Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media.
The news signals ICE’s heavy emphasis on bringing disparate datasets together in order to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation effort. The tool, called ATrac and “Alien Tracker” in the document, is planned to allow for the management of all enforcement priorities, and provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country.
💡
Do you work for a government agency or contractor connected to this? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at [email protected].
The document says ATrac is an ICE tool that displays information on a geospatial interface for officials to identify potential enforcement targets, and then task that enforcement to a particular team. Once a team is sent out, they are required to report the ultimate outcome, such as the target being arrested; the target being located but not arrested; or the target not being located.
The document says ATrac already includes information from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It also includes data from law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), according to the document.
Other agencies planned for inclusion named in the document, such as HUD, HHS, and DOL, are not ordinarily associated with immigration enforcement. Earlier this month the IRS said it would provide data to ICE for immigration enforcement efforts.
Neither HUD, HHS, DOL, nor ICE responded to a request for comment.
The document also says that each target in the tool includes information from TRSS, an apparent reference to Thomson Reuters Special Services. The company was previously criticized during the first Trump administration for assisting ICE with the “identification and location of aliens.” Thomson Reuters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It is not clear how ATrac’s data collection and analysis would fit in with other reported ICE databases or tools, and whether it is distinct or related to those projects. On Thursday, U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly said in a letter to the oversight body for the Social Security Administration (SSA) that an agency whistleblower reported members of DOGE were building a “master database” using data from SSA, IRS, and HHS. On Friday, WIRED reported DOGE was working on a master database which includes data from SSA, voting records, and biometric data which could track immigrants. The Washington Post reported that ICE and DOGE were seeking access to Medicare data.
On Wednesday, 404 Media reported ICE paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars for “complete target analysis of known populations.” A day later, 404 Media reported that Palantir recently engaged in a three-week sprint and is now working on a six month project with ICE “concentrated on delivering prototype capabilities,” according to a leak of internal Palantir Slacks and other messages. ICE published a document about that same development effort, called ImmigrationOS.
Those leaked Palantir messages said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE, developed its own in-house system called RAVEn, before coming back to Palantir in late 2024 after that project failed. In the new document obtained by 404 Media, it says officials access the ATrac tool through RAVEn. A privacy impact assessment published by the Department of Homeland Security in March says RAVEn “will not replace ICE’s traditional criminal investigatory case management systems. Rather, RAVEn will primarily perform large, complex analytical projects at HSI.”
It was a good week for the Fox Mulders among us. We want to believe, and a new study has given us some empirical grist along those lines. I shall say no more, and let the giant planet K2-18b speak for itself.
Next, remember the time that Earth partied so hard that the Northern Lights showed up in the Sahara and humans had to invent sunscreen? Hahaha…our planet just DGAF sometimes. Then, the Perseus cluster thought it could get away with eating a subcluster, but we have the EVIDENCE. Last, dino-walk with me.
“It’s Never Aliens”...Oh Shoot, This Time It Actually Might Be Aliens
Scientists have reported some of the most compelling evidence for extraterrestrial life ever identified, teasing what would be the most anticipated scientific breakthrough in history.
The possibly life-bearing world in question is K2-18b, a giant planet about eight or nine times as massive as Earth located about 124 light years away. It belongs to a tantalizing class of “Hycean” planets that may host global liquid water oceans under thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
K2-18b has attracted a lot of interest in recent years because water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane have been detected in its skies at concentrations that hint at the presence of life. That said, planets can bake up those compounds in all kinds of ways that don’t involve beasties. That’s why scientists decided to put this world into the sights of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most sensitive observatory ever, to see if they could find anything more concrete.
Webb delivered by confirming the presence of dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) and dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—compounds that are concocted by microbes here on Earth— in the skies of K2-18b. It’s not yet an alien slam dunk, because there are a few abiotic processes that also can make this stuff. But there are simply fewer ways to explain their sustained presence in a planet’s skies without invoking biological processes, compared to water, carbon dioxide, or methane.
