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.

“As Americans we do not have very many options to trade futures or certain alt coins, so exchanges allowing us to use a digital residency ID is pretty much a no brainer,” Ben, from the cryptocurrency-focused YouTube channel DeFi Rebels and who says he has used the ID, told me in an email. Ben only provided his first name.

Users of the Palau ID Discord as well as YouTubers both mention the Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin as a place that accepts the ID. “If you’re on KuCoin right now in the U.S., you only have a withdrawal limit of $25,000,” one of those YouTubers, who goes by the name “Belief Bag,” said in a 2024 video. “But you may want the max withdrawal capabilities of a million a day.”

To test whether know-your-customer (KYC) regulations could be bypassed with the Palau ID, in which a service is supposed to check a user is who they say they are and their real location, I made an account on KuCoin. Initially, I used a VPN to connect from a U.S. IP address to see whether KuCoin served the U.S. market or not. 

“Our services are currently unavailable in the U.S. To ensure a seamless experience, please access the platform from a non-restricted country/region using a supported IP address,” a pop-up on the site said.

I then changed my IP address to a random country, in this case Argentina, and created a KuCoin account as normal. I still needed to verify my account with an identity document in order to enable deposits, purchases, and trading, according to a second pop-up on the site.

I then selected Palau as the issuing country for my identity document, and KuCoin automatically selected “ID card” as the recommended type of ID. I uploaded a photo of my Palau ID, then looked into my webcam so KuCoin could check that my face matched that on the ID. A short while later, my account was verified and I was now able to trade cryptocurrency largely unrestricted.

To get the ID I signed up on the RNS.ID site, paid around $250, and the system performed a criminal and sanctions background check on the information provided. I received the card in the mail a few weeks later. The RNS.ID site describes the ID as a “government-issued identification card that can be used for any purpose that requires legal proof of identity.”

The Palau digital residency program was launched in 2022, with longtime cryptocurrency investor Tim Draper becoming the program’s first resident. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is also a Palau digital resident.

Surangel Whipps Jr., the President of Palau, appeared in multiple media outlets and on various podcasts when the program first launched. On the investor, cryptocurrency booster, and former CTO of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan’s podcast in 2023, the president said that he had long believed Palau had to diversify its economy and not be dependent on tourism. “When I ran for president, one of the things I said is we have to develop our financial industry, and let’s find ways that we can do that.”

“America is successful because it’s the land of opportunity where you can dream the impossible. So we want to be that home for the digital world,” he added. 

In that same podcast, RNS.ID’s CEO William Wang explained the motivation was to improve Palau’s economy in a way that didn’t follow the Singapore model of bringing millions of people to the country. He also pointed to other countries that have implemented similar digital residency programs, like Estonia. That program is not as explicitly pro-crypto as Palau’s. He also said that if someone appears on a sanction list, RNS.ID has the “option to say no.”

The digital residency program appears somewhat popular with cryptocurrency traders, with reams of cryptocurrency-focused YouTubers making guides on how to get the ID and the benefits. The RNS.ID Discord also includes people exchanging tips on what VPN to use in conjunction with the ID to better bypass KYC. Some say they want to use the ID to open a bank account, or explicitly ask what cryptocurrency exchanges the ID works on. 

Often when someone in the Discord asks this question, an RNS.ID representative interjects and writes some variation of “we can’t provide specific guidance on where you can use your Palau ID for KYC, as each platform has its own policies.” Other users happily provide lists, though.

In an emailed statement, RNS.ID said “The Palau Digital Residency Program offers you an ID issued by the Republic of Palau. Your Palau ID can be used for KYC, however, it doesn't mean it can be used for every and all scenarios, given not all institutions take Palau ID. Even [if] they accept Palau ID, certain institutions may have various rules, for example, many banks requires you to disclose if you are a U.S. person. In such senario [sic], you should of course disclose to them.”

Multiple exchanges deliberately do not accept the Palau ID. “Kraken has an explicit control that rejects Palau Digital Residency Cards for KYC on the grounds that they can obscure an individual's true residency and may be available to nationals sanctioned by OFAC,” a Kraken spokesperson told me in an email, with OFAC referring to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control which enforces sanctions. RNS.ID did not reply to a follow-up email I sent asking if a sanctioned entity has ever received a Palau ID. 

“Additionally, Kraken continues to maintain strong KYC and fraud checks. We have measures in place to uncover and prevent fabricated identification documents being used in an attempt to circumvent our robust identity verification processes. We also reserve the right, as part of our terms of service, to suspend or close accounts where clients have used questionable or stolen identification documents during our KYC reviews,” the spokesperson added.

A spokesperson from Binance told me in an email that “Binance conducted its regular due diligence which resulted in our Risk and Compliance team deciding not to permit Palau ID for KYC on our platform."

“We require all users to complete a rigorous KYC process. We work hard to ensure safeguards are in place to prohibit US-based users from accessing our platform. These safeguards are monitored and enhanced regularly. Anyone caught circumventing these controls are violating our TOUs and are off-boarded,” the spokesperson added.

KuCoin did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In 2023, the New York Attorney General secured $22 million from KuCoin for operating illegally. It was also required to cease New York operations.

Ben from DeFi Rebels said he was concerned that more exchanges might not allow the Palau ID. “100% yes, we have seen most recently ByBit stop it,” he wrote. But “with a pro-crypto administration now in the U.S., we might see some more exchanges start allowing non KYC trading again.”

The Palau embassy in Washington DC did not respond to a request for comment.

Welcome back to the Abstract!  

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!

This is Your Brain on Mount Vesuvius

Giordano, Guido et al. “Unique formation of organic glass from a human brain in the Vesuvius eruption of 79 CE.” Scientific Reports. 

