Niantic is selling Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now to Scopely, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company called Savvy Games, which itself is owned by the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund. Scopely, Niantic, and Savvy Games have collectively publishedsixseparateblogpostsabout the $3.85 billion deal, none of which specifically address what is happening with the location data of Pokémon Go’s 100 million players and none of which address how location data collected in the future will be handled under Scopely and its Saudi Arabian owners.
Two other apps, called Campfire and Wayfarer, are also part of the deal. Campfire is a tool that lets people meet up in the real world to play Pokémon Go (or other Niantic games) together, and Wayfarer is an app that specifically leverages the players of Niantic games to map real-world locations for Pokémon Go. Niantic will keep Ingress, its first augmented reality game, and another game called Peridot.
Some Spotify employees are not happy that the audio streaming giant was, until this week, hosting and profiting from a course about “pimping hoes” by Andrew Tate, according to internal Spotify communications viewed by 404 Media.
“Pretty vile that we’re hosting Andrew Tate’s content,” one Spotify employee said in a company Slack channel called #ethics-club, and linked to a Linkedin post that criticized Spotify for hosting the course.
“Happy Women’s History Month, everybody!” another employee said, adding a sweating smiling emoji.
Tate is an infamous manosphere influencer known for promoting misogyny and anti-semitic conspiracy theories and who was previously charged for human trafficking and rape.
A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to a leaked list of the sites obtained by 404 Media. In all the list names more than 200 sites that the contractor, called ShadowDragon, pulls data from and makes available to its government clients, allowing them to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.
The news comes after ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Columbia University protester and green card holding legal permanent resident of the U.S., on Saturday with the intention of deporting him. It also comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly launching an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to scan the social media accounts for tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts, looking for what Axios reported as foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.
There is no indication ShadowDragon specifically, or its data tool SocialNet, is part of that program. But ShadowDragon says in marketing material its tools can be used to monitor protests, and claims it found protests around Union Station in Washington DC during a 2023 visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Daniel Clemens, ShadowDragon’s CEO, previously said on a podcast that protesters should not “be surprised when people are going to investigate you because you made their life difficult.”
We start this week with Emanuel's great investigation into Chinese AI video models, and how they have far fewer safeguards than their American counterparts. A content warning for that section due to what the users are making. After the break, Joseph explains how police are using AI to summarize evidence seized from mobile phones. In the subscribers-only section, we chat about an AI-developed game that is making a ton of money. But your AI-generated game probably won't.
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.
This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.
NASA paid for access to Clearview AI’s “Investigator Tool + Cloud Database,” according to a set of procurement documents obtained by 404 Media under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Clearview is a controversial facial recognition company which was the first to cross the rubicon of allowing third parties to search for someone’s face and then link that to their online activity, such as their social media profiles. Since gaining attention at the start of the decade, its facial recognition tool, built on a massive database of scraped images, has become a staple in law enforcement and federal government agencies.
“Clearview AI is an OSINT [open source intelligence] platform used to aid in the identification and investigations of persons of interest, by allowing users to search its database of 50+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, & many other open sources,” one part of the documents reads. 404 Media previously reported NASA’s purchase of the technology, but previously cited procurement records only said the agency bought a “Clearview AI license.”
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester who was detained by ICE on Saturday, has been moved to a detention facility in Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator system. Khalil was a key part of Columbia students’ protests last year against Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks. He is a green card holding legal permanent resident of the U.S. and has not been charged with a crime.
The news follows Khalil’s attorney initially being told he was being detained in a New Jersey facility, but after his wife went to visit him, found that Khalil was not there, according to the Associated Press.
The locator system says Khalil is being held in the Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility. It is owned and operated by the Geo Group, a long-time ICE contractor. Previous research found the Jena/LaSalle Detention Facility received the largest number of sexual and physical abuse complaints filed to ICE’s oversight body.
Image: Screenshot of the ICE detainee locator system.
Wikipedia is one of the most valuable repositories of information ever created by humanity. Having your own Wikipedia page has become a kind of status symbol—proof that someone is important enough to enter the historical record. But, ironically, having your face in a Wikipedia page is often not flattering at all.
This portrait problem stems from Wikipedia’s mission to provide free reliable information. All media on the site must be openly licensed, so that anyone can use it free of charge. That, in turn, means that most photos of notable people on the site are of notably poor quality.
“ No professional photographers ever have their photos on Wikipedia, because they want to make money from the photos,” said Jay Dixit, a writing professor and amateur Wikipedia photographer. “It’s actually the norm that most celebrities have poor photos on Wikipedia, if they have photos at all. It’s just some civilian at an airport being like, ‘Oh my god, it’s Pete Davidson,’ click with an iPhone.”
Dixit is part of a team of volunteer photographers, called WikiPortraits, that’s trying to fix that problem.
“It’s been in the back of our minds for quite a while now,” said Kevin Payravi, one of WikiPortraits’ cofounders. “Last year, finally, we decided to make this a reality, and we got a couple of credentials for Sundance 2024 [a major film festival]. We sent a couple photographers there, we set up a portrait studio, and that was our first organized effort here in the U.S. to take good quality photos of people for Wikipedia.”