“We present a mid-infrared transmission spectrum of K2-18b with JWST, the first for a habitable-zone exoplanet,” said researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge. “The spectrum shows multiple spectral features…that are best explained by a combination of DMDS and DMS in the atmosphere, both molecules uniquely produced by life on Earth and predicted as promising biosignatures in habitable exoplanets.”
DMDS and DMS are largely produced by marine microbes, such as phytoplankton. It’s alluring to envision a massive ocean world blushing with colorful microbial blooms as it orbits its red dwarf star, just 124 light years away (an immense distance for humans, but just down the street on galactic scales).
Still, the team emphasized that abiotic sources of these compounds should be rigorously explored, and noted that they can be found on barren comets in our own solar system. It’s possible that similar comets in the K2-18 system may have recently crashed into this massive world, producing some transient signatures captured by Webb, though it would be a bit of a coincidence. Future observations may distinguish the likely sources of the compounds, and perhaps find even more signs of life (or signs of not-life).
Humans have often imagined our “first contact” moment with aliens as irrefutable. We receive an unambiguously artificial transmission. An ancient alien artifact is unearthed from a nearby planet. Aliens straight-up show up on Earth to invade or enlighten us.
But it seems much more likely that this vexing mystery—is life on Earth a fluke or the norm?—will be constrained through a slow and grinding probabilistic framework. We may never conclusively determine if K2-18b hosts life; the best we might get is a gradient of more to less probable. As scientists accumulate reams of data from other planets, we will get a lot more smoke signals but may never find an actual smoking gun.
“Overall, our findings present an important step forward in the search for signatures of life on exoplanets,” according to the study. “However, robustly establishing both the veracity of the present findings and their possible association with life on K2-18 b needs a dedicated community effort in multiple directions—observational, theoretical, and experimental.”
“The central question now is whether we are prepared to identify the signatures of life on such worlds,” the team concluded. “The opportunity is at our doorstep.”
Even Mother Earth, the one world that we know hosts life, can be a bit of a chaotic parent at times. For instance, our planet went on a little bender about 41,000 years ago, called the Laschamps geomagnetic excursion, in which it temporarily lost its magnetic bearings for about 2,000 years.
As the magnetic poles shifted from the geographic poles, Earth’s magnetic shield was reduced to 10 percent of its strength, exposing everything on its surface to a flood of cosmic radiation. The excursion also caused auroras to become unmoored from the poles, thereby drifting to lower latitudes and causing the Northern Lights to dance over the Sahara.
This bizarre episode may have inspired our human ancestors to invent sunscreen out of ochre and develop tailored clothing to avoid radiation exposure, according to a new study. The work also suggests that Neanderthals may have failed to adapt to the changes, perhaps contributing to their extinction around the same time as the Laschamps excursion.
Ochre shows “increased frequency in archaeological sites dating to the peri-Laschamps” which “could be due in part to its use as a sunscreen” by anatomically modern humans (AMH), said researchers led by Agnit Mukhopadhyay of the University of Michigan.
“Although both Neanderthals and contemporary AMH produced technologies associated with clothing manufacture, only AMH appear to have produced technologies consistent with the manufacture of tailored clothing; Neanderthals are assumed to have produced only relatively simple, draped clothing (e.g., capes)...Neanderthals’ decline was almost certainly multifactorial, but it is possible that topical sunscreens and tailored clothing provided AMH essential photoprotection and access to resources in places and at times they would otherwise have been inaccessible” which may have been “a competitive advantage.”
First of all, we need to bring back Neanderthal capes. They have been out of fashion for 41,000 years, so a revival is frankly overdue. Second, it would be wild if humans outlived Neanderthals in part because we wore sunscreen. Has there ever been a better advertisement for Big SPF?
But that is only the skin-deep part of this cool and expansive study, which also speculated that the excursion may have inspired new forms of art and music. “Others have noted co-occurrence of the Laschamps with the earliest known representational cave art—which depicts animals, anthropomorphs, and other figures or scenes, as opposed to abstract marks or designs—including images of animals,” the team said. “To this, we add that the Laschamps event coincides with early examples of portable art and musical instruments.”