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.

Neural structures preserved in glass. Image: Giordano, Guido et al

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.

Oceanfront Property on Mars (Ocean Not Included)

Li, Jianhuii and Liu, Hai et al. “Ancient ocean coastal deposits imaged on Mars.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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.

Will Somebody Please Think of the Amphibians?!

Guénard, Benoit et al. “Limited and biased global conservation funding means most threatened species remain unsupported.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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…. 

A Moment of Zen from an Arctic Den

Archer, Louise et al. “Monitoring phenology and behavior of polar bears at den emergence using cameras and satellite telemetry.” The Journal of Wildlife Management.

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.

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! 

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 stunt blogging, Signal pains, and murderous Reels.

EMANUEL: Yesterday Jason wrote about Instagram delivering users reels showing murder, gore, and extreme violence. It’s hard to say exactly how many people saw these videos, but judging by what users have said online, and the fact that Meta felt the need to publicly apologize for the videos, which the company said it served users because of an error, suggest that these were very widespread. 

I’ll admit that when Jason first flagged to us on Slack that this was happening it didn’t immediately strike me as a must do it immediately story. First, it’s kind of hard to suss out if what one or a handful of users say they see on Instagram is really a widespread problem or a very specific rabbit hole the algorithm put them in because of their particular Instagram habits. Second, I think that I’ve become numb to how terrible content on Meta platforms and Instagram in particular has become. 

Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet.

The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”

The situation brings to mind an interview I did over a decade ago, with the executive of a now-defunct streaming platform. He told me candidly that the goal of all this was to make digital media a “utility” like gas or electricity—a faucet that dispenses the world’s art as “content,” with tech companies in complete control of what goes in the tank and what comes out of it.

Hearing this was a real tin foil hat moment for me. For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off. 

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while­ simultaneously raising subscription fees. 

Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch.

How did we get here? 

In the US, it goes back to the legal concepts of individual versus intellectual property rights, which are mediated by something called “exhaustion.” The idea behind the exhaustion principle was that copyright owners, like the studio that produces a film, relinquish some (but not all) of their rights over how a work is used when they sell copies to consumers. For example, if you buy a DVD, the law may prohibit you from duplicating the work for non-personal use, but the company that produced the movie can’t stop you from re-selling or gifting the physical disc to someone else.

The fact that you’re free to do whatever you want with the things you buy seems very obvious and intuitive from our perspective, but the truth is that copyright holders have been trying to erode these individual rights granted by exhaustion from the very beginning. Over the years, book publishers have tried to punish students for reselling expensive textbooks at lower prices, and record labels have launched unsuccessful crackdowns on stores selling used CDs. Hollywood tried to shut down the video rental market multiple times after it first emerged in the 1970s, and video game industry lobbyists have repeatedly claimed that used game sales will herald the apocalypse, with some publishers calling second-hand stores like GameStop a “bigger threat than piracy.”

In all these cases, the companies’ claims were overblown, but they boiled down to one simple gripe: technology was changing and creating new markets that they didn’t control. After much hooting and hollering, their inevitable response has always been to enter those markets and attempt to position themselves at the absolute center. And nothing has made that task easier than the rise of digital distribution.

“The basic principle of exhaustion—the notion that owners have rights that are not contingent on copyright holder permission—can and should survive the transition to a digital copyright economy,” explain Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, in their book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy. “Rights holders have always fought against this principle, but the digital marketplace gives them their best chance to kill it.”

Following the mass corporate freakout over piracy in the post-Napster era, copyright holders finally found two ways to get past the exhaustion principle: Digital rights management (DRM), which locks downloaded content to a centrally controlled platform with varying degrees of success, and streaming services, where companies fully control access to all media and users pay fees to access it with an internet connection.

The streaming model was particularly appealing to most normal people, because who wants to pay for and manage thousands of media files when you could have unlimited access to an entire library for a monthly fee? Piracy never went away of course—services like Netflix simply outpaced it in terms of convenience. Streaming beat piracy at its own game, but this time Silicon Valley tech companies and copyright owners were the ones at the controls.

This was fine for a time. But when two or three streaming services turned into several dozen, all with their own monthly fees, some of us started turning back to the Old Ways.

Over the past decade, keeping your own DRM-free digital media archive has become something of a lost art. It requires time and patience that many people no longer have, and it certainly can’t compete with the convenience of streaming. As large corporations and algorithms tighten their grip to a clenched fist, I think we’re long past due for a second DIY Media Renaissance. But in order for that to happen, we first need to change our habits and expectations around media consumption—starting with deprogramming this idea that media is something that should be unlimited and available at all times through a digital faucet.

"Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful"

One of the more abstract but dire consequences of this streaming mentality is that we’ve started to treat art and culture like wallpaper. The rise of algorithmic curation and AI-generated content has sent this into overdrive: On Spotify, music is detached from its human creators and flattened into algorithmically-generated playlists with hashtag-able labels like “Lo-Fi Chillwave Anime Vibes.” Netflix has even started dictating that producers make TV shows less engaging, so that people can passively consume them as “second screen content” while scrolling on their phones.

In her recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, music journalist Liz Pelly refers to this process as “Muzak-ing”—the conversion of media from discrete works of art with a discernible context and author to anonymous background noise meant for passive consumption at the gym or while relaxing at home.

“It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll,” Pelly wrote in an essay for The Baffler. “These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists.”

Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.

While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.

I don’t expect everyone to read this and immediately go back to hoarding mp3s, nor do I think many people will abandon things like Spotify and Amazon Kindle completely. It’s not like I’m some model citizen either: I share a YouTube Premium account because the ads make me want to die, and I will admit having a weakness for the Criterion Channel. But the packrat lifestyle has shown me that other ways are possible, and that at the end of the day, the only things we can trust to always be there are the things we can hold in our hands and copy without restriction. 

