the Magic Wand in question, though: Magic wand may also refer to a brand of massager: Hitachi Magic Wand. A massaging device that was first listed for business use in 1968 and became available to the public in the 1970s. It's designed to relieve pain and tension, soothe sore muscles and nerves, and aid in rehabilitation after sports injuries.In a company blog about AI Overview, Google said the feature uses multi-step reasoning capabilities to help with increasingly complex questions. The search term magic wand pregnancy isnt particularly complex; most people with basic reading comprehension skills would probably put it together that the term is looking for answers about using one of the worlds most popular sex toys while pregnant. But Gemini took the weirdest route possible instead, pulling from an obscure document about a talk therapy technique that happened to contain the phrases magic wand and pregnancy.Searching with a full, natural language query can you use a magic wand while pregnant returns a more nuanced AI-generated response that considers the searcher might have several different kinds of wands in mind:Last year, Reddit signed a $60 million per year contract with Google in exchange for licensing users content to train Googles AI models. Adult content, including sex education and conversations about sex toys, are still allowed on Reddit as one of the few platforms that hasnt banned sex entirely, and pregnancy-related questions are massively popular there. (There are dozens of questions specifically about using vibrators while pregnant.) It makes sense that phrasing the search term as a question rather than a set of keywords would turn up a better response from the AI: its what the AI was trained on.Thankfully, most people searching magic wand pregnancy are probably able to use their human brains to deduce that they shouldnt use a vibrator as a talking stick in group therapy with kids. But its yet another example of AI being shoved into every product and tool that adds more work, friction, and confusion to the experience of being online, instead of less as tech companies constantly promise.Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2020, after walking by refrigerated trailers full of the bodies of people who died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic one too many times, my fianc and I decided that it would maybe be a good idea to get out of New York City for a while. Together with our dog, we spent months driving across the country and eventually made it to Los Angeles, where we intended to stay for two weeks. We arrived just in time for the worst COVID spike since the one we had just experienced in New York. It turned out we couldnt and didnt want to leave. Our two week stay has become five years.While debating whether we were going to move to Los Angeles full time, my partner and I joked that we had to choose between the fire coast and the water coast. New York City had been getting pummeled by a series of tropical storms and downpours, and vast swaths of California were fighting some of the most devastating wildfires it had ever seen. We settled on the fire coast, mostly to try something new.It turns out this was a false choice. Since weve moved to Los Angeles, we have experienced the heaviest rains in the citys recorded history, the first hurricane to ever trigger a tropical storm warning in Los Angeles, and, of course, the fires. New York City, meanwhile, has had both tropical storms and this summer fought an out-of-control brushfire in Prospect Park after a record drought. Both coasts are the fire coast, and the water coast. We have been very lucky, and very privileged. Our apartment is in Venice Beach, which is probably not going to burn down. This time, we will not lose our lives, our things, our memories. We had the money and the ability to evacuate from Los Angeles on Wednesday morning after it became clear to us that we should not stay. What is happening is a massive tragedy for the city of Los Angeles, the families who have lost their homes, businesses and schools.I am writing this to try to understand my place in a truly horrifying event, and to try to understand how we are all supposed to process the ongoing slow- and fast-moving climate change-fueled disasters that we have all experienced, are experiencing, and will definitely experience in the future. My group chats and Instagram stories are full of my friends saying that they are fine, followed by stories and messages explaining that actually, they are not fine. Stories that start with were safe, thank you for asking have almost uniformly been followed with circumstances have changed, we have evacuated Los Angeles. Almost all of my friends in the city have now left their homes to go somewhere safer; some people I know have lost their homes.I knew when I moved to Los Angeles that we would to some extent experience fires and earthquakes. I live in a tsunami hazard zone. I also know that there is no place that is safe from climate change and climate-fueled disaster, as we saw last year when parts of North Carolina that were considered to be safer from climate change were devastated by Hurricane Helene.We are living in The Cool Zone, and, while I love my life, am very lucky, and have been less directly affected by COVID, political violence, war, and natural disasters than many people, I am starting to understand that maybe this is all taking a toll. Firefighters and people who have lost their homes are experiencing true hell. What I am experiencing is something more like the constant mundanity of dystopia that surrounds the direct horror but is decidedly also bad. I knew it would be windy earlier this week because I check the surf forecast every day on an app called Surfline, which has cameras and weather monitoring up and down nearly every coast in the world. The Santa Ana windsa powerful wind phenomenon I learned about only after moving to Californiawould be offshore, meaning they would blow from the land out to sea. This is somewhat rare in Los Angeles and also makes for very good, barreling waves. I was excited.I had a busy day Tuesday and learned about the fire because the Surfline cameras near the fire were down. In fact, you can see