The researchers also warned that if the same event happened today, we would be up a magnetic creek without a paddle. “Considering the probable impact of the Laschamps excursion on early humans and their way of life, a similar event today would likely have dire consequences for modern humans,” the team noted. “The ramifications of a Laschamps-like magnetospheric configuration and auroral oval would reverberate across all facets of modern communication, satellite infrastructure, and intercontinental travel.”
I know, I know, you really needed one more thing to worry about. You had so many wonderful worries, but to fill out your collection, I present you with this one about Earth’s magnetic field shutting down for a millennium or two. No geomagnetic excursions are imminent, according to the study, but it will eventually happen again, so something to be aware of, I guess.
In the meantime, honor your ancestors by wearing sunscreen!
We’ll now zoom out from planetary scales all the way up to the mind-detonating expanse of the Perseus Cluster, one of the most massive objects in the known universe. This thing is just a lot of galaxies—at least 1,000, probably a lot more—that are all gravitationally jostling around each other some 240 million light years from Earth.
Based on its dynamics, it looks like the cluster ate a smaller “subcluster” in the past as part of a “major merger.” But until now, scientists have not been able to track down the companion that was absorbed into the Perseus whole, which is a missing piece that has really been bugging them.
The Perseus cluster is about 11 million light years wide. Image: VLA-Radio, Chandra-X-ray, Hubble-Visible, SDSS-Infrared
“Although the Perseus cluster has often been regarded as an archetypical relaxed galaxy cluster, several lines of evidence ...suggest that the cluster might have experienced a major merger,” said researchers led by Kim HyeongHan of Yonsei University. (I also identify as an “archetypical relaxed” entity).
“However, the absence of a clear merging companion identified so far hampers our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster consistent with these observational features,” the team said.
We simply must not be hampered in our understanding of the evolutionary track of the Perseus cluster. To that end, the team used weak lensing, an observational technique based on gravitational distortions, to locate the swallowed companion.
Well, everyone: We got ‘em. “Here, through careful weak-lensing analysis, we successfully identified the missing subcluster halo,” which is located about 430 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light years) west of the Perseus main cluster core,” the team said. “This discovery resolves the long-standing puzzle of Perseus’s dynamical state.”
And to think, Perseus would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling weak lenses. Another cosmic cold case closed.
Slap a “Coexist” Bumper Sticker on These Armoured Dinosaurs
We’ll close by walking in the footsteps of an ankylosaurus, the dinosaurian equivalent of a tank. Some 100 million years ago, these giant armored dinosaurs left footprints in what is now the Canadian Rockies, which paleontologists have identified as the only known ankylosaurid ankylosaur tracks in the world.
The name “ankylosaurid ankylosaur” may seem a bit redundant, but it exists because there is such a thing as—you guessed it—a non-ankylosaurid ankylosaur (also known as a nodosaurid). These two major ankylosaur lineages differed in many ways, including in the number of digits on their hind feet (ankylosaurids had three, nodosaurids had four).
Paleontologists had previously identified the footprints of Tetrapodosaurus borealis, the four-toed variety, in mid-Cretaceous trackways near the town of Tumbler Ridge, in British Columbia, and at Dunvegan Bridge, Alberta. Now, a team has pinpointed the tell-tale “tridactyl” prints of an ankylosaurid ankylosaur representing a new species, named Ruopodosaurus clava.
“This new taxon is currently known exclusively from the Cenomanian of northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta, and provides confirmation that ankylosaurid ankylosaurs were present in North America prior to the Campanian–Maastrichtian,” said researchers led by Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum. “Ruopodosaurusclava is found in the same localities and deposits as Tetrapodosaurus borealis, indicating that both ankylosaurid and non-ankylosaurid ankylosaurs co-existed in the mid Cretaceous of the Peace Region.”
Co-existence between giant armoured dinosaurs in a place now named the Peace Region? The reality simulation writers did well with this one.
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 Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television.
JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about how our Palantir leak story came about, Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People, because I think it shows the value of just hammering on a broader story, finding a way in, then getting more and more specifics on it.
It really starts with Jason’s story on April 9 called Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People. This was about ICE’s tool called the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. The tool was not new. It had been around for multiple years and other outlets had covered it. What was new was that we got to see actual parts of the database. This provided an opportunity for us to cover it in new, specific detail.