Since last January, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and award ceremonies, and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos of celebrity attendees. And the celebrity attendees are often quite excited about it. Dixit, for example, found Jeremy Strong of Succession at a New York showing of the new The Apprentice and asked to take a new headshot of him for Wikipedia.
“His publicist said no,” Dixit said. “But Jeremy said, ‘Wait, you’re from Wikipedia? For the love of God, please take down that photo. You’d be doing me a service.’ So he stood and posed, and I got a shot of him.” Strong’s old photo was from 2014.
WikiPortraits photos are currently used on Wikipedia articles in over 120 languages, and they’re viewed up to 80 million times per month from those pages alone. In January, for example, Payravi said that over 1,500 WikiPortraits photos were used on articles that collectively received 140 million views. Many WikiPortraits photos have also been used by a variety of news outlets around the world, including CNN Brasil, Times of Israel, and multiple non-English-language smaller news organizations.
“It’s become sort of a mini photo agency that is accessible for organizations that can’t afford Getty [Images],” said Jennifer 8. Lee, another WikiPortraits cofounder, referring to one of the biggest stock and news photo agencies in the world. WikiPortraits photographers both run temporary photo studios at events for celebrities to come have their photos taken, and roam red carpets to snap candids.
“Our priority is, of course, Wikipedia,” Payravi said. “We’ll often check to see existing coverage on Wikipedia. If we’re at a film festival, and we see people who have a Wikipedia article, but don’t have a photo, that’s going to become our priority.”
Sriya Sarkar, a videographer by trade who has covered three festivals for WikiPortraits, said that taking photos of underrepresented people was also a major goal.
“ Kevin and Jenny are constantly trying to find ways to address the diversity blind spots that are in Wikipedia and helping to correct that,” Sarkar said. “We need more high quality portraits of notable figures in the public domain, and of course, most people of color who are notable figures in the public domain are not represented in Wikipedia. It’s not just about photos. The diversity angle is a really important reason why this project is being done.”
But not being an official news or photo agency means WikiPortraits sometimes faces problems getting media credentials to cover events.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, for example, last year featured a Native American woman who builds robots that teach Indigenous languages. Lee thought she would be a good candidate for a new Wikipedia page, and applied to the conference to take her photo, but was rejected on the basis of the conference only accepting “editorial media.”
“ I don’t think Wikimedia is traditional press, but I do consider it media,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Other events were often more willing to grant some form of press credentials.
“ Wikipedia itself is a very big brand name,” Payravi said. “Oftentimes when we apply for credentials, they ask us, ‘What’s your circulation?’ They ask that because they’re expecting a news publication or a magazine—and then we say several billion, so they’re often pretty willing to credential us.”
Funding poses another main challenge. Photographers must already own a professional-quality camera, and usually have to cover the cost of getting to events and at least part of their lodging. Although WikiPortraits sometimes receives rapid grants from the Wikimedia Foundation and private donors to cover costs, Payravi said he still likes to run a “tight ship.”
But over 30 people have taken on the job, and for some of them, it’s deeply personal. Sarkar grew up hearing about the Jaipur Literature Festival, and this past January got enough funding from the Wikimedia Foundation to make the trip and cover it for WikiPortraits.
“I got to take photos, yes, but I also got to hear from diplomats and thought leaders and culture makers from my culture,” Sarkar said. “That meant a lot to me—to be able to bring these people to an audience that may not be able to reach them, even if it’s just through a photo. Wikipedia has a lot of space to expand and really diversify their database, and I think by taking photos and going to these events, it’s helpful for both the Wikipedia community and obviously all the millions of people who use them.”
In 2024, WikiPortraits focused largely on film festivals. Payravi said this year he wanted to cover a wider variety of events. That includes events like the Jaipur Literature Festival and CES Las Vegas, a major tech conference, that WikiPortraits photographers had covered in January.
“ This is cheesy, but a picture’s worth a thousand words,” Payravi said. “The picture you see that comes up first in Google results is Wikipedia—that’s the thing people are going to see first and recognize you as. I think it’s very important for people to have a good photo of themselves for their online presence. And it’s a really fun way for an amateur photographer like me to both give back and also get to see my photographs used and showcased. I hope it’s also good for the people we’re photographing.”
Let me start this column with a question: Are you a man or a mouse? Or a mammoth? Or a mammoth mouse? Okay, that was more than one question, but in my defense, scientists made a bunch of mammothy mice and I’m getting my taxonomical lines crossed.
Then, hornet guts: What’s in them? The answer will haunt your nightmares (but in a fun way). Next, quench your thirst with primordial supernova water. Last, a heartwarming story about how we averted death by cosmic radiation. I love that for us!
The last woolly mammoths vanished from Earth 4,000 years ago, but they loom large in our imaginations. The extinct proboscideans have become the main avatar of a push to “de-extinct” lost animals by creating genetic “proxy” species spliced together with gene-editing tools like CRISPR. Yes, this movement is very reminiscent of Jurassic Park—except the proposed attractions are dodos, thylacines, and mammoths instead of T-rexes with a specific taste for lawyers.