Living with some degree of artificial scarcity also changes the way you value those things, and makes you question how much media is “enough.” If more people reflected on their desire for unlimited everything, maybe we’d find a way to break through the walled gardens that have been built to satisfy them.

Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.

On Tuesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released a new “open” AI video generation model called Wan 2.1 and shared the software on Github, allowing anyone with the technical know-how and hardware to use and modify freely. It took about 24 hours for the model to be adopted by the AI porn hobbyist community, which has already shared dozens of short AI porn videos using Alibaba’s software. Elsewhere, in a community that’s dedicated to producing and sharing nonconsensual AI-generated intimate media of real people, users are already salivating over how advanced the model is. 

This is the double-edged sword of releasing open AI models that users can modify, which on one hand democratizes the use of powerful AI tools, but on the other is often used by early adopters to create nonconsensual content. 

“Hunyuan just came out when? December?” one user said Wednesday on Telegram channel dedicated to sharing nonconsensual AI-generated porn, referring to another open AI video generator developed by Tencent that’s popular in that community. “Now we get a better Text2Video Model [that] can handle more complicated motions c: This one just came out YESTERDAY and the first Lora which got made for this is a Titfuck 😆.”

Content warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of violence against people and animals.

An “error” in Instagram Reels caused its algorithm to show some users video after video of horrific violence, animal abuse, murders, dead bodies, and other gore, Meta told 404 Media. The company said “we apologize for the mistake.”

Sometime in the last few days, this error caused people’s Reels algorithms to suddenly change. A 404 Media reader who has a biking-related Instagram account reached out to me and said that his feed, which is “typically dogs and bikes,” had become videos of people getting killed: “I had never seen someone being eaten by a shark, followed by someone getting killed by a car crash, followed by someone getting shot,” he told 404 Media. 

To test this, the person let me login to his Instagram account, and I scrolled Reels for about 15 minutes. There were a couple videos about dogs and a couple videos about bikes, but the vast majority of videos were hidden behind a “sensitive content” warning. I will describe videos I saw when I clicked through the warnings, many of which had thousands of likes and hundreds of comments: 

• An elephant repeatedly stepping on and flattening a man
• A man attacking a pig with a wrench
• A close-up video of someone who had just been shot in the head
• A woman crying while laying on top of a loved one who had just been shot to death
• A man on a motorcycle stopping next to a pedestrian and shooting them in the head with a pistol
• A pile of dead bodies in what looked to be a war-type situation
• A small plane crash in front of a crowd of people
• A group of people beating a crocodile to death
• A few videos by an account called “PeopleDeadDaily” 
• A man being lit on fire
• A man shooting a cashier at point blank range

A U.S. soldier who recently pleaded guilty to hacking AT&T and Verizon communicated with an email address that he believed belonged to a foreign country’s military intelligence service and attempted to sell the service stolen data, according to newly filed court records reviewed by 404 Media. The court document also says that the soldier searched for “U.S. military personnel defecting to Russia.”

The court filing in the case of Cameron John Wagenius, who used the handles kiberphant0m and cyb3rph4nt0m, discusses Wagenius’ unlawful posting and transferring of confidential phone records, including records belonging to high-ranking public officials. 404 Media previously revealed how hackers linked to the AT&T breach mined it for records associated with members of the Trump family, such as Melania and Ivanka Trump, Kamala Harris, and Marco Rubio’s wife. The court document does not say what specific data Wagenius tried to sell to the foreign intelligence service, or who that data belonged to.

The surveillance company Flock sent the creator of a website that maps its license plate-reading cameras a cease and desist letter demanding that he immediately stop using the name “DeFlock” on his website.

404 Media previously wrote about DeFlock, an open source mapping project created by Will Freeman that tracks the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock and other companies. DeFlock currently maps more than 16,000 ALPRs around the world, which includes both Flock cameras as well as many created by Motorola. 

Late last month, Flock’s lawyers sent Freeman a letter demanding that he immediately “Cease and desist all use of the name ‘DEFLOCK’ or any variation thereof, remove all instances of ‘DEFLOCK’ from your Website, advertisements, promotional materials, and any other content, and Refrain from adopting any trademarks, trade names, or branding continue to or likely to cause dilution by blurring, dilution by tarnishment, and false advertising with respect to the Flock Marks in the future.” 404 Media has obtained a copy of the letter and uploaded it here.

“It has come to our attention that you are maintaining a website and promoting a project entitled DEFLOCK, which purports to track automated license plate readers across the country, and discusses the alleged dangers of [the surveillance]. While Flock believes in open debate, it takes misuses of its intellectual property seriously,” the letter, written by Sarah M. Katz of the law firm Adelman Matz, says. “While Flock does not object to the free dissemination of truthful information, your use of the Flock Marks as part of your brand DEFLOCK is being wrongfully used to make false statements about Flock and its products and is damaging both its reputation and the goodwill associated with the Flock Marks.”

It is not clear what “false statements” Freeman is making about Flock. The letter says that it should not be called DeFlock because not all of the cameras tracked by DeFlock are Flock cameras (some are Motorola), and says “the website also implies that various license plate readers are vulnerable to security hacks, which given that all of the readers are being imputed to Flock, provides a false impression about the security of Flock Products.” On the front page of DeFlock, there is a link to a 404 Media article about a security vulnerability in Motorola ALPRs. A security researcher on YouTube and Freeman previously showed that certain Motorola ALPRs are leaking data online, and 404 Media wrote about that research. The DeFlock site says “BREAKING: Anyone Can Access Motorola ALPR Data” and links to our article, but makes no claims about Flock ALPR security. 