We're excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can do to fight back against it.
Here's the panel:
It's better with the video, because there are some visual aids, but we also released an audio-only version of this on our podcast feed:
This was our first big live event, and we hope to do more in the future. If you're throwing a conference or event, hit us up! We had a wonderful time talking about AI spam, labor, and the future of the internet. Thanks to everyone who came out to meet and party with us.
This panel was held at Speakeasy in Austin, Texas at SXSW on March 10, 2025. Thanks to our friends at Flipboard for giving us the space and to DeleteMe for sponsoring the event.
SPONSORED
This segment is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, let's talk.
A judge in Nevada has ruled that “tower dumps”—the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers—is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search.
Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbers and personal information of every single phone connected to a tower during a set time period. Depending on the area, these tower dumps can return tens of thousands of numbers.
Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they’re not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they’re sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location.
A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.
U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”
Du argued that the officers acted in good faith when they filed the warrant and that they didn’t know the search was unconstitutional when they conducted it. According to Du, the warrant wasn’t unconstitutional when a judge issued it.
Du’s ruling is the first time the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, but this isn’t the first time a federal judge has weighed in. One in Mississippi came to the same conclusion in February. A few weeks later, the Department of Justice appealed the ruling.
There’s a decent chance that one of these cases will wind its way up to the Supreme Court and that SCOTUS will have to make a ruling about tower dumps. The last time the issue was in front of them, they kicked the can back to the lower courts.
In 2018, the Supreme Court considered Carpenter v. United States, a case where the FBI used cell phone location data to investigate a series of robberies. The Court decided that law enforcement agencies violate the Fourth Amendment when they ask for cell phone location data without a warrant. But the ruling was narrow and the Court declined to rule on the issue of tower dumps.
According to the court records for Spurlock’s case, the tower dump that caught him captured the private data of 1,686 users. An expert who testified before the court about the dump noted that “the wireless company users whose phones showed up in the tower dump data did not opt in to sharing their location with their wireless provider, and indeed, could not opt out from appearing in the type of records received in response to [the] warrant.”
Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media.
The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda. The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE.
“Hey all, wanted to provide a quick update on our work with ICE,” Akash Jain, the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir Technologies and President of Palantir USG, wrote in a Slack message several days ago. “Over the last few weeks we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflows with ICE.”
💡
Do you work at Palantir? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at [email protected].
“The new administration’s focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated those efforts,” Jain wrote.
A page of an internal Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media says Palantir participated in a three-week sprint, where developers rapidly work on new projects, with Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) Innovation Lab, which is the agency’s centralized hub for developing new advanced analytics capabilities and tools. The primary focus of that sprint was providing immigration agents with “improved awareness about the criminality and location of individuals who have already received a final order of removal,” the wiki says.
This article was produced with support from WIRED. This reporting was also the product of dozens of public records requests.
📄
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.
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests.
Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.
A screenshot from a Massive Blue presentation to the Texas Department of Public Safety, obtained using a public records request.
Massive Blue lists “border security,” “school safety,” and stopping “human trafficking” among Overwatch’s use cases. The technology—which as of last summer had not led to any known arrests—demonstrates the types of social media monitoring and undercover tools private companies are pitching to police and border agents. Concerns about tools like Massive Blue have taken on new urgency considering that the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of students, many of whom have protested against Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Los Angeles Police Department obtained video footage from a Waymo driverless car as part of its investigation into a hit-and-run in which a separate, human-driven car hit a pedestrian.
The LAPD published the footage, which has a note on it that reads “Waymo Confidential Commercial Information,” on its YouTube page to ask the public for help identifying the driver of the vehicle. The short clip shows what video footage that law enforcement requests from Waymo looks like.
The situation shows that police in Los Angeles are now looking at Waymo robotaxis as potential sources of surveillance footage to investigate crimes that the vehicles’ cameras and sensors may have witnessed. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that police in both San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, had issued search warrants for Waymo footage. Police have also requested footage from Teslas, extremely pervasive Ring cameras, and Cruise autonomous vehicles.