Now, researchers working for Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup that bills itself as the “de-extinction company” have unveiled a “woolly mouse” chimera, according to a new preprint study. These mice have “exaggerated hair phenotypes including curly, textured coats, and golden-brown hair,” which the researchers claim could shed light into the genetic adaptations of mammoths. The mice don’t have any actual mammoth DNA in them; rather, the team toggled gene mutations that are similar to those found in mammoths, and other mammals.
“This study establishes a rapid platform for testing mammoth-centric genetic variants while advancing methods for complex genetic model generation,” said researchers led by Rui Chen of Colossal Biosciences. “These approaches inform de-extinction efforts and research into the genetic basis of mammalian hair development and cold adaptation.”
The study was published this week on bioRxiv, a server for biology preprints that are hot off the press and have not yet gone through the peer review process. The team also disclosed competing interests in this statement: “The authors have filed a patent application based on the results of this work. All authors are current or former employees, or scientific advisors/consultants for Colossal Biosciences and/or Form Bio, and may hold stock and/or stock options in these companies.”
In other words, this study has not been traditionally vetted and the authors acknowledge financial interest in the outcome, which are important considerations in evaluating its results. Some scientists have already pushed back on the team’s claim that the mice offer a meaningful step toward a resurrected mammoth.
Jurassic Park may be a good guide here not only for its literal premise of resurrecting animals, but for its excellent portrayal of how commercialization shapes our conception of scientific breakthroughs. After all, science is very cool, people are often enthused about it, and this makes it easy to market lofty and appealing narratives about its progress. John Hammond (the British dino tycoon) wants to make money off his park, sure, but he also has a grander sense of purpose that he has even sold himself on. “How can we stand in the light of discovery and not act?” he asks his guests over a meal. Hungry dinosaurs bluntly counter this techno-optimism by making meals of several characters.
Of course, it’s just a movie (albeit the best one ever made). Future mammoth proxies are unlikely to go on murderous rampages, though they would be well within their rights to do so. But it will be interesting to watch how this clear commercial interest in de-extinction will materialize in the coming years and, crucially, what popular narratives emerge from it. Are proxies possible? If so, who are they for? Can simulacra of dead things help save living things? Or is it all just a stunt? (Stunts can be very profitable, after all!)
This study demonstrates an eagerness to prove that the rubber is meeting the road in the journey to de-extinction, but nobody knows where this road leads or what Frankensteinian creatures might show up along the way. For a deeper dive into the thorny dimensions of de-extinction efforts, I recommend Sabrina Imbler’s thoughtful feature on the topic for Defector.
And while the methods and conclusions of this preprint should be adjudicated by experts, I did want to end on a light note by spotlighting the many luxurious mouse hairdos described in the study, such as “wavy pelage” and “curly vibrissae.” If nothing else, these mice chimeras can serve as inspiration for your next haircut.
There’s a Party in these Hornet Guts and Everyone’s Invited
In what is hands-down the gnarliest study of the week, scientists rummaged through hundreds of hornet guts to see what they were eating. Why would any sane person want to do such a thing? Because, like Mount Everest, the hornet guts are there. Oh, and also, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) is an invasive predator that is wreaking havoc across Europe, and understanding its diet is key to mitigating its ecological impact.
And boy, this hornet did not disappoint: The team found a veritable buffet of 1,449 different species in the bellies of its babies (larvae).
“Through deep sequencing of gut samples from >1500 V. velutina larvae originating from 103 nests, the aim of this study was to provide the first large-scale dietary analysis of V. velutina across European regions,” said researchers led by Siffreya Pedersen at the University of Exeter.
“We evidence V. velutina as a highly adaptable predator with an incredibly wide array of invertebrate prey, spanning the orders Hymenoptera, Diptera, Hemiptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, and Araneae with considerable dietary species variation across seasons and geographical regions,” the team said.
Asian hornet dismembering a bee. Image: Kennedy
Mitigating the devastating impacts of this predator will clearly be a tough job, as it can apparently subsist on any biofuel it can catch. The Asian hornet is particularly fond of devouring pollinators like the honey bee Apis mellifera, and it is truly chilling to read about their tactics.
“The hornets hunt A. mellifera by ‘hawking’ outside of hive entrances and intercepting returning workers, or by targeting individual foragers at floral patches,” the team said. “Unlike the Eastern honey bee, Apis cerana, which has evolved defensive mechanisms such as killing the hornets through thermal shock (bee balling), A. mellifera has no effective defence against V. velutina.”
Insect studies will just casually mention insane defense moves like “bee balling” that sound like Bioshock plasmids. All in all, the Asian hornet’s gastronomical versatility distinguishes it as “a potential ecosystem-level pressure” in Europe and a threat that must be addressed. But even as we vow to curb its carnage, we must salute this epicurious gourmand.
We now move from the gnarly to the serene. The very title of this study is a slice of zen: “Abundant water from primordial supernovae at cosmic dawn.” Forget “abracadabra” and other incantations. This is the kind of phrase I believe might make you levitate into enlightened transcendence if you repeat it enough.
Water is the essential catalyst for life as we know it on Earth, and it is the fundamental parameter that we use to assess the habitability of other worlds. For this reason, the origins of water in the universe is a major research area that can shed light on the odds that life has emerged elsewhere in space and time.