what it looked like as the fires overtook the camera at Sunset Point here: 0:00 /0:18 1 The camera livestream was replaced with a note saying this camera is offline due to infrastructure issues caused by local wildfires. The surf forecast did not mention anything about a fire. 0:00 /0:13 1 I walked out to the beach and could see the mountains on fire, the smoke plumes blowing both out to sea and right over me. The ocean was indeed firingmeaning the waves were goodand lots of people were surfing. A few people were milling around the beach taking photos and videos of the fire like I was. By the time the sun started setting, there were huge crowds of people watching the fire. It was around this time that I realized I was having trouble breathing, my eyes were watering, and my throat was scratchy. My family locked ourselves into our bedroom with an air purifier running. Last week, we realized that we desperately needed to replace the filter, but we did not. A friend told us the air was better near them, so we went to their house for dinner.While we were having dinner, the size of the fire doubled, and a second one broke out. Our phones blared emergency alerts. We downloaded Watch Duty, which is a nonprofit wildfire monitoring app. Most of the wildfire-monitoring cameras in the Pacific Palisades had been knocked offline; the ones in Santa Monica pointing towards the Palisades showed a raging fire.Every few minutes the app sent us push notifications that the fire was rapidly expanding, that firefighters were overwhelmed, that evacuation orders had expanded and were beginning to creep toward our neighborhood. I opened Instagram and learned that Malibus Reel Inn, one of our favorite restaurants, had burned to the ground.Apple Intelligence began summarizing all of the notifications I was getting from my various apps. Multiple wildfires in Los Angeles, causing destruction and injuries, from the neighborhood watch app Citizen, which I have only because of an article I did about the last time there was a fire in Pacific Palisades. Apple Intelligences summary of a group chat Im in: Saddened by situation; Instagram shared. From a friend: "Wants to chat about existential questions." A summary from the LA Times: Over 1,000 structures burned in LA Count wildfires; firefighter were overwhelmed. From Nextdoor: Restaurants destroyed.Earlier on Tuesday, I texted my mom yes we are fine, it is very far away from us. It is many miles from us. We have an air purifier. Its fine. I began to tell people who asked that the problem for us was "just" the oppressive smoke, and the fact that we could not breathe. By the time we were going to bed, it became increasingly clear that it was not necessarily fine, and that it might be best if we left. I opened Bluesky and saw an image of a Cybertruck sitting in front of a burnt out mansion. A few posts later, I saw the same image but a Parental Advisory sticker had been photoshopped onto it. I clicked over to X and saw that people were spamming AI generated images of the fire.We began wondering if we should drive toward cleaner air. We went home and tried to sleep. I woke up every hour because I was having trouble breathing. As the sun was supposed to be rising in the morning, it became clear that it was being hidden by thick clouds of smoke.Within minutes of waking up, we knew that we should leave. That we would be leaving. I opened Airbnb and booked something. We do not have a Go Bag, but we did have time to pack. I aimlessly wandered around my apartment throwing things into bags and boxes, packing things that I did not need and leaving things that I should have brought. In the closet, I pushed aside our boxes of COVID tests to get to our box of N-95 masks. I packed a whole microphone rig because I need to record a podcast Friday.I emailed the 404 Media customers who bought merch and told them it would be delayed because I had to leave my home and cannot mail them. I canceled meetings and calls with sources who I wanted to talk to.Our next-door neighbor texted us, saying that she would actually be able to make it to a meeting next week with our landlord with a shared beef were having with them. Originally she thought she would have to work during the time the meeting was scheduled. She works at a school in the Palisades. Her school burned down. So had her sisters house. I saw my neighbor right before we left. I told her I would be back on Friday. I had a flashback to my last day in the VICE office in March 2020, when they sent us home for COVID. I told everyone I would see them in a week or two. Some of those people I never saw again.Image: Jason KoeblerA friend texted me to tell me that the place we had been on a beautiful hike a few weeks ago was on fire: sad and glad we went, he said. A friend in Richmond, Virginia texted to ask if I was OK. I told him yes but that it was very scary. I asked him how he was doing. He responded, We had a bad ice storm this week and that caused a power outage at water treatment that then caused server crashes and electrical equipment to get flooded. The whole city has been without water since Monday. He told me he was supposed to come to Los Angeles for work this weekend. He was canceling his flight.A group chat asked me if I was OK. I told them that I did not want to be dramatic but that we were having a hard time but were ultimately safe. I explained some of what we had been doing and why. The chat responded saying that its insane how you start this by saying it sounds more dramatic than it is, only to then describe multiple horrors. I am mostly just glad you are safe.We got in the car. We started driving. I watched a driverless Waymo navigate streets in which the traffic lights were out because the power was out. My fianc took two work meetings on the road, tethered to her phone, our dog sitting on her lap. We stopped at a fast food drive through.Once we were out of Los Angeles, I stopped at a Best Buy to get an air purifier. On my phone, I searched the reviews for the one they had on sale. I picked one out. The employee tried to sell me an extended warranty plan. I said no thank you, got back in the car, and kept driving away from the fire. I do not know when we will be able to go back.