Freeman is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is not going to change his website, Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney at the EFF said in a response to Flock: “The claims alleged in your letter are groundless, and Mr. Freeman will not be complying with your demands,” the EFF’s letter says. “Because there is no legal basis for your demands, my client declines to comply with them.”

The cease-and-desist letter shows that Flock is both aware of the DeFlock website and is threatening Freeman with legal action. Flock’s letter argues that DeFlock is causing the “dilution” of Flock’s trademarks rather than “infringement” of them. This is a crucial distinction, Gagliano said. 

Companies can sue for trademark infringement when they believe that a consumer is likely to confuse the infringing product for the real one; dilution cases only apply to “famous” trademarks and can be pursued when a similar product would undermine or tarnish the brand of the original. Gagliano says in her letter that DeFlock is not diluting the Flock brand because it was specifically made for the noncommercial criticism of the surveillance company.

“Federal anti-dilution law includes express carve-outs for any noncommercial use of a mark and for any use in connection with criticizing or commenting on the mark owner or its products,” Gagliano wrote, adding that a false advertising claim made in Flock’s letter does not apply because DeFlock is a noncommercial website. 

“DeFlock is a grassroots project that aims to ‘shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.’ It pursues that mission by providing information about ALPRs and maintaining an interactive, crowd-sourced map of ALPR installations,” she added. “The name ‘DeFlock’ references the project’s goal of ending ALPR usage and Flock’s status as one of the most widely used ALPR providers.”

Gagliano told 404 Media that Flock’s attempt to go after Freeman and DeFlock on a dilution claim raises serious free speech concerns. “Flock's choice to claim dilution rather than infringement is telling. Infringement requires showing that consumers are likely to be confused by the use; Flock clearly realizes how implausible that is here,” she said. “Dilution is a much more nebulous concept that we think raises serious constitutional questions. It's fortunate that dilution laws typically have enough explicit exceptions for claims to fail in their face in cases like this, but it's still much too broad a doctrine with little to justify it.”

Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas' post and told 404 Media the following: "This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts."

Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter. 

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” 

“A Bluesky account you control (@marisakabas.bsky.social) posted content or shared a link that contains non-consensual explicit material, which is in violation of our Community Guidelines. As a result of this violation, we have taken down your post,” an email Kabas received from Bluesky moderation reads. “We trust that you will understand the necessity of these measures and the gravity of the situation. Bluesky explicitly prohibits the sharing of non-consensual sexual media. You cannot use Bluesky to break the law or cause harm to others. All users must be treated with respect.” 

Kabas is challenging the deletion. 

“Hello—the post you have taken down was a video broadcast inside a government building to protest a fascist regime,” Kabas wrote in an email back to Bluesky seen by 404 Media. “It is in the public interest and it is legitimate news. Taking it down is an attempt to bury the story and an alarming form of censorship. I love this platform but I’m shocked by this decision. I ask you to reconsider it.” 

Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform. 

Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States. 

For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing. 

More importantly, the video Kabas posted was not a video Kabas made herself or that was totally devoid of context. As Kabas notes in her email back to Bluesky, the video was being played on television screens within a federal government office building, an obvious act of protest that she was reporting on, and an obviously newsworthy video when considering the context that the federal government is currently being gutted by these two men. (For what it's worth, Kabas has been doing some of the best reporting on Musk's dismantling of the federal government on her website The Handbasket.)

Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.

Bluesky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We start this week's episode with Joseph finding out someone basically ripped off his book with a potentially AI-generated summary. Emanuel also updates us on some of the impact his reporting on AI in libraries has had. After the break, Sam tells us all about a Y Combinator supported startup that is straight-up dehumanizing factory workers. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about an apparent act of protest from inside the U.S. government involving an AI video of Musk and Trump.

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.

• SXSW event information
• A Slop Publisher Sold a Ripoff of My Book on Amazon
• Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers
• AI Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes Blasted on Government Office TVs

A venture capital-backed “AI performance monitoring system for factory workers” is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency.

In a launch video demoing the product, Baid and Mohta put on a skit showing how Optifye.ai would be used by factory bosses. 

Workers around the federal government are scrambling to figure out how and if they should respond to an all-government email sent Saturday at the behest of Elon Musk asking them to list five things they did at work within the last week. During the confusion caused by Musk’s email, workers at the Treasury Department received an email from a former Heritage Foundation staffer who is not the Treasury Secretary from an email address that billed itself as being from “Secretary of the Treasury.”

How and whether to respond to the “What did you do last week” email has itself resulted in much discussion and confusion, and efforts to clarify any confusion have resulted in additional confusion as well as worries about sharing classified or otherwise private information. FBI employees were told by new FBI director Kash Patel not to respond to the email, so were members of the military. Musk tweeted “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” 

The Treasury Department email, seen by 404 Media and currently being discussed widely on Reddit, came from an email address with the name “*Secretary of the Treasury” but signed by John W. York, who is not the Secretary of the Treasury and who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025. The current Secretary of Treasury is Scott Bessent, not York. Treasury workers seem to not know who York is or why he is sending emails from an email address previously used by past Secretaries of Treasury. 

“It was used in the past rarely: wishing Treasury employees a Merry Christmas or noting there is a return to office mandate,” one source told 404 Media about the email address York’s email came from. “In the past, the emails included the title of the sender (Sec of Treasury, for example)."

In the email, York tells workers that they must respond to the “What did you do last week” email: “Given the voluminous and extremely important work that Treasury staff perform [sic] on a daily basis, we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time consuming.” 

“Your responses should be descriptive enough to show the significance of the work you performed; however, the descriptions should not reveal confidential, privileged, otherwise non-public, pre-decisional or deliberative aspects of that work, given that these responses will be sent outside Treasury,” he wrote. “If you have any questions about how to respond, please consult with your manager.”