Researchers have now simulated the explosions of the first very stars in the universe, known as population III, which were much more massive and chemically homogenous than their stellar descendants. The models predicted that water formed in the cooling haloes that surrounded these inaugural supernovae, hinting that this vital compound has been around for about 13.6 billion years.
“Primordial (or population III) supernovae were the first nucleosynthetic engines in the Universe, and they forged the heavy elements required for the later formation of planets and life,” said researchers led by D.J. Whalen of the University of Portsmouth. “Here we present numerical simulations that show that the first water in the Universe formed in population III…supernovae.”
“The primary sites of water production in these remnants are dense molecular cloud cores, which in some cases were enriched with primordial water to mass fractions that were only a factor of a few below those in the Solar System today,” the team said. “Besides revealing that a primary ingredient for life was already in place in the Universe 100–200 [million years] after the Big Bang, our simulations show that water was probably a key constituent of the first galaxies.”
Water, water everywhere? More like water, water, every-when. Water has been around almost as long as starlight, which makes it obvious that there are lots of aliens out there who must be just actively ignoring us.
An Update on the Ozone Layer: Earth’s Bullet-Proof Vest
We’ll close on a high note—so high, in fact, that it is located in the stratosphere. If you are an ancient crone like me, you might recall a time called the 1980s when humans realized that many commercial chemicals, especially chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), were eating away at an atmospheric layer of ozone gas that helpfully protects life on Earth from deadly radiation. People were like, “I don’t want to be exposed to deadly radiation!” so they banned ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) in the Montreal Protocol of 1987.
The Montreal Protocol has often been held up as one of the biggest environmental successes in history, and a study out this week has further bolstered its reputation. While a lot of research has shown evidence of healing ozone, scientists have now adapted advanced climate change tools to check in on the famous ozone “hole” that once gaped over Antarctica.
“We performed a pattern-based fingerprint analysis for Antarctic ozone recovery, analogous to fingerprinting anthropogenic climate change,” said researchers led by Peidong Wang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We demonstrate that the data and simulations show compelling agreement in the fingerprint pattern of the ozone response to decreasing ODSs since 2005.”
“Our results provide robust statistical and physical evidence that actions taken under the Montreal Protocol to reduce ODSs are indeed resulting in the beginning of Antarctic ozone recovery,” the team said.
Boom! Take the win, humanity, we need all the morale we can get. Indeed, the Montreal Protocol is often cited as an aspirational model of the international collaboration required to combat climate change. This is a bit of an oversimplification—the entire global economy was not built on CFCs, and fossil fuels are a much harder habit to kick. Still, if you’re a person who doesn’t like being bombarded with carcinogenic space particles, rejoice. And if you do like radiation exposure, I have some waterfront property on Mars to sell you.
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a Supreme drop, a visit to a local Risograph printer, and what is up with Big Car.
JOSEPH: My only experience with brands like Supreme and drops is when I’ve covered the underground industry of bots and tools for getting ahead of ordinary customers. In 2019 I spoke to the hacker finalphoenix about her fascinating work on this botting ecosystem. “I was very frustrated, because whenever I’d try to buy something that was relatively cool on Instagram, it was always sold out,” she told me at the time. I think we were standing in one of those cavernous hallways at the DEF CON hacking conference in Vegas. She then automated the process of buying these clothes herself, but learned so much more about the wider industry too.
Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results.
As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an Amazon listing’s customer reviews. So, it’s a search algorithm attempting to summarize an AI summary. The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.”
As I’m writing this, Google says “An AI Overview is not available for this search,” but the Amazon AI summary was in large text directly below it, in the space where an overview would typically be, above other web results. This is what Google calls a featured snippet: "Google's automated systems select featured snippets based on how well they answer the specific search request and how helpful they are to the user," the company says. A highlight appeared, added by Google, over the phrase “easy to read and interesting.” Notably the featured snippet result for this doesn’t quote everything from Amazon’s AI, so it is itself a summary.
Google's result for "mein kampf positive reviews" as of early Thursday morning, showing the Amazon review as a "featured snippet." Screenshot of Amazon's AI-generated review summary
Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of Trust & Safety Intelligence at Google, first spotted the result.
Uh... Amazon's AI summary of Mein Kampf is even worse, and pollutes Google results for [Mein Kampf positive reviews]
After I contacted Google for comment (the company hasn’t responded as of writing) an AI Overview did appear, and notes that the book is “widely condemned for its hateful and racist ideology,” but that historical analyses “might point to aspects of the book that could be considered ‘positive’ from a purely literary or rhetorical perspective.”
Screenshot of Google's search result for "mein kampf positive reviews" as of late Thursday morning, showing the AI Overview result.
This is, at least, a better summation of the conversation around Hitler’s book that Amazon’s AI summary gives. The AI-generated review summary on the Amazon listing also shows links to see reviews that mention specific words, like “readability,” “read pace,” and “suspenseful content.” Enough people mentioned Mein Kampf being boring that there’s a “boredom” link, too.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 2,067 reviews for this specific copy of Hitler’s fascist manifesto are mostly positive, and taken extremely literally, the blueprint for Nazism is easy to read and, in some sense, “interesting.” But the reviews are much more nuanced than that. Reviewing the roadmap for the Holocaust from the world’s most infamous genocidal dictator with “five stars” seems twisted, but the reviews are nuanced in a way that AI clearly doesn’t understand—but a human can.
“Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, should be read by everyone in the world who are interested in a world of peace, social responsibility, and worldwide cooperation,” one reviewer wrote, in an honestly pretty concerning start to a very long review. But they go on to write more that clarifies their point of view: “This evil book presents a dark vision of how to go about creating tyranny in a democratic society so that one, similar to Russia, is created. [...] Also, Hitler is an excellent writer; he is not a rambling madman writing disconnected ideas and expressing a confusing methodology. His text is easy reading, and it is a world classic that is a must read.”
Another five-star review says: “Chilling to begin reading this book and realize that these are the words written by Adolf Hitler. Read it and absorb what he says in his own words and you soon grasp what he means. [...] We are bound to repeat History if we don't understand mistakes that were made in the past.”
These aren’t “positive” reviews; most of the five-star reviews are noting the quality of the print or shipping, and not endorsing the contents of the book.
Mein Kampf has never been banned in the U.S. (unlike plenty of other books about race, gender, and sex), but Amazon did briefly ban listings of the book from its platform in 2020 before reinstating it.
Google’s AI Overview shoots itself in the algorithmic foot frequently, so it’s noteworthy that it’s sitting this result out. When it launched in May 2024 as a default feature on searches, it was an immediate and often hysterical mess, telling people it’s chill to eat glue and that they should consume one small rock a day. In January, the feature was telling users to use the most famous sex toy in the world with children for behavioral issues. These weird results are beside the bigger point: Google’s perversion of its own search function—its most popular and important product—is a deep problem that it still hasn’t fixed, and that has real repercussions for the health of the internet. At first, AI Overview was so bad Google added an option to turn it off entirely, but the company is still hanging on to the feature despite all of this.
The Mein Kampf AI summaries are also an example of how AI is starting to eat itself online, and the cracks are showing. Studies in the last few years show that AI models are consuming AI-generated content as training data in a way that’s polluting and destroying the models themselves.
A number of AI video generators, mostly released by Chinese companies, lack the most basic guardrails that prevent people from generating nonconsensual nudity and pornography, and are already widely used for that exact purpose in online communities dedicated to creating and sharing that type of content.
A 404 Media investigation into these AI video generators show that the same kind of ecosystem that’s developed around AI image generators and nonconsensual content has already been replicated around AI video generators, meaning that only a single image of someone is now required to create a short nonconsensual adult video of them. Most of these videos are created by abusing mainstream tools from companies with millions of dollars in venture capital funding, and are extremely easy to produce, requiring only a reference image and a text prompt describing a sexual act. Other tools use more complicated workflows that require more technical expertise, but are based on technology produced by some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The latter are free to use, and have attracted a large community of hobbyists who produced guides for these workflows, as well as tools and models that make those videos easier to produce.
“[These AI video generators] need to put in safeguards to prevent the prompting and creation of NCII [nonconsensual intimate images],” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on synthetic media, told me in an email. “OpenAI’s DALL-E, for example, has some pretty good semantic guardrails on the user prompt input, and image filtering on the image output to prevent the widespread misuse of their image generator. This type of output filtering is relatively standard now and used in many social media platforms like Facebook/Instagram/YouTube to limit the uploading of NSFW content.”
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Do you know anything else about people abusing AI tools? 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 [email protected].
A leading French university is inviting American scientists who fear their research on subjects like climate might be censored by Donald Trump’s administration to do their work in France.
“The program is called ‘safe place for science,’ and will provide 15 million Euros in funding for some 15 researchers over a 3-year period,” Clara Bufi, a spokesperson for Aix Marseille University, told me in an email. “It targets, but is not limited to, climate and environment, health, and human and social sciences.”
A press release from Aix Marseille University today said that the program is for American scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered in their research,” and is “dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.”
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Are you doing research that's compromised by the Trump Executive Orders? 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 [email protected].
A game created with AI in just 30 minutes is generating more than $50,000 a month, its creator claims—and could be a peek at how AI can, and can’t, change game design in the future.
fly.pieter.com, an in-browser “fun free-to-play MMO flight sim made with AI” was made by Pieter Levels, who amassed a huge online following for pioneering the practice of quickly developing and launching software and startups with the help of AI. As he explains in his X bio, “All my websites/apps/startups/projects are built by just me with vanilla HTML, JS with jQuery, PHP and SQLite. I'm very fast with my own little stack. I don't collaborate with other people and prefer shipping fast by myself.”
This is sometimes referred to as “vibe coding,” which generally means being less methodical and detail oriented, telling the AI tool what you want, and getting it to work without worrying about the code base being messy.
A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe.
As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration’s war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC’s live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting “gender ideology” to some of them.
Restored CDC isn’t going to have continuous updates on this type of healthcare and disease guidance, but it has brought back all of the critical data that was purged in an easy to use, easy to navigate, and fast website. Other critical archiving projects, including the End of Term Archive, have saved government websites more broadly, but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky. Some archives require users to download files to navigate them on their own computers, for example. Archives on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are a great public service, but depending on the snapshot, they can be slow to load and some elements may be broken. Using RestoredCDC.org, meanwhile, is like using any other website, and the team hopes that the pages will be indexed by Google so they will be easily discoverable on search engines.