Waymo is rapidly expanding in Los Angeles; anecdotally, I see many Waymos driving around town every day, and the company just announced that the autonomous vehicles have expanded the geographic region in which they would operate in the city and that it would soon begin testing them on Los Angeles freeways. The proliferation of Waymo cars also means the proliferation of roving surveillance cameras. LAPD has shown an interest in obtaining footage from autonomous vehicles that operate in the city; last year we reported on a case in which the LAPD obtained footage from an autonomous food delivery robot to investigate a crime.
A Waymo spokesperson told 404 Media that it does not proactively give footage to police.
“Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order. These requests are often the result of eyewitnesses or other video footage that identifies a Waymo vehicle at the scene,” the spokesperson said. “We carefully review each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws and is legally valid. We also analyze the requested data or information, to ensure it is tailored to the specific subject of the warrant. We will narrow the data provided if a request is overbroad, and in some cases, object to producing any information at all.”
Waymo’s website explains that it conducts training sessions for law enforcement and emergency responders, which is designed to teach them about Waymo and explains what they should do in case they are responding to a car crash or other emergency involving a Waymo. The page says it had “conducted in-person training for 18,000+ first responders at 75+ agencies.”
The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
As part of the company's months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at Wordpress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media.
Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic's P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site’s white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it.
💡
Do you know work at Automattic and have insights to share? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee’s loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people.
Many companies provide this kind of forensic watermarking for internal communications. In 2023, one watermarking startup raised $10 million. Apple and Tesla reportedly have watermarking practices for emails and other internal comms, and some game developers add watermarks to game files to catch pre-release leaks.
It’s not clear when the watermarks started appearing on P2, and Automattic has not responded to a request for comment. But Mullenweg has been warring with web hosting platform WP Engine—and as the story has developed, seemingly with his own staff—since last year.
Mullenweg started publicly accusing WP Engine of misusing the WordPress brand and not contributing enough to the open-source community in September. WP Engine sent Mullenweg a cease and desist demanding he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” and he sent one back then banned WP Engine from using WordPress’ resources. Contributors to the open-source Wordpress project said they’d been kicked out of community Slack workspaces for criticizing or questioning Mullenweg’s actions. Meanwhile, Mullenweg added a required loyalty-pledge checkbox to the Wordpress.org login page demanding contributors denounce WP Engine; a judge told him he had to remove the box as part of the ongoing trial, and he replaced it with a checkbox that said “pineapple is delicious on pizza.”
Automattic employees I spoke to at the time of the October buyout offers told me that this ultimatum meant two kinds of employees: Mullenweg’s strongest supporters, and people who couldn’t afford to risk leaving their jobs. "Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one employee told me.
“159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!” Mullenweg wrote in a blog post following the offer. A few weeks later, he offered another buyout window. He wrote in internal Slack messages seen by 404 Media: “New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge” So many people took him up on the combined offers that the company was “very short staffed,” he said.
Just six months later, in early April, Automattic laid off 16% of its staff—reportedly almost 300 people. Multiple people with knowledge of the severance packages offered to laid-off Automatticians told me that some employees, regardless of time spent at the company, received just nine weeks of pay.
One Automattic employee told me they don’t think anyone is shocked by the watermarking, considering Mullenweg’s ongoing campaign to find leakers, but that it’s still adding to the uncertain, demoralized environment at the company. “Can't help but feel even more paranoid now,” they said.
Update: after the publication of this article, 404 Media obtained leaked material further detailing Palantir's work with ICE. You can read that coverage here.
Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.
At the same time, Palantir is running adverts at U.S. colleges which say “a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built—and why. We did.”
💡
Do you work at Palantir? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at [email protected].
“As a whole, extending Palantir's services with intentionally vague corporate-speak phrasing coupled with ICE's recent public escalation of violating people's rights via harassment, deportation without a basis, and terrorizing immigrants paints a clear picture: Palantir's engagement with ICE is facilitating and enabling abuses and violation of rights—rights like due process which, I want to note, extend to all in the US, regardless of citizenship status,” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told 404 Media in an email after reviewing screenshots of the records.