Sources at the Treasury Department told 404 Media that they have not previously received any emails from John W. York, that they are not sure what his job is or whether he actually works for the Treasury Department, and that giving descriptive, substantial rundowns of their work tasks without giving “non-public” or sensitive information is not an easy task.

“John York had no title associated with his signature line (unusual as ALL Fed service employees are proud to put their title, Dept, etc in the sig line as a default),” one source told 404 Media. Employees at the Treasury Department have been doing research on York to attempt to figure out who he is. York worked for the Heritage Foundation before joining the Office of Personnel Management towards the end of Trump’s first term. His LinkedIn says he has worked as a “Strategic Human Capital Lead” at Accenture since March 2021. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he is now a Treasury Department employee.

Top comments on a Reddit post discussing this email are “Who the fuck is John W. York?” and “Schrodinger's phishing email. you're fired if you respond. you're fired if you don’t.” 

Other federal employees tell 404 Media that they have been receiving similar clarification emails from agency heads about how and whether to respond, and have been getting follow up emails from their supervisors about what to say if the things they work on are classified. The majority of these emails, which 404 Media is not sharing specifics on because they were in many cases sent to small teams of people, are begging employees to respond to the “What did you do last week emails” while threading the needle of sharing specifics but not sharing private or confidential information.

An AI-generated video of President Donald Trump sucking on Elon Musk’s feet, overlaid with the text “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING,” played on TV screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) headquarters in Washington, D.C., multiple journalists are reporting on social media.

Journalist Marisa Kabas posted the video on Bluesky, writing, “this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source. Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.” 

The Washington Post also obtained a recording of the televisions.

Last week, Trump called himself a king in a social media post. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Right to repair legislation has now been introduced in all 50 states, a milestone that, despite not all passing, shows the power of the grassroots political movement. Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill. 

So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process. 

Right to repair laws are designed to make it easier for consumers to fix their electronics, farmers to fix their agricultural equipment, for hospitals to fix their medical devices, and so on. Most right to repair legislation requires companies to sell repair parts to the general public, to make repair manuals available, and bans the use of technological protection measures (which are called “software locks”) that are designed to restrict repair only to authorized repair technicians. 

I have been following the right to repair movement for a decade, and, in the early days, a small group of consumer rights advocates worked in a couple states to get legislation introduced. 

Many of those bills were killed quickly by big tech lobbyists, who were successful at scaring lawmakers into believing that right to repair would make devices less safe or would be a boon for hackers. Over time, those same consumer rights advocates have been successful in convincing the general public that you should be able to fix the things you buy. The movement was endorsed by the Biden White House and Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, millions of consumers, and an increasing number of state legislators. The movement has gotten companies like Apple, Google, and John Deere to change their policies, inching toward a world where repair is more easily accessible.

"Now that Wisconsin filed their first Right to Repair legislation, we’ve completed the sweep of getting bills filed in all 50 states. Our legislative map no longer has any blanks,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, Executive Director at Repair.org, which has been advocating for the legislation. “This proves that Right to Repair is needed everywhere—and we are well on our way towards making that happen."

“Americans are fed up with all the ways in which manufacturers of everything from toasters to tractors frustrate or block repairs, and lawmakers are hearing that frustration and taking action,” said Nathan Proctor, right to repair director for consumer rights group PIRG.

iFixit’s Kyle Wiens, meanwhile, said covering the entire map is a “tipping point” for the movement: “We’ve gone from a handful of passionate advocates to a nationwide call for repair autonomy. People are fed up with disposable products and locked-down devices. Repair is the future, and this moment proves it.”

Like some (many? most? all?) authors I sometimes check how my book is doing on Amazon and other booksellers. Recently while doing that, I came across another listing on the online retailer: “SUMMARY OF JOSEPH COX’S DARK WIRE,” referring to the book I spent years researching, investigating, and writing. It cost $4.99.

Curious whether this product was an AI-generated rip-off of my work, I bought a copy. Flicking through the digital pages, the summary, rather expectedly, condensed each of my chapters into a few page overview. Details I had gone to incredible lengths to get, including flying around the world to meet criminals face-to-face, or sneaking into a law enforcement conference, or slowly building trust with understandably scared sources was plopped into this new book with little context on how they got there or why they mattered.

For example, here is the original opening of my book, about a drug trafficker called Owen Hanson: 

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

It’s hard to keep up with all the news about all the giant gassy orbiters out there. I’m speaking, of course, about hot Jupiters, a class of planets that takes the concept of “inhospitable” to dazzling and creative new levels, and which had an epic news week.

Then, what did scientists find in cores taken from deep-sea trenches? The answer might surprise you. Next, mice administer “first aid.” Last, fish can see you for who you really are (though yummy treats will certainly not be refused). 

Hot Jupiters Are So Hot Right Now (and at All Other Times)

Seidel, Julia et al. “Vertical structure of an exoplanet’s atmospheric jet stream.” Nature.

Hot Jupiters are the low-hanging fruit of exoplanet discoveries. As the name implies, they are Jupiter-sized worlds that orbit extremely close to their stars, a proximity that makes them—you guessed it—hot. 

Given that they are both giant in scale and have short years lasting only hours or days, hot Jupiters are the easiest exoplanets to spot, which is why our catalog of distant worlds is packed with them. In fact, a study came out just this week that identified seven new ones.

But while it’s not all that novel to discover these worlds (which is kind of amazing in itself), scientists have now peered deep into the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter WASP-121, nicknamed Tylos, which is about 850 light years from Earth. It’s the first time several distinct atmospheric layers and processes have been observed on an exoplanet.   