On other archives, “The individual pages are archived, but links between them are broken and the pages are not easy to locate through web searches,” the team behind RestoredCDC wrote.
“Therefore, we will re-build the links between the pages, to create a site that can be navigated the same way as the pre-January 21, 2025 CDC site,” they wrote. “The only changes we will make on these pages is to add a header that indicates that this site is not a CDC website. Because of the complex navigation between pages, we will also include a button to report problems in this header. Our goal is to provide a mirror site that provides the same information and user experience as the previous CDC website.”
In a Reddit post on the DataHoarders subreddit, one of the developers of RestoredCDC said that the website was made using archived pages created by that community, and that the website is hosted in Europe.
“Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available,” the team wrote. “We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site.”
This week we start with Jason's article on how a Facebook group for Cybertruck owners is completely overrun with people flipping them off. Then Joseph explains how U.S. crypto traders are buying IDs from the tropical nation of Palau to skirt the law. Then in the subscribers-only section (with a content warning), we talk about Jason's story on a big Instagram bug that pushed really horrible stuff into ordinary peoples' feeds.
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Cellebrite, the company which makes near ubiquitous phone hacking and forensics technology used by police officers around the world, has introduced artificial intelligence capabilities into its products, including summarizing chat logs or audio messages from seized mobile phones, according to an announcement from the company last month.
The introduction of AI into a tool that essentially governs how evidence against criminal defendants is analyzed already has civil liberties experts concerned.
“When you have results from an AI, they are not transparent. Often you cannot trace back where a conclusion came from, or what information it is based on. AIs hallucinate. If you always train it on data from cases where there are convictions, it will never understand cases where indictments should not be brought,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media in an email.
A Facebook group for Cybertruck owners is full of videos and photos of passersby and other drivers flicking them off, leaving notes that say “WHAT’S ELON’S CUM TASTE LIKE?,” and “NAZI CAR,” and people kicking their cars, throwing slices of cheese at it, etc.
This genre of post is being made nearly daily in a group called “Cybertruck Owners Only,” a development that shows two things. The wider protests and backlash against Elon Musk at Tesla dealerships is, at the very least, making it uncomfortable for some people to own a Cybertruck. The protests also highlight that Cybertrucks are outfitted with many cameras that are always recording in “Sentry Mode,” and that a community of Cybertruck owners are sometimes trying to identify people using this footage.
In a video taken from a Cybertruck of a man throwing American cheese slices at the windshield of a Cybertruck, many comments suggest filing a police report and attempting to dox the man by posting a screengrab of his face to social media: “Freeze frame and blow up his face. Go on all the social media platforms and post your video. I would file a police report stating that if he is willing to do this in public, then he obviously has some type of vendetta against me, and therefore, I feel threatened and fearful for my life… the only way these people will learn [is] if they are shamed,” one comment reads. “Can you make an 8 x 11 print out of his face with a QR code that leads to the video so everybody in your city will know who this guy is and what he did?? can’t we just make him famous?”
After a group of attorneys were caught using AI to cite cases that didn’t actually exist in court documents last month, another lawyer was told to pay $15,000 for his own AI hallucinations that showed up in several briefs.
Attorney Rafael Ramirez, who represented a company called HoosierVac in an ongoing case where the Mid Central Operating Engineers Health and Welfare Fund claims the company is failing to allow the union a full audit of its books and records, filed a brief in October 2024 that cited a case the judge wasn’t able to locate. Ramirez "acknowledge[d] that the referenced citation was in error,” withdrew the citation, and “apologized to the court and opposing counsel for the confusion,” according to Judge Mark Dinsmore, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of Indiana. But that wasn’t the end of it. An “exhaustive review” of Ramirez's other filings in the case showed that he’d included made-up cases in two other briefs, too.
“Mr. Ramirez explained that he had used AI before to assist with legal matters, such as drafting agreements, and did not know that AI was capable of generating fictitious cases and citations,” Judge Dinsmore wrote in court documents filed last week. “These ‘hallucination cites,’ Mr. Ramirez asserted, included text excerpts which appeared to be credible. As such, Mr. Ramirez did not conduct any further research, nor did he make any attempt to verify the existence of the generated citations. Mr. Ramirez reported that he has since taken continuing legal education courses on the topic of AI use and continues to use AI products which he has been assured will not produce ‘hallucination cites.’”
But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.
The judge wrote that he “does not aim to suggest that AI is inherently bad or that its use by lawyers should be forbidden,” and noted that he’s a vocal advocate for the use of technology in the legal profession. “Nevertheless, much like a chain saw or other useful [but] potentially dangerous tools, one must understand the tools they are using and use those tools with caution,” he wrote. “It should go without saying that any use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with counsel's ethical and professional obligations. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.”
In January, as part of a separate case against a hoverboard manufacturer and Walmart seeking damages for an allegedly faulty lithium battery, attorneys filed court documents that cited a series of cases that don’t exist. In February, U.S. District Judge Kelly demanded they explain why they shouldn’t be sanctioned for referencing eight non-existent cases. The attorneys contritely admitted to using AI to generate the cases without catching the errors, and called it a “cautionary tale” for the rest of the legal world.