This week we start with a couple of Jason and Joseph's stories about the tool ICE uses to lookup an incredible amount of information about people. After the break, Joseph explains how he tested an AI service that calls your parents in case you can't be bothered. In the subscribers-only section, our new regular contributor Matthew Gault tells us all about the hack of 4chan and how we got here.
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.
When I walked into the Shrine of the Renunciation in Assisi, I thought about going to my friends’ houses in high school to play Xbox, and how bizarre it would be if one of those teenagers became a saint. What if the kid from down the cul-de-sac died, and they put his face on keychains, fridge magnets, and rosaries, and people stood in line to see his dead body through glass?
I was there to see Carlo Acutis, the first Millennial Saint, who was born in 1991 and died at 15 years old of leukemia in 2006. By all accounts, he was a fairly normal—if not unusually pious—teenager. He reportedly knew Javascript and C++, tinkered with 3D rendering in Maya, and playedHalo, Super Mario and Pokémon games. His mom said he bought a Playstation when he was eight. Notably, Halo was Xbox-exclusive, making this an inconsistency in the narrative of Acutis’ life (but whose mom didn’t call every gaming console “the Sony” or some other wildly incorrect catchall). He’s been called the “gamer saint,” but only gamed about an hour a week, wary of getting too hooked on gaming. He used his programming skills to make websites for volunteer projects and documenting historical miracles.
He was a kid, and now his body is coated in wax and dressed in a red track jacket, jeans, and Nikes and lies in a church in a tiny Italian hill town where people arrive on tour buses to kiss their fingers and touch the glass next to his head of thick black hair.
📹VIDEO | The body of Blessed Carlo Acutis is exposed in Assisi, Italy, and even though authorities within the Catholic Church have said the body is not incorrupt, his almost intact appearance is astounding. Future Saint Carlo Acutis, pray for us! pic.twitter.com/97I0BTq97K
Standing in a short line to get a look at Acutis, people snapped sneaky photos on their phones in front of a “NO PHOTOS” sign. A group of old women sat against the wall in front of the tomb, gazing at his waxy face and soaking up as much Blessedness as possible. Most milled past with a short pause near his reposed head to clutch a rosary or do a half-kneel. I stopped long enough to gawk then moved to the pews and copied a messy sign of the cross from other worshippers as a midday service began.
I went into my own off-books pilgrimage knowing almost nothing about Catholic sainthood. I was in nearby Perugia, Italy for the International Journalism Festival and decided to take the train out on a day trip to Assisi, to see the “Patron Saint of the Internet” in person. But having spent a lot of time in youth groups in a variety of Protestant flavors, I do know an attempt to make the church Cool when I see one.
Among religious groups, Catholics are experiencing one of the largest recent declines in church attendance in the U.S., from 45 percent to 33 percent in the last two decades. Meanwhile, the share of Amercans without any religious affiliation is up by a lot: nine percent in 2000-2003 versus 21 percent in 2021-2023. This, of course, is a big problem for the Catholic church: The median age of Catholic adults in the U.S. is 49 years old, according to Pew Research Center, four years older than in 2007. Only 17 percent are under 30 years old. Members = money in most religions, and young members mean the money keeps flowing through generations.
Add to this the Catholic Church’s ongoing image crisis, with hundreds of clergy credibly accused of child sex abuse; meanwhile, the Washington State Catholic Conference is opposing new legislation that would require clergy in the state to report sexual abuse if it’s disclosed to them in confessionals, with Republican legislators calling it “an attack” on Catholisim.
In comes the Millennial Saint, a relatable example of piety and discernment for modern youths. Before him, the most recently-canonized saints lived and died in the 1800s. Acutis is different: He had a phone! He made websites about miracles! He wore sneakers! He’s “God’s influencer.” Supplicants see him as somehow both approachably normal and extraordinarily devout. He was reportedly “uninterested in the trappings common for a wealthy child in Milan,” asking his parents to donate the money they would have spent on more designer sneakers to the poor and skipping ski trips to teach catechism instead. Having been a pious little Christian teen myself, I can definitely relate.
Blessed Carlo Acutis, pray for us!