“Ultra-hot Jupiters, an extreme class of planets not found in our solar system, provide a unique window into atmospheric processes,” said researchers led by Julia Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “Here we show a dramatic shift in atmospheric circulation in an ultra-hot Jupiter” including “the first vertical characterization of a high-altitude, super-rotational atmospheric jet stream.”  

Tylos is slightly bigger than Jupiter, but it is so close to its star that its year lasts only 30 hours. As a consequence, it is tidally locked, meaning that one side is always facing the star, and the other always faces away. The star-lit side is about 2,300°C (4,200°F) which is, as advertised, quite hot. Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the researchers spotted the aforementioned equatorial jet stream and saw flows of hot gas moving from the hot day side to the cooler night side—which is still pretty hot at around 700°C (1,340°F). 

The weather report on Tylos is permanently fatal with a chance of titanium rain, according to a third study that came out this week (that’s a hot Jupiter hat-trick). Taken together, the research represents a new emerging era of exoplanet observations in which astronomers can peek under the hood of these distant atmospheres and start to get a real vertical cross-section of otherworldly skies. 

Down the line, this will lead to better characterizations of the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, which could contain detectable signs of alien life. But for now, on this late winter weekend, let's be satisfied with warming ourselves  into certain oblivion in the bellies of hot Jupiters. 

From the Hadal to the Grave 

Hovikoski, Jussi et al. “Bioturbation in the hadal zone.” Nature Communications.

To cool off, we shall now dive straight into the deepest parts of the ocean, the hadal zone, where strange things are inherently afoot. Scientists took sediment cores from seafloors at depths of over 4.6 miles in the Japan Trench which is, in my opinion, asking for trouble. But in this case, the results revealed an activity that you might not expect to find in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth—farming.   

I should just say, the “farmers” are probably invertebrates, like sea cucumbers or bivalves, that cultivate microbes that help break down organic matter for them. Still, a basic form of “agrichnial” farming is preserved in trace fossils, like burrows, the team found in the cores. 

“The hadal zone, >6 km deep, remains one of the least understood ecosystems on Earth,” said researchers led by Jussi Hovikoski of the Geological Survey of Finland. The cores open a rare window into this otherworldly region and reveal “slender spiral, lobate and deeply penetrating straight and ramifying burrow systems…interpreted to include burrows of microbe farming and chemosymbiotic invertebrates.” 

The study also gets points for its title, “Bioturbation in the hadal zone,” which sounds like an early aughts prog rock album. \m/ 

Somebody Call an EMT! (Emergency Mouse Technician)

Sun, Wenjian et al. “Reviving-like prosocial behavior in response to unconscious or dead conspecifics in rodents.” Science.

Humans produce a lot of selfish psychos, if you hadn’t noticed, but one nice thing about our species is we generally share a prosocial instinct to help people during a medical crisis. As it turns out, we’re not alone in this behavior, according to a new study that monitored the reactions of mice to ailing, unconscious, or dead conspecifics. 

“Anecdotal observations across several species in the wild, including nonhuman primates, dolphins, and elephants have reported intriguing behaviors of animals toward unresponsive conspecifics that have collapsed because of sickness, injury, or death,” said researchers led by  Wenjian Sun of the University of Southern California. “These animals…display various behavioral responses, including touching, grooming, nudging, and sometimes even more intense physical actions, such as striking, toward the collapsed peers. Some of these actions toward incapacitated conspecifics are reminiscent of human emergency responses, especially those involving sensory stimulation.”

To bring these anecdotal reports in an experimental setting, the team videotaped mice responding to cagemates that had been anesthetized into unconsciousness, as well as their reactions  to dead mice. The r mice interacted with unconscious cage-mates  about ten times as much as with an active partner, and may have even performed basic versions of first aid.

“Our results suggest that the actions of mouth/ tongue biting and tongue pulling may have rescue-like effects, reminiscent of human first aid efforts in reviving unconscious individuals with physical stimulation and airway maintenance,” the researchers said.  

“The consequences of the behaviors, such as improved airway opening or clearance and expedited recovery, are clearly beneficial to the recipient,” they added, though they also cautioned that “it is challenging to determine the motivational needs behind these distinctive ‘reviving-like’ behaviors.”  

Familiarity played a strong role in the experiment's outcome; mice heaped much more attention on dead or unconscious cage-mates that they knew well compared to strangers. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it’s kind of sad to think about these mice being confronted with their passed-out or dead friends, but the silver lining is an empirical validation of widespread prosocial behaviors. 

I’m also going to assume it means that the Disney franchise The Rescuers, starring mice humanitarians, is a documentary.

The Adventures of Left Hump and Friends

Tomasek, Maëlan and Soller, Katinka et al. “Wild fish use visual cues to recognize individual divers.” Biology Letters. 

The next time you go for an ocean swim, why not introduce yourself to some neighboring fish? They might learn to recognize you as an individual and start following you around, especially if you give them something nice to eat. That’s the conclusion of a new study that found fish can tell individual divers apart based on visual cues—and that they rapidly learn which divers are generous with treats (in this case: shrimp).

Researchers Maëlan Tomasek and Katinka Soller conducted several dives at the STARESO research station in Corsica, France. Soller was the designated shrimp dispenser, and the wild fish “volunteers” rapidly learned to distinguish her visually from Tomasek, the shrimp miser.

“Two species voluntarily took part in our experiments: saddled sea bream O. melanura and black sea bream S. cantharus,” said the researchers. “Of specific individuals, the saddled bream (Bernie) was first identified at dive 5 of the training, four black bream at dives 12 (Left Hump), 15 (Kasi), 19 (Alfi), 21 (Julius) and the last black bream (Geraldine) on the first session of experiment 1. Note that this marks the moment from which we were able to reliably identify them (i.e. identify with absolute certainty at each apparition from one dive to the next) but that they most likely appeared several days prior to this.”

