Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, we’re going to the movies. For 77 hours straight. At the end, we’ll know whether we are doomed to villainy or driven to heroism. These are the only two options! 

Then, you’re 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 Reproducibility

Wigmore, 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 characters—19 men, 8 women, and a gender-fluid Loki—the 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 (I’m 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 don’t 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, I’m 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 Plane

Hinsley 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 plants—including olive trees, cut roses, and exotic shrubs—is 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 “Suckerotopy”

Olson, 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 it’s 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 Viscous 

Zhu, 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 object—and 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 planets…may have suffered far more impacts than the basin records indicate” but those “early epochs are obliterated.”

And with that, it’s 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: I’m going to talk about Emanuel’s great piece CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music. Here is the key passage:

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.

“We didn’t 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. It’s 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 don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

Please go read Emanuel’s whole piece. It’s 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. There’s 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 I’m 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 people—incluing us—are already furious that they were automatically opted into it. Turns out, disabling it isn’t straightforward, as I found out why I tried to opt 404 Media out of it.

“Today we announced that we’re 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.”

Gemini’s summary said “Mohammed Karzoon, a former member of the Syrian President al-Assad’s 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, that’s 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 wasn’t 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.” 

But it looks like it’s all or nothing. You can’t 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 you’re 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 doesn’t 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 it’s right next to the button to switch to a different inbox), it’ll 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. We’ve already seen that with ChatGPT, and organizations have to write policies to stop employees doing it. And now you’re 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, that’s part of the problem.

“You’ll see these end user settings will become even clearer and easier for people to use in the coming days as we’re rolling out updates (happening now) with language that’s 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. government—the Biden administration that he has been railing against as he pivots to MAGA—has squarely aimed its spear at Meta’s biggest, most credible competitor in a move that would greatly benefit Zuckerberg and his company.

Everything that Zuckerberg is doing right now–Meta’s 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 men’s bathrooms at Meta offices; the inauguration party–should 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. 

Zuckerberg’s 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.

Zuckerberg’s 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 Zuckerberg’s 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 Meta’s 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 it’s 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 there’s 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 we’re 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 Zuckerberg’s 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 America’s 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 “you’re painting this as if we don’t do it, China will do it. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find somebody who is more of a hawk on China in this committee. So I agree with that. What I don’t think is the right frame is ‘If Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t do it, then Xi Jinping will.’ Like, this isn’t Mark Zuckerberg versus Xi Jinping … Facebook doing this, frankly, I don’t trust it and I don’t believe the American people trust it.”

This endeavor of watching Zuckerberg’s 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 2020—during the Trump administration—while 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, Zuckerberg’s 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. 

Zuckerberg’s 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 company’s 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 Trump’s 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 content—spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 according to a press release from the university—was licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes, but is now open to the public to peruse. 

It’s a Y2K treasure trove of weird ideas. In one presentation deck titled “Tomahawk,” there’s 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.

It’s 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. 

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 didn’t save it quickly. “Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft Mobile Phones and in 2016, Microsoft announced it was ceasing phone production entirely. That’s 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 couldn’t, 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 Microsoft’s 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 it’s 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 communications—just not on this planet. It’s 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 options—like they were doing at Nokia—or discussion that really considers people’s different needs and concerns, not just the interests of global corporations or governments.” 

With Meta’s 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 Trump’s 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 country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s 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. 

Zara Dar’s 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 “I’m 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 that’s 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 she’s 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 doesn’t have much in terms of written articles, but there’s 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 it’s also not the worst place to monetize one’s videos, even if they’re not porn. In fact, I learned about Dar’s 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 YouTube’s $340 per million views. 

For reasons she doesn’t understand, Dar’s 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 she’s 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 it’s optional,” Dar told me. “It’s frustrating that verification isn’t required for other users, yet my account was banned for sharing a straightforward fact about my content creation career. I was engaging professionally, but LinkedIn’s 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 Dar’s 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 don’t know exactly why Dar’s Linkedin account was removed because Linkedin won’t explain, but it’s possible it was reported because it was reported by users after going viral on the LinkedinLunatics subreddit, where people share Linkedin posts they feel don’t belong on the professional networking platform. As we’ve 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 that’s 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 Dar’s Pornhub video on pi. “They're trying to hinder our education.”

The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s 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 Deere’s 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.

The FTC lawsuit specifically states that that MOU was designed to kill right to repair legislation and repair regulation against the company.

"Deere invoked its release of Customer Service ADVISOR and its MOU with the Farm Bureau to stymie state 'right-to-repair' legislation that would otherwise have required Deere to make fully functional repair tools available to customers," it stated.

It also highlights the fact that Deere has released a version of its repair software, called "Service Advisor," to the public (which costs $3,160 per year). But the version of the software released to the public can only do certain repairs and is not fully functional.

"Deere offers two versions of its electronic repair tool: (1) Full-Function Service ADVISOR, a fully functional repair tool that Deere makes available only to Deere dealers, and (2) a degraded Customer Service ADVISOR, which Deere licenses to equipment owners, IRPs [Independent repair providers], and others," it states.