Last week, Judge Rankin issued sanctions on those attorneys, according to new records, including revoking one of the attorneys’ pro hac vice admission (a legal term meaning a lawyer can temporarily practice in a jurisdiction where they're not licensed) and removed him from the case, and the three other attorneys on the case were fined between $1,000 and $3,000 each.
The first envelope looked innocuous enough. A sticker on the white cardboard sleeve said it came from Hangzhou City in the east of China. Opening it up revealed something more ostentatious: a second blue envelope with a regal gold stamp.
“Welcome to the Metaverse on Earth!” the letter inside read. Attached was my new identity card for the Republic of Palau, a tropical island nation in Micronesia near Indonesia and the Philippines. I was now officially a “digital resident” of Palau, despite never stepping foot in the country. According to the website I bought the ID from, run by a company called RNS.ID, I could use it to check-in to rental accommodation and could extend a tourist visa for Palau by 180 days if I wished. Most importantly, I could use it as my identity document on cryptocurrency exchanges.
That is exactly what traders in the U.S. are doing in order to bypass restrictions on the amount of cryptocurrency they can withdraw and the exchanges they can use, according to interviews with users, a review of Discord messages and YouTube tutorials, and my own successful tests. Many exchanges don’t allow signups from the U.S. because of the country’s still strict regulations around cryptocurrency. But with a Palau ID, U.S. traders can skirt that issue, and claim they come from Palau. The ID is so ripe for abuse that major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Kraken have already banned use of the ID from their platforms.
How’s your mental state these days? Feeling burnt out? Well, have I got a story for you about a guy whose mind was so blown by the events of his time that we can see his actual neurons 2,000 years later. I’m not trying to trivialize anyone’s legitimate feelings of stress; just giving us all the opportunity to look on the bright side: We haven’t been cooked alive—yet!
Next, Mars. Want to live there? Some people apparently do. Here’s a guide to the best coastal real estate of the past, courtesy of a rover that recently died there. Snap up your timeshare before Elon Musk buys it and names it X-Mars-the-Spot or some crap. Then, scientists raise alarms about all the weird endangered animals that get short shrift compared to fan favorites, like tigers, and whales, and Moo Deng. Last, an ode to the mama bear. Enjoy!
Nearly 2,000 years ago, a young man aged about 20 was chilling out in the Collegium Augustalium, a hall built to worship Emperor Augustus, in the Roman town of Herculaneum. Nobody knows what was running through his mind that morning, but we know what was there by the afternoon: A heat-shocked brain preserved in organic glass.
This unlucky fellow was one of the thousands of people killed when Mount Vesuvius blew its ever-lovin’ top in the year 79, burying the neighboring towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in searing ash, lava, and pumice.
Remains of the man in the Collegium Augustalium. Image: Pier Paolo Petrone
The man in the Collegium Augustalium, who probably served as the building’s guardian, was lying down in bed when he was hit by a fast-moving volcanic belch, known as a pyroclastic flow, which raised his body temperature well above 510°C (950°F).
That is, medically speaking, too hot. But while it is an absolutely horrifying way to die, the guardian has the posthumous honor of having a preserved glass brain “formed by a unique process of vitrification” which “is the only such occurrence on Earth,” according to researchers led by Guido Giordano of Università Roma Tre.
“Our comprehensive chemical and physical characterization of the material sampled from the skull of a human body buried at Herculaneum by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius shows compelling evidence that these are human brain remains, composed of organic glass formed at high temperatures, a process of preservation never previously documented for human or animal tissue, neither brain nor any other kind,” said the team.
“The glass that formed as a result of such a unique process attained a perfect state of preservation of the brain and its microstructures” including “exceptionally well-preserved complex networks of neurons, axons, and other neural structures,” the researchers added.
We talk about having brain-freeze or being brain-fried, but the guardian definitely has us all beat with: brain–vitrified-into-glass-via-volcano. While it’s probably not how this guy hoped to go down in history, it’s insane that we can look at an ancient person’s actual brain, down to the neural structures, after 2,000 years. These same networks once carried thoughts like “what should I have for lunch?” and “Emperor Augustus was so based” and now they are laid out in front of us, immortalized in a glass tableau.
“We reconstruct a scenario where a fast, very hot ash cloud was the first deadly event during the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption, enveloping victims, including the guardian who was subject to the specific conditions for heating the brain at temperatures well above 510 °C without the (total) destruction of the cerebral tissue,” the team said. “The brain then turned into glass during the fast cooling at glass transition temperature close to 510°C. Later, in agreement with witness accounts and deposit stratigraphy, Herculaneum was progressively buried by thick pyroclastic flow deposits, but at lower temperatures, so that the unique presence of a vitrified brain could have been preserved until today.”
Don’t mess with Mount Vesuvius! Unless you want people to look at your neurons in 2,000 years, in which case: go with the pyroclastic flow.
Martian lakes? Sure. Rivers? Ok. But a big ole Martian ocean? Show me the receipts.
That’s the upshot of a decades-long debate about whether a vast Martian sea extended across the northern lowlands of the red planet billions of years ago. Now, China’s Zhurong rover has produced the aforementioned receipts—and they are premium property deeds.