Theres a video going viral this week of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles with a wildfire raging behind it, letters glowing in the blaze. Its a powerful scene, up there with the burning McDonalds sign in imagery thats come out of this weeks devastating fires spreading across LA.Unfortunately goes hard pic.twitter.com/Hzglibzs4t Joseph (@CaudilloXIV) January 9, 2025I've seen several people sharing this same video with shades of shock and heartbreak. But its AI-generated. When it was posted, according to a Community Note on one of the posts, a look at the Hollywood sign livestreams showed the sign was fine; as of writing, the feeds are down, but Hollywoodsign.org, a website that runs a live webcam pointed at the sign, told fact-checking site Snopes "Griffith Park is temporarily closed as a safety precaution, but the Sign itself is not affected and is secure and the cameras will slowly but surely come back up."Another viral image of the Hollywood sign burning is also AI: All reports that the Hollywood sign is on fire are false. This is a AI generated image. #Hollywood #California #LosAngeles #HollywoodHills #RunyonCanyon #PalisadesWildfire #Palisades #PacificPalisades #Curson #lafires #wildfires #BreakingNews #WorldNews #HollywoodSign pic.twitter.com/HOzVe2bCHm Media Insider (@_MediaInsider) January 9, 2025Then theres X poster Kevin Daltons image, which he later admitted was made with Xs Grok generative AI tool for now, showing what I can only assume he imagines as antifa in all black descending on a burned-out neighborhood to loot it. The remains of Pacific Palisades will get picked clean tonight, he wrote. (Daltons been making AI paint him little fantasy pictures of Trump firing California governor Gavin Newsom, so this is a big week for him.)People are also obsessively generating Grok images of Newsom fiddling in front of fires or saving goldfish (???).Grok nailed it. Gavin Nerosome playing the fiddle while California burns. pic.twitter.com/BlfaLEcFjW Liekitisnt (@liekitisnot) January 8, 2025Grok showing Gavin Newsome saving a goldfish during the fires pic.twitter.com/mX3qb61M5q KillaKirby (@KillaKirby1) January 9, 2025The very real footage and images coming out of Southern California this week are so surreal theyre hard to believe, with entire miles of iconic coastline, whole neighborhoods, and massive swaths of the Pacific Palisades and LAs east side turned to ash (and still burning as of writing).Interestingly, a lot of this weeks news cycle has turned to blaming AI and its energy usage as contributing to climate change. But others are not wasting an opportunity for boosterism. In a stunning show of credulity, British-owned digital newspaper The Express ran a story with the headline Five dead in LA fires as residents think AI tech could have prevented disaster based on a quote from one evacuating 24 year old they found who took the opportunity in front of a reporter to breathlessly shill for AI, as an AI industry worker himself. [Los Angeles] fire and police departments dont invest in technology [sic] hopefully more people build AI robotics solutions for monitoring or help. Instead a lot of people in ai are building military solutions. Aka putting a gun on top of a robot dog, Chevy Chase Canyon resident William Lee told The Express. Robotics operated fire response systems. It costs $6-18k for AI humanoid robots. LAFD salary is approx $100k/yr 3,500 firefighters. We can slowly integrate robotics to put less lives at risk, but also for assistance."That guy was so close to saying something prescient its painful: Robot dogs are a stupid waste of taxpayer money, and not a hypothetical one, as LA approved $278,000 for a surveillance robot dog toy for the LAPD in 2023. But the Los Angeles Fire Departments budget was cut by nearly $17.6 million this fiscal year, while giving even more money to the police departments already massive budget: the LAPD received a $2.14 billion budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, representing an 8.1% increase.Humanoid robots as an absurd proposition aside, I dont want to write off all forms of new technology as useless in natural disasters. Machine learning and machine vision technology seem to show promise in helping detect, track, or prevent wildfires: Last week, University of California San Diegos ALERTCalifornia camera network alerted fire officials of an anomaly spotted on video, and firefighters were reportedly able to contain the blaze to less than a quarter acre. But companies taking investment to solve wildfires are also profiting off of a crisis thats only getting worse, with no promise that their solutions will improve the situation.OCFA RESPONDS TO VEGETATION FIRE DETECTED EXCLUSIVELY BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A FIRST IN AGENCY