First of all, fantastic names. I’m already shipping Julius and Geraldine as a celebrity fish couple called Juladine. Left Hump will officiate the wedding. But setting aside the fish fanfic, the team demonstrated that the fish learned to visually tell the researchers apart, leading to a clear preference for following Soller. 

“The fact that wild bream can discriminate between divers adds scientific evidence to the numerous accounts suggesting differentiated relationships between fish and specific humans,” the team said. “Our study thus encourages a reappraisal of the methodological avenues to study cognitive abilities of wild fish under natural conditions.” 

“It also demonstrates a potential difficulty when conducting such experiments that could be disturbed by fish following specific experimenters,” the researchers said, concluding with an implied wink: “Researchers might not always want to be followed all around by fish, but if they do, they will not be disappointed.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wasting workers’ time and taxpayer dollars on “a witch hunt to find any content deemed ‘bad,’” according to a source familiar with the work and internal communications viewed by 404 Media. Specifically, people who work on HHS websites are spending days scanning those sites and any documents they share in search of a list terms like “gay,” “sexuality,” “non-binary,” “inclusion,” “queer,” and “gender,” potentially so they could be later removed to comply with Trump’s executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government.

“The most obvious issue to me about this list is that it’s being done in the name of ‘efficiency and saving money.’ It is not efficient to take engineers off their work to scan old content for any keywords this new administration hates. The bigotry is astounding,” the source who is familiar with the work and who asked to be anonymous because they were not permitted to speak to the press, told me. “If they were being true to the concept, sure, they could say that moving forward, we will no longer support creation of new data about these topics. But to go backward decades, scrubbing for stuff they hate, that’s not a savings of time and money, that’s a huge expenditure. It's hypocritical on top of it all.”

The source said that part of what makes the work so time consuming is that the current HHS administration doesn’t just want to know about every page on its sites that include these terms, but also pages that link out to .PDF files that include those terms. For example, last week we reported that the Trump administration added a note rejecting “gender ideology” on a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s website page that shared a .PDF of a study about substance abuse among gay, lesbian, bisexual, or other nonheterosexual adolescents. According to the source, HHS administrators want that page added to a spreadsheet of pages and documents that include the terms it's looking for because of the content of the study. 

Since HHS websites share thousands of .PDFs, the source said, “very expensive” engineers spent multiple days scanning the files for the list of terms instead of doing their regular tasks. 

Other terms on the list include “they/them” pronouns, “pregnant ‘people,’” “Biden,” and “intersex,” according to a copy of the list seen by 404 Media.

The fact that the government is wasting resources finding every instance of a term it finds objectionable directly contradicts Trump’s and Musk’s stated goal of “government efficiency.” Finding these terms in thousands of studies and papers and potentially removing them is not saving any taxpayer dollars, but just purging government sites with a perspective it disagrees with. Other agencies have also scrambled to find similar terms. Axios reported that DOGE representatives at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are searching for “DEI content” and Stat News has reported that a number of federal health agencies are searching grants for “taboo words” like “trans” and “diversity.” 

“The spitefulness is such a waste of time and money. It's infuriating,” the source said. “Sure, they might argue not to do anything inclusive or helpful in the future, but to burn so much time and money trying to scrub out any content he [Trump] hates from past decades is ... I'm kinda at a loss for words.”

At the moment, it appears that HHS is not removing pages that contain the terms it’s looking for because a federal judge ordered it and other agencies to restore several webpages they removed as a result of Trump’s executive order. The court ordered the administration to restore the webpages to their versions as of January 30, 2025, meaning they were supposed to revert the webpages to what they looked like on January 30 with no changes. The versions that have been restored now have this additional disclaimer about “gender ideology” we reported on last 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 the new Murderbot show, ChatGPT for journalism, and birdwatching from afar.

EMANUEL: Yesterday Apple released the first two images from its upcoming sci-fi show, Murderbot, and announced that it will debut on May 16 this year. I, like many fans of the The Murderbot Diaries books the series is based on, am very excited about the show, but also already disappointed with one major deviation from the source material that’s obvious just from these two still images. The gist is in the show Murderbot is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who in the images looks like a guy, while in the books Murderbot is neither a he or a she, but an “it,” and while it’s not at all the focus of the story, the fact that the main character is androgynous make it much more interesting. 

To back up, The Murderbot Diaries are set in the far, far future and follow a “SecUnit,” a super advanced, super lethal cyborg who does private security for scientists and corporations exploring deep space and dangerous planets. Eventually the SecUnit, who we come to know as Murderbot hacks the governing module that keeps it enslaved and has to choose what to do with its independence as it goes off on a series of pulpy space adventures. 

Ziff Davis, the $2 billion media conglomerate that owns dozens of sites including PCMag, Lifehacker, IGN and CNET, is quietly taking diversity, equity, and inclusion information off of its website, 404 Media has learned. 

In the past month, the company removed information about diversity-focused employee resource groups, inclusion-based hiring goals, and diversity training for its workers and managers from its corporate website. 

The changes were first spotted by a Ziff Davis employee. 404 Media granted the employee anonymity to speak candidly. 

An archived version of Ziff Davis’s DEI webpage saved on January 19 states, “Ziff Davis is proud to offer Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), voluntary employee-led groups mentored by executive sponsors and overseen by our Global DEI and HR Programs team. They represent s​even identity groups​: Asian, Black, 2SLGBTQIA+, Latinx/Hispanic, family of all kinds, women and gender minorities​, and interfaith.”