“Various observations suggest that large amounts of liquid water once existed on the Martian surface, however, the nature and fate of this water are uncertain,” said researchers co-led by Jianhui Li and Hai Liu of Guangzhou University.
“Through radar data gathered by the Zhurong Rover, we identify extensive dipping deposits in the subsurface of southern Utopia Planitia,” the team said. “These deposits have structures similar to those of Earth’s coastal sediments. This finding implies the past existence of a large water body, supporting the hypothesis of a past ocean in the northern plains of Mars.”
The Zhurong rover landed in 2021 in a region called Utopia Planitia, at the edge of this proposed shoreline. Though it died the next year, it is still producing revelations from beyond the grave as scientists work through its observations.
This study provides the first clear onsite evidence that ocean waves lapped against these lowlands, creating scenic beaches. All you have to do to cash in on this location is go back in time about four billion years and adapt your body to an alien planet, which is only slightly more challenging than getting into the housing market here on Earth in the present day.
Humans are causing a sixth mass extinction event. Yup, it’s a bummer. To make matters worse, even our efforts to help curb the losses get all tangled up with our biases toward the so-called “charismatic megafauna” that most inspire our wonder, affection, and asymmetric sympathy.
Enchanting animals like rhinos, tigers, and pandas have become the icons of conservation movements—but these anthropic preferences come at a great cost, reports a new study that analyzed roughly 14,600 conservation projects over a period of 25 years.
“More attention is urgently needed to assess the extinction risks of neglected taxa, especially smaller species,” said researchers led by Benoit Guénard of the University of Hong Kong. “Paradoxically, while approximately 6% of species identified as threatened were supported by conservation funds, 29% of the funding was allocated to species of ‘least concern.’”
“For example, small-bodied taxa, such as amphibians, have been known to be the most threatened of vertebrate groups for two decades, accounting for ~25% of the threatened vertebrate species” and “yet, amphibians received only 2.5% of recent funding, which declined from 4% in the late 1990s,” the team said. “Similarly, weak conservation efforts are observed within many groups of mammals (e.g., Rodentia, Chiroptera), reptiles (e.g., Squamata, Serpentes, or nonmarine Testudines), or insects (e.g., Odonata, Orthoptera) despite the well-known threats to these taxa.”
Honestly, preach. This problem has been a hobby-horse of mine for years—and if a hobby-horse were a real endangered species, it would probably get disproportionate conservation funding.
To that end, the authors made a series of recommendations for “a more holistic distribution of conservation funding” and “more balanced coverage of threatened species within conservation programs.”
“Successful citizen-science programs, even for taxa not typically seen as charismatic, have already spurred an increase in local and applied actions, as many individuals may feel geographically disconnected from some of the large megafauna that receive the ‘lion’s share’ of funding,” the team noted.
“With heightened awareness of the essential functions and services of many species that are often seen as less charismatic, it is crucial to address these biases and optimize the allocation of funds to ensure the protection of these species.”
Stoneflies and salamanders need love too! Who cares if they don’t inspire Disney movies or Moo-Deng-level devotion? Are we really so superficial that we predicate survival on cuteness?
I mean, yes, evidently—I will literally do this in the following section. I contain hypocritical multitudes. But you can still ogle adorable animals while recognizing the urgent need for more objective conservation approaches.
And now, on to a story about endangered charismatic megafauna….
Last, polar bear cubs. Yeah. We deserve it. We talked about the uncharismatic minor-fauna. Now show us those fluffy little bear cubs.
Scientists have done just that by filming a bunch of cuddly future killers emerging from their dens for the first time. For six years, a team logged footage from cameras installed at roughly a dozen sites in Svalbard, Norway, to get a better sense of the factors involved in this crucial rite of passage for bears, which is rarely observed as the dens tend to be in remote and inaccessible parts of the Arctic.
The results revealed…very cute cubs. I just want to pick them up and hug them and accept the fatal mauling that comes my way—worth it for the snug. But in addition to lil baby bear pics, the study also produced valuable scientific insights, which was not necessary, but is nonetheless appreciated.
“We found that the probability a bear had broken out of the den could be accurately predicted from changes in collar temperature, activity, and ordinal date,” said researchers led by Louise Archer of the University of Toronto. “Post-den emergence behavior was influenced by external environmental temperature, time of day, and the amount of time since den breakout; bears were more likely to emerge and stay outside longer given warmer temperatures and increasing time since den breakout.”
“Our study highlights the importance of the post-emergence period for cub acclimatization and development and provides new monitoring tools to study polar bear denning behavior, which is increasingly vulnerable to disruption in a rapidly changing Arctic,” the team said.
Polar bear family near den. Image: Steven C Armstrup/Polar Bears International
The study is also a reminder of the general badassery of mama bears. These animals mate in the spring, delay implantation for several months (wish humans had this trick), dig out a den in late summer, give birth to tiny 600-gram cubs around the winter solstice, nurse them for several months, before emerging with them in the spring, by which point they have fasted up to eight months and lost nearly half their body weight. And then they have to raise the dang kids solo! All while humans make their lives immeasurably harder with the effects of climate change.
These moms deserve a medal. Made of meat. Give the moms 5,000-pound meat medals.
And with that, may you emerge from your dens as spring starts to thaw the Northern Hemisphere. Just watch out for volcanoes!