HISTORYIrvine, CA In December 2024, the OCFA successfully utilized artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and >>> pic.twitter.com/mgo4HGFcGv OCFA PIO (@OCFireAuthority) January 3, 2025Overwhelmingly, AI is being crammed down the publics throats as a tool for generating some of the dumbest bullshit imaginable. That includes misinformation like weve seen with these fires, but also bottomless ugliness, laughably terrible bots, sexual abuse and violence. And its sold to us as both our inevitable savior and the next world-ending existential crisis by people with billions earned on the theft of human creativity, and billions more yet to gain.AI might help solve tough problems related to climate change and things like wildfires, water scarcity, and energy consumption. But in the meantime, data centers are projected to guzzle 6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027, in service of churning out sloppy, morbid fantasies about tragedies within tragedies.

Meta employees are furious with the companys newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have mental illness, according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content moderation on Meta platforms. I am LGBT and Mentally Ill, one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. Just to let you know that Ill be taking time out to look after my mental health.On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be getting back to our roots around free expression to allow more speech and fewer mistakes. The company said were getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. A review of Metas official content moderation policies show, specifically, that some of the only substantive changes to the policy were made to specifically allow for allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation. It has long been known that being LGBTQ+ is not a sign of mental illness, and the false idea that sexuality or gender identification is a mental illness has long been used to stigmatize and discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.Earlier this week, we reported that Meta was deleting internal dissent about Zuckerberg's appointment of UFC President Dana White to the Meta board of directors.Do you work at Meta? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 202 505 1702.

This articlewas producedwith support from WIRED.Some of the worlds most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystemnot code developed by the app creators themselvesthis data collection is likely happening both without users and even app developers knowledge.For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients, appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising bid stream, rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data.The data provides a rare glimpse inside the world of real-time bidding (RTB). Historically, location data firms paid app developers to include bundles of code that collected the location data of their users. Many companies have turned instead to sourcing location information through the advertising ecosystem, where companies bid to place ads inside apps. But a side effect is that data brokers can listen in on that process, and harvest the location of peoples mobile phones.This is a nightmare scenario for privacy because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, but there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger, doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way, Edwards adds.

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 weird fake furniture and shared reality (or the lack thereof).SAM: It has been such a busy week I forgot its Friday until I woke up this morning, so Ill be brief with a quick couple of thoughts about Googles AI Overview, which I wrote about serving bizarre results that suggested people pass a Magic Wand vibrator to a child like a talking stick for counseling purposes.Emanuel found the thread on Reddit where someone posted a screenshot of the result they got with the search term magic wand pregnancy. He was getting the same result as that person; I assume both he and OP were doing a lot of Googling about pregnancy related topics, as Emanuels wife just had a kid and this person was clearly looking for answers about what sorts of buzz buzz were safe to throw down with while pregnant. When I searched with the same term, I didnt get that answer, and couldnt replicate it. I could get the other one mentioned in the storysearching what is a magic wand showed me an AI Overview result about magicians small sticks (ouch) but not the pregnancy one. I assumed, and mentioned in the story, that this is because of the aforementioned Googling about babies; Google personalizes search based on activity, and parents are a valuable market for advertisers.

Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill, 404 Media has learned.Metas Messenger app allows users to change the color scheme and design of their chat windows with different themes. For example, there is currently a Squid Game theme, a Minecraft theme, a Basketball theme, and a Love theme, among many others.These themes regularly change, but for the last few years they have featured a trans theme and a nonbinary theme, which had color schemes that matched the trans pride flag and the non-binary pride flag. Meta did not respond to a request for comment about why the company removed these themes, but the change comes right as Mark Zuckerbergs company is publicly and loudly shifting rightward to more closely align itself with the views of the incoming Donald Trump administration. 404 Media reported Thursday that many employees are protesting the anti LGBTQ+ changes and that its total chaos internally at Meta right now because of the changes.Do you work at Meta? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 202 505 1702. The trans theme was announced for Pride Month in June 2021, and the nonbinary theme was announced in June 2022 in blog posts that highlighted Metas apparent support for trans and nonbinary people. Both of these posts are no longer online. Other blogs about updates to Messenger have been moved over from the old website they were originally published on to new URLs on the Meta newsroom, but these two blog posts have not.This June and beyond, we want people to #ConnectWithPride because when we show up as the most authentic version of ourselves, we can truly connect with people, the post announcing the trans theme originally said. Starting today, in support of the LGBTQ+ community and allies, Messenger is launching new expression features and celebrating the artists and creators who not only developed them, but inspire us each and every day.

Welcome back to the Abstract!This week, its time to demand a new planet. Dont we deserve it? Havent we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world, if it actually is discovered? Im already exhausted. Lets just skip the fuss and call it Becky.Then, well hang around the outer system for a while to check in on Pluto and Charon. How did they meet? Violently, it turns out! Next, scientists confirm that saber teeth are extremely efficient at converting living things into dead things. Last, meet Punk and Emo, founding members of the mollusc underground. Its a week of deep space and deep time; enjoy the ride.All I Want for Christmas 2025 is A GIANT PLANETSiraj, Amir et al. Orbit of a Possible Planet X. The Astrophysical Journal.For nearly a decade, scientists have speculated that an undiscovered giant planet lurks in the distant reaches of the solar system. The existence of this unconfirmed Planet X or Planet Nine could explain strange observations of objects far beyond Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).These TNOs appear to be being gravitationally influenced by some unknown entity, though there is a lot of debate about the origin of the anomaliesor whether they are real at all. Planet X is one popular hypothesis, but scientists have also speculated that the anomalies could point to an expansive disk of smaller objects, or even a primordial black hole. The effects may also just be a temporary coincidence that does not require the invocation of some hidden hulking entity.To help constrain these possibilities, scientists have presented new predictions about Planet X, assuming it exists, in part by expanding the sample of TNOs from 11 objects to 51. The results suggest that a hypothetical Planet X would be about 4.4 times as massive as Earth, and occupy an orbit about 300 times farther from the Sun than Earth..Most importantly, the studys projected orbit places Planet X right into the sights of Vera C. Rubin Observatorys Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a major new astronomical facility in Chile. LSST is expected to begin operating later this year, and it will be especially adept at illuminating the here be space dragons parts of our solar system map.Nearly all of the parameter space for the unseen planet proposed here falls within LSSTs field of view and detection limits, so if such a planet exists, it is likely to be discovered early on in the survey, said researchers led by Amir Siraj of Princeton University. LSST will simultaneously reveal whether the observed clustering of distant TNOsis real, an observational selection effect, or a statistical fluke, given the large number of expected TNO discoveries.In other words, we may genuinely be on the cusp of adding a new planet to our solar familyor, perhaps, learning that Planet X was just an astronomical mirage. LSST is poised to answer the riddle, one way or another.Vera Rubin Observatory. Image: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. QuintIn addition to the exciting prospect, the new study offers other tantalizing predictions. The team found that the planets projected orbit is probably aligned with the plane of the solar system, a result that contrasts with past studies that predicted the planet would orbit at an angle. The angle of the orbit has implications for the origins of the planet; a world aligned to the plane of the solar system is more likely to be a homegrown member of our solar family, whereas a planet with a more inclined orbit could have been gravitationally captured by the Sun after making an interstellar journey from its native star system.Look, were living through an overwhelming time of climate disasters, political strife, and obscene inequities. I really think we deserve a new planet, as a treat. Ill even take a primordial black hole, if thats whats on offer. Given that LSST is not set to start running until the back-end of 2025, it will probably be at least a year before the existence of a planet is confirmed or refuted. But if anyone starts a betting market on this long-sought mystery, put me down for Planet X.Kiss-and-Capture: The Pluto-Charon StoryDenton, C. Adeene et al. Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto. Nature Geoscience.Speaking of TNOs, lets talk about the most famous of them all: Pluto. This farflung world was the OG Planet Nine before it was officially downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, a decision that ignited an astronomical culture war. But though Pluto and its moon Charon arent big enough to count as planets, they are giants for TNOs; indeed, the Pluto-Charon system is the largest binary in the known TNO population. (Pluto is about two thirds the size of Earths Moon, and Charon is about half the size of Pluto.)Scientists have long suspected that the system formed in the wake of a collision between two icy bodies billions of years ago, but the dynamics behind this event have defied easy explanation.Now, scientists have developed a new formation model for this system that they call the kiss-and-capture regime. In this scenario, the two parent bodies of Pluto-Charon collided and then kind of just merged together for about 10 to 15 hours, before separating into the distinct bodies we see today.Kiss-and-capture leaves the bodies mostly intact; however, it does result in the resurfacing of Charon and a large portion of Pluto, said researchers led by Adeene Denton of the University of Arizona. The scenario provides a new foundation for the accumulation of geological features observed today, including Charons widespread fracture network and Plutos ancient ridgetrough system, which reflects early and widespread extension.Simulation of kiss-and-capture. Image: Denton, C. Adeene et al.Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer when kisses keep the bodies mostly intact. Given that Pluto has a giant heart-shaped region on its surface, this binary is really shaping up to be the most romantically coded system in the solar system.Brushing Up on Saber TeethPollock, Thalia et al. Functional optimality underpins the repeated evolution of the extreme saber-tooth morphology. Current Biology.You dont need anyone to tell you that saber teeth are rad. They are deadly weapons that grow out of skulls. The allure is self-evident. But just in case you wanted empirical proof to back it up, scientists have now demonstrated that extreme saber teeth are functionally optimal for killing bites, which explains why they have independently evolved at least five times in mammals and mammal ancestors (including gorgonopsians).To assess the advantages of saber teeth versus other canine morphologies, researchers examined 95 teeth from carnivorous mammals, including 25 from saber-toothed animals like Smilodon, Homotherium, and Thylacosmilus. The team concluded that saber teeth optimize puncture performance at the expense of breakage resistance, meaning that these dental daggers evolved to deliver swift death.Study framework. Image: Pollock, Thalia et al.Predatory scenarios for saber-toothed animals favor a killing bite through penetration causing tissue damage and blood loss over the suffocation through clamp-and-hold bite of conical-toothed pantherine felids, such as snow leopards, said researchers led by Tahlia Pollock of the University of Bristol.The most recent saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, went extinct only 10,000 years ago, so our ancestors would have encountered it. In fact, saber-toothed cats may have occasionally preyed on humans. But those iconic canines are no longer spilling blood and severing arteries out there in the wild anywhere, suggesting that the niche(s) they once occupied do not exist in the modern context, according to the study.Its bittersweet to live in an era devoid of saber teeth. While I wouldnt want to see these fatal fangs up close, the world is undoubtedly duller without them.Punk is Dead! LikeReally, Really DeadSutton, Mark et al. New Silurian aculiferan fossils reveal complex early history of Mollusca. Nature.A nice bonus of discovering a new species is that you typically get to name it. Scientists have been having fun with this responsibility for decades, which is why we have spiders called Hotwheels sisyphus, fungus called Spongiforma squarepantsii, and wasps called Aha ha.Now, scientists have continued this tradition with two new mollusc species identified from fossils that date back 430 million years ago. Everyone, meet Punk (Punk ferox) and (Emo vorticaudum).Punk is named for the fancied resemblance of the spicule array to the spiked hairstyles associated with the punk rock movement paired with ferox (Latin) meaning wild, bold, defiant, said researchers led by Mark Sutton of Imperial College London.Emo is named after the emo musical genre related to punk rock, whose exponents canonically bear long bangs or fringes which is reminiscent of the fossilized molluscs exoskeleton, the team added. In addition, Emos anterior valves resemble studded clothing.Reconstructions of Punk (top) and Emo. Image: Dr Mark Sutton, Imperial College London.There you have it: mohawks, devilocks, studs, and other punk culture mainstays were pioneered by rabble-rousing molluscs all the way back in the Silurian period, long before animals ever walkedlet alone crowd-surfedon land.Now all we need is to discover a new species of screeching weasel to really round out the punk biological kingdom.Thanks for reading! See you next week.