"Deere has acquired and maintained monopoly power in a relevant market for the provision of repair services that require the use of a fully functional repair tool. Through its limited distribution of the repair tool, Deere controls entry into, and limits output in, the provision of such services," the lawsuit added. "As a consequence, Deere’s dealers are able to maintain a 100% market share and charge supracompetitive prices for restricted repairs, and Deere itself reaps additional profits through parts sales."

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 shouldn’t 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 FTC’s enforcement action will help farmers, and everyone else who believes people should be able to fix their stuff.”

The Oscars of porn and the industry’s 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 they’ve 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. It’s 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. It’s also the biggest event of the year for the industry’s 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 decades—since 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. They’ve 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 AVN’s 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.” 

Performer Electra Rayne told me on Monday she’s 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. 

 “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 can’t 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.

AVN 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. APAG’s 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 that’s 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 don’t receive a fair contract soon, AVN won’t 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. 

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 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
• Meta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger Themes
• Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
• Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here’s How
• People Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are Real
• An Amazon Delivery Confirmation Photo Is the Last Time a Palisades Resident Saw Her Burnt Down House
• ‘We’re 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 Meta’s policies over the course of months is making a mockery of the company’s 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.

I’ve 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 Crushmate’s 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.

Other ads feature other real women I wasn’t 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.

I’ve 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. 

I’ve recently reported about Meta running ads that feature explicit nudity, including dozens of ads that are just close up images of vaginas. I’ve also reported repeatedly about “nudify” apps buying ads on Meta platforms. When we’ve 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. 

Meta did not respond to specific questions about why it’s 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 Meta’s 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 it’s 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.” 

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 Meta’s platforms. 

As we’ve 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, we’ve 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 don’t need to go to the dark corners of the web in search of these tools. Meta is getting paid to popularize them.

It’s that time again! We’re 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. We’re planning this for Thursday, 23rd January at 1 PM Eastern. Add it to your calendar! 

So, what’s 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. We’ll 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, don’t 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!

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.

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.

“We didn’t 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. It’s 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 don’t 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.

In the interview, Shulman says he’s 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 don’t 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 that’s 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 don’t find that frustrating.

It’s 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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 it’s 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.

It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) 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 it’s 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.

Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s 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. Riley’s 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 company’s website. 

Since 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 Amazon’s 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 didn’t 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 LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

“The block you’re scheduled for on 09 January 2025 at 3:30 am at VAX5 has been canceled. Please don’t come to the delivery station. This cancellation is due to circumstances beyond your control. Your standing won’t 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 they’d 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 aren’t close to the source of the fire itself. In 2023, New York City was enveloped in smoke from Canadian wildfires, and the city’s 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 it’s 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 it’s safe to do so from outside the affected region…Our 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 Riley’s post about the Amazon package. 

“We’re 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 driver’s performance will not be impacted.”

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 game’s forums and social media about being hacked and their inventories emptied. The comments also show how the hacker compromised the account shortly before the game’s 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.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t 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? I’m already exhausted. Let’s just skip the fuss and call it Becky.

Then, we’ll 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. It’s a week of deep space and deep time; enjoy the ride.

All I Want for Christmas 2025 is A GIANT PLANET

Siraj, 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 anomalies—or 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 study’s projected orbit places Planet X right into the sights of Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 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 LSST’s 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 TNOs…is 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 family—or, perhaps, learning that Planet X was just an astronomical mirage. LSST is poised to answer the riddle, one way or another. 

In addition to the exciting prospect, the new study offers other tantalizing predictions. The team found that the planet’s 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, we’re living through an overwhelming time of climate disasters, political strife, and obscene inequities. I really think we deserve a new planet, as a treat. I’ll even take a primordial black hole, if that’s what’s 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 Story

Denton, C. Adeene et al. “Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto.” Nature Geoscience.

Speaking of TNOs, let’s 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 aren’t 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 Earth’s 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 Charon’s widespread fracture network and Pluto’s ancient ridge–trough system, which reflects early and widespread extension.”

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 Teeth  

Pollock, Thalia et al. “Functional optimality underpins the repeated evolution of the extreme “saber-tooth” morphology.” Current Biology.

You don’t 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.

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.

It’s bittersweet to live in an era devoid of saber teeth. While I wouldn’t want to see these fatal fangs up close, the world is undoubtedly duller without them.

Punk is Dead! Like…Really, Really Dead

Sutton, 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 mollusc’s exoskeleton, the team added. In addition, Emo’s “anterior valves” resemble “studded clothing.”  

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 walked—let alone crowd-surfed—on 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.

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.

Meta’s 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 Zuckerberg’s 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 “it’s total chaos internally at Meta right now” because of the changes.

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 Meta’s 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.” 

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 it’s Friday until I woke up this morning, so I’ll be brief with a quick couple of thoughts about Google’s 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 Emanuel’s 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 didn’t get that answer, and couldn’t replicate it. I could get the other one mentioned in the story—searching “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. 

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

Some of the world’s 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 ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this 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.