This is the first time that a contemporary saint is dressed with Nike shoes, jeans, and a sweater. Cool? Yes. But it tells us that the call to holiness is never ever only reserved to the ones in the convents but to all...yes, even to geeks! pic.twitter.com/vDcrmqTEHD
The campaign for Acutis the Influencer seems to be working, based on the sheer SEO power of the news of Acutis’s sainthood and the number of people asking questions, writing blog posts, and making the pilgrimage to see his tomb. Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend Acutis’ canonization service in Rome later this month—thousands of which, it’s safe to assume, will be there on Catholic high school field trips. For those who can’t make the trip, there are screenings of the Eternal Word Television Network’s film Roadmap to Reality, a documentary about teenagers visiting Acutis’ tomb but also serves as a warning about the ills of technology.
“In a world losing itself to screens, teenage mystic Carlo Acutis saw beyond the social media-addicted society we live in and offered an answer… if we’re willing to listen,” the filmmakers wrote on the documentary’s website. “Carlo emphasized that the Eucharist, with its real presence and physical communion, serves as a critical anchoring reality. This idea starkly contrasts the often isolating and superficial interactions fostered by digital technology.”
Coincidentally, technology is bedeviling Acutis’ early days as a saint. On eBay, people are selling what they claim to be his “relics,” tiny pieces of a saint’s body. One anonymous seller was selling “supposedly authenticated locks of Acutis’ hair that were fetching upward of 2,000 euros ($2,200 US), according to the Diocese of Assisi, before being taken down,” the AP reported. “It’s not just despicable, but it’s also a sin,” one reverend who has a tiny fragment of Acutis’ hair in a chapel by his office told the AP. “Every kind of commerce over faith is a sin.”
There is a lot of non-relic commerce happening at the Shrine of the Renunciation, however. It’s free to enter the church, but there is a gift shop around the corner at the exit.
Photos from the gift shop and church where Acutis' body is held in Assisi. Photo credit: 404 Media
There’s also a lot of online debate about the status of the Gamer Saint’s body. Redditors from r/funeraldirectors to r/Catholicism have been asking about his appearance in the big glass coffin.
“I don’t know man. I’ve pulled off some good embalmings in my career but nothing ever looked as good as this. I can’t explain it,” one funeral director wrote. After I saw him IRL, I was similarly confused. I’ve seen embalmed people, but this wasn’t an embalming. He looks like a mannequin. His folded hands are flat and plasticky. His face is super-smooth and all one color. This is because when he was exhumed in 2019, 13 years after his death, his body showed the “normal process of decay,” the bishop who oversaw the exhumation said, so they covered it in a layer of wax.
From what I understand of sainthood and the bureaucratic process of canonization, it’s pretty hard to become one, and that process often involves getting dug up and moved around. Would-be saints are sometimes exhumed after the local Bishop and the Vatican approve the investigation into their saint-worthiness, because checking out the state of decay is part of it (as is making relics, like the hair on eBay). A body found “incorrupt” means it’s resisted normal decay (allegedly; these exhumations are not exactly open to the public, so we’re relying on the testimony of clergy who were there) while “integral” means the whole body remains but—as I understand it—did not exactly look tomb-display read. Acutis’ body was “reassembled with art and love,” the bishop said.
The legacy of the Patron Saint of the Internet isn’t immune to fake news, either. A priest in Brazil claimed Acutis’ body was incorrupt in a Facebook post, but later deleted it and backtracked.
Having paid my respects, botched a sign of the cross, and bought a magnet for the fridge, I left the Shrine of the Renunciation feeling like I’d just witnessed something stranger than miracles or incorrupt death. A tradition started more than a thousand years ago is brushing roughly up against the 21st century, complete with a livestream where you can submit your intentions at a link in the description. Saint Acutis arrives at a time when young people are being aggressively sold a “trad” lifestyle and leaders with right-wing, Christian agendas are calling the shots from the highest offices. For the Catholic church, the timing might be perfect.