A hacker compromised an administrative account on the website for popular game Path of Exile 2, which allowed them to reset the passwords on dozens of players accounts, according to comments from developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) made during a podcast on Sunday. This access would have given the hacker the ability to steal powerful and rare items from those players, with some players spending hundreds of hours grinding for valuable in-game currency.The news comes after a wave of Path of Exile 2 players complained on the games forums and social media about being hacked and their inventories emptied. The comments also show how the hacker compromised the account shortly before the games launch, seemingly laying in wait for players to build up their stashes of items before pulling off their heist.We totally fucked up here, Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers said during a podcast recording with action roleplaying game (ARPG) content creators GhazzyTV and Darth Microtransaction.

Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeless Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhoods mandatory evacuation order.Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo. The photo showed an Amazon box on a bench in front of a glass door.Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders, Riley wrote in the post. Rileys home in the Pacific Palisades was included in the first evacuation order issued on January 7, about two hours after the fire started burning. Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok.Amazon drivers have continued delivering packages in some areas of Los Angeles affected by ongoing wildfires, according to numerous posts by drivers on social media and corroborated by the companys website.Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders. Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok #PalisadesWildfire pic.twitter.com/ox3CIRJ7y1 Ali Riley (@RileyThree) January 10, 2025Since Tuesday, uncontrolled fires in the northern parts of Los Angeles have burned down over 12,000 buildings, and thousands of people have lost their homes.Amazon closed the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale on Wednesday, the day after the fires broke out. But Amazons distributed delivery system has led to some confusion. Amazon uses a network of Delivery Service Partners, which are nominally independent businesses who hire delivery drivers. Amazon also delivers packages in Los Angeles with a system called Flex, which functions sort of like DoorDash or Uber in that drivers use their personal vehicles to deliver packages.An Amazon Flex driver posted that they had been instructed to deliver close to the fires on Thursday. The screenshot of their route map showed a road in Westgate Heights, in an area that is now under an evacuation warning and is immediately next to an area under a mandatory evacuation order. A photo they shared taken in their warehouse parking lot showed a massive plume of orange smoke. They said in a comment that they had refused to deliver the packages.While some drivers told 404 Media or posted on driver subreddits and Discords that their routes had been canceled, some said they were given delivery routes close to fires or in areas that were eventually evacuated.Multiple drivers wrote that the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale, for example, had closed on Wednesday. I was still scheduled to work on the 8th, one driver wrote to 404 Media in an online chat. I didnt hear much from management until 30 minutes before our clock in time, that the station had closed due to the fires.The driver posted a photo of a brown smoke-darkened sky above the parking lot of their warehouse.Another Flex driver posted a screenshot of a delivery cancellation notice they got from VAX5, a warehouse in LAs Boyle Heights neighborhood.The block youre scheduled for on 09 January 2025 at 3:30 am at VAX5 has been canceled. Please dont come to the delivery station. This cancellation is due to circumstances beyond your control. Your standing wont be impacted and you will still be paid for the block.Multiple drivers on the Amazon delivery subreddit, r/AmazonDSPDrivers, have written that despite nearby fires and evacuation zones, their work days have gone on as normal over the last week.I deliver east in LA county and today was just another day on the job, one user wrote in a comment on a post asking how drivers in the state were dealing with the fires. Not really that bad out here tho[ugh], but one of our delivery areas is close to level 2 evacuation warning.Another driver wrote, We cover the Burbank/Glendale area, still working. A lot of businesses are closed. Some unprecedented traffic. We were just given N95 masks for mild ashes falling. Glendale sits just west of the Eaton fire, which is the second most destructive fire in the state.A third driver in Santa Monica, about 20 minutes away from the Palisades, wrote last Wednesday that their workload had been reduced because of the fires. They posted a screenshot of a route with 192 packages. I honestly thought theyd send us home since we deliver close to the fires but no they just gave us masks to wear, the driver wrote.Delivering in wildfire conditions can be dangerous even if you arent close to the source of the fire itself. In 2023, New York City was enveloped in smoke from Canadian wildfires, and the citys air quality was categorized as hazardous. Delivery drivers at the time said they had spent their whole workday coughing. As of Sunday, Los Angeles air quality was poor.The driver subreddits are also full of people discussing whether they would get paid for canceled routes, and screenshots of drivers talking to Amazon support. In many cases, Amazon appears to be paying drivers for routes cancelled because of the fires.Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told 404 Media in a statement that the company was supplying drivers with N95 masks and was monitoring the air quality in the area.If [the air quality index] is over a certain threshold for extended timeframes as defined by Cal OSHA, we have mechanisms in place to reduce time on the road for drivers, MacLachlan said. If its still deemed safe to be on the road, we suggest DSPs [delivery service partners] advise their drivers to keep vehicle windows closed and to run the A/C on high with air recirculating, out of an abundance of caution.In a blog post written two days after the fires began burning, the company wrote that its customers would likely experience delays due to the temporary closing of some Amazon facilities, and that it would fulfill their orders when its safe to do so from outside the affected regionOur top priority is ensuring the safety of our employees and partners.MacLachlan said Amazon had instructed drivers not to make deliveries in mandatory evacuation zones. Safety is our utmost priority and drivers are encouraged and instructed to never make deliveries if they feel unsafe, and they will never be penalized for it, MacLachlan said. She also said the company was investigating Rileys post about the Amazon package.Were looking into the details of this delivery, MacLachlan said. However, drivers have been instructed to not deliver in evacuation zones, or areas closed to public access. And if a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so, and the drivers performance will not be impacted.

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people dont enjoy making music. We didnt just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people, Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. Its not really enjoyable to make music now [] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people dont enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry.Its not really enjoyable to make music now it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people dont enjoy the majority of time they spend making pic.twitter.com/zkv73Bhmi9 Mike Patti (@mpatti) January 11, 2025In the interview, Shulman says hes disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.However, the notion that the majority of people dont enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of music, why people make art, become artists, and the basic human practice of skill building and mastery.Music is a form of creative expression thats old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will make music by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they dont find that frustrating.Its true that becoming very good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately produce the joy of perfectly executing a sick guitar solo. You have to start from zero, maybe learn some theory, and build the muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting a little better over time and become musicians. Some people dont and instead spend their time becoming good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc.The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects while Shulman says the making music isnt enjoyable and compares it to running, another obviously challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at over time.Most people drop out of that pursuit because its hard, and so I think that the people you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it, Shulman said.Its funny and frustrating that Shulman cant (or pretends he cant) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task.This is not a surprising position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way for producing images, music, and text in the future. We report on how those AI-generated outputs are flooding the internet already, though in most cases that output is derided as slop because its low quality and annoying to users who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company.Every single person at Suno has an incredible deep love and respect for music, Shulman said later in the interview.

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as spam and deleting them immediately.Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.Pixelfed is experiencing a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced that it would loosen its rules to allow users to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill amid a host of other changes that shift the company overtly to the right. Meta and Instagram have also leaned heavily into AI-generated content. Pixelfed announced earlier Monday that it is launching an iOS app later this week.Pixelfed said Sunday it is seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.Over the weekend, Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces. The open source charter, which has been adopted by Pixelfed and can be adopted by other platforms, contains sections titled right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, strong protections for vulnerable communities, and data portability and user agency.Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project, Supernault wrote on Mastodon. Pixelfed is for the people, period.Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Its that time again! Were planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. Were planning this forThursday, 23rd January at 1 PM Eastern. Add it to your calendar!So, whats the FOIA Forum? We'll share our screen and show you specifically how we file FOIA requests. We take questions from the chat and incorporate those into our FOIAs in real-time. Well also check on some requests we filed last time. This time we're particularly focusing on how to use FOIA in the new Trump administration. We'll talk all about local, state, and federal agencies; tricks for getting the records you want; requesting things you might not have thought of; and how to apply when the federal government tries to withhold those records.If this will be your first FOIA Forum, dont worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too.Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join.We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along!