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

A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon’s patients filed a class action lawsuit against him earlier this month after they say he didn’t tell them that his patient information database had been hacked twice, and that their personal information and nude photos of themselves undergoing surgery had been posted online. 

The lawsuit alleges that the surgeon, Dr. Jaime Schwartz, did not secure his patients’ information with industry-standard safety protocols, and that he lied about the scope of the first hack when patients asked him about it. Schwartz may also be familiar to some reality TV viewers, having appeared on shows such as “Botched,” according to his website.

“Despite charging clients thousands of dollars and having access to their deeply private medical information, Dr. Schwartz disregarded basic security measures necessary to protect that information from malicious cyberattacks,” the lawsuit states. “As a result of his negligence, he allowed his network to be compromised twice in less than a year [emphasis in original].”

In both cases, Dr. Schwartz did not notify his patients of a hack until some of them found their information—including nude photos of themselves with their faces visible—online, according to the lawsuit. 

The lawsuit alleges that Dr. Schwartz was first notified of a hack of his patient database in October of 2023, when the hacking group Hunter International posted that it had access to his data. 

“The hackers had exfiltrated 1.1 terabytes of data from Dr. Schwartz, consisting of 248,245 files,” the lawsuit states. “The dark web posting included four patient photos, including one nude photo with the patient’s face visible.” 

Schwartz refused to pay the ransom, according to the lawsuit. One month later, the hackers updated the post with a note to him.

“Seems like you don’t want to protect your data at all,” the lawsuit quotes the note as reading. “More than 30 days had passed already since your network has been breached. You have been provided with everything you have asked about…But you keep begging for proofs [sic]. This is not the way we going to make business with you. Maybe you will do us a favor and transfer half of the money to prove that you can pay for your data?” 

The lawsuit does not specify how much money the hackers had asked for as part of the extortion. About two weeks after the note was posted, the lawsuit states, the hackers put up another update including nude photos of patients. “If you find your private data here just email us and we will let you know how to proceed further with actions against this DOCTOR!” the last update read, according to the lawsuit. 

The lawsuit alleges that Schwartz did not notify his patients of the hack until some of them found information about it online. One plaintiff reached out to him to ask whether her data was compromised as part of the breach. 

“Thereafter, a person claiming to be in charge of cybersecurity for Dr. Schwartz called [the plaintiff],” the lawsuit states. “[She] is informed and believes that the person was Dr. Schwartz’s brother.”

According to the lawsuit, the head of cybersecurity told the plaintiff that the breach had only affected six people, that her data was not included, and that Schwartz was “working with the FBI and had completely overhauled the computer system to prevent future cyberattacks.” 

The medical world is not new to this kind of extortion. Both major hospitals and private clinics have suffered data breaches in recent years, and over 500 breaches of varying degree were reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2024. The American Medical Association found in 2019 that 83 percent of doctors in the U.S. had experienced some kind of cyber attack. 

Plastic surgeons, however, have recently become a popular target because of the kind of data they retain. A patient’s file includes not only their medical and financial information, but also photographs taken as part of the treatment process. Depending on the surgery, many of those photographs are taken nude. Even as far back as 2017, hackers targeted a plastic surgeon whose clients allegedly included royal families and stole a wealth of highly personal photos. 

“Seems like you don’t want to protect your data at all.”

“This information is particularly valuable for purposes of sale on the dark web to facilitate identity theft and for purposes of ransom/extortion against physicians and patients,” the lawsuit states.

In October of 2023, the FBI released a public service announcement that hackers were targeting plastic surgeons. The announcement said that hackers would phish plastic surgeons’ offices to get access to their patient information databases, then use “open-source information” like patients’ social media profiles as leverage.

“Once successful, cybercriminals use social engineering techniques to enhance the harvested data and extort individuals for cryptocurrency,” the announcement stated. 

Yet the lawsuit alleges that Schwartz did not take any extra precautions after his October hack. And, in March of 2024, it claims, he was hacked a second time. In this breach, the lawsuit alleges, “The entirety of Dr. Schwartz’s patient data was compromised.”

“[Schwartz] failed to notify his patients as required by federal and state law,” the lawsuit states. “He waited to do so until after the hackers posted a public website announcing the hack and leaking patients’ names, contact information, and nude photographs, and began contacting his patients directly. Despite knowing that his patients’ most private medical data was in the hands of malicious actors, Dr. Schwartz waited almost 10 months to notify them [emphasis in original].” 

“Maybe you will do us a favor and transfer half of the money to prove that you can pay for your data?”

Schwartz sent his patients a generic message about the second hack in January of 2025. He wrote that, “An unauthorized third party utilized a third-party vendor’s credentials to access the practice’s medical billing and practice management system…It was determined that some of your personal information was present in the impacted data set. We then took steps to notify you of the incident as quickly as possible.”

Despite the head of cybersecurity’s promise of a full system overhaul, the lawsuit alleges that Schwartz’s team did not sufficiently secure its network-connected devices, did not train its staff to avoid phishing emails, and did not properly vet or secure its third-party vendors with access to sensitive patient data. It also claims Schwartz did not adequately monitor its network activity or implement “appropriate network ‘traffic’ controls to prevent the exfiltration of large amounts of data.” The lawsuit additionally claims Schwartz did not have appropriate anti-malware software or firewalls in its system. 

The lawsuit also alleges that, when it was filed, Schwartz had not yet contacted the California attorney general or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service about either hack. 

“To date, the hackers have posted approximately 30 patient files,” the lawsuit states. “They have warned that they will continue releasing patient files, in alphabetical order, until Dr. Schwartz contacts them to address the matter.”

The plaintiffs are demanding damages of up to $3,000 per violation per person, amounting to more than $5 million, as well as a potential jury trial. 

Schwartz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.