If he hadn’t died young, Acutis would be around my age today, and would probably be a front-end software engineer or a priest who was really good at running the parish Instagram account, or any number of more boring things than venerated saint. And if the church didn’t need an influencer, I wouldn’t be standing in the afternoon sun on the stone streets of Assisi, wondering what we’ll say about the next generation of saints—some of the only people in history whose legacies are preserved across centuries for the encouragement and recruitment of future generations, to a church desperate to have them.
The notorious imageboard 4chan is down following what appears to be a major hack of its backend. The hackers claim to have exposed code for the site, the emails of moderators, and a list of mod communications. This happened, it seems, as part of a five year long, inter-image board beef between users of 4chan and Soyjak, another image board that splintered off of 4chan.
It’s still unclear what the fallout of the hack will be, but the notorious image board remains down and a huge amount of data appears to have been leaked.
Users struggled to load 4chan on the evening of April 14, 2025, according to posts on other imageboards and forums. A few hours before that, the banned board /qa/ reappeared on the site and someone using the hiroyuki account, named after 4chan’s owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, posted “FUCKING LMAO” and “U GOT HACKED XD.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors.
The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the Freedom of Information Act and are more up to date.
“Fivecast ONYX supports the collection of publicly available, internet-based content in near real-time, quickly organizing the content to facilitate analysis and the surfacing of risks and threats against the homeland to enhance CBP tactical targeting, analysis and vetting capabilities while at the same time supporting CBP’s strategic counter-network analysis,” one of the documents says, referring to the Australian intelligence company Fivecast. CBP also published documents about Dataminr, another social media monitoring company.
None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a “Post-AGI” world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the “profound impact” that technology will have on society.
“Spearhead research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains such as economics, law, health/wellbeing, AGI to ASI [artificial superintelligence], machine consciousness, and education,” Google says in the first item on a list of key responsibilities for the job. Artificial superintelligence refers to a hypothetical form of AI that is smarter than the smartest human in all domains. This is self explanatory, but just to be clear, when Google refers to “machine consciousness” it’s referring to the science fiction idea of a sentient machine.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and other major and minor players in the AI industry are all working on AGI and have previously talked about the likelihood of humanity achieving AGI, when that might happen, and what the consequences might be, but the Google job listing shows that companies are now taking concrete steps for what comes after, or are at least are continuing to signal that they believe it can be achieved.
Part of the problem is that AGI is a loosely defined term and goal. According to The Information, a 2023 document from OpenAI and Microsoft defined AGI as an AI system that can generate up to $100 billion in profit, which seems entirely removed from any scientific benchmark. Earlier this year, Altman wrote that OpenAI is confident it knows how to build AGI “as we have traditionally understood it” and that the company believes that in 2025 we’ll see the first AI agents “join the workforce.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later downplayed this type of AGI definition, saying “Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me.”
As other critics have previously pointedout, AGI and the massive impact it could theoretically have on society is also a useful marketing strategy for AI companies, allowing them to hype up their value based on something that may or may not happen in the future, while distracting from the actual problems and harm their AI system are actively causing as they exist.
Google’s job listing appears to prepare the company for the most ambitious, science fiction-y interpretation of AGI. Other key responsibilities for the job include “research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains such as economics, law, health/wellbeing, AGI to ASI, machine consciousness, and education,” conducting “in-depth studies to analyze AGI's societal impacts across key domains,” and building “infrastructure and evaluation frameworks for a systematic evaluation of AI's societal effects.”
The job listing comes shortly after Deepmind published a report in early April about “taking a responsible path to AGI.” The report, which states that “AI that’s at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks, could be here within the coming years,” details how Google is “taking a systematic and comprehensive approach to AGI safety, exploring four main risk areas: misuse, misalignment, accidents, and structural risks, with a deeper focus on misuse and misalignment.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Hollywood sign was on fire; or at least, it was online. Those images and videos were fake and AI-generated. Maybe you already knew this. But people made money off of them, anyway.
At the beginning of January, the Instagram account FutureRiderUS was posting AI videos of a motorcycle riding through futuristic landscapes – hence the name. Those videos usually would get anywhere from 20k to 30k views. But then, the fires started.
The next day, FutureRiderUS posted its own flaming Hollywood sign video. That one got a million views.
Next, they posted another AI video, this one focusing on firefighters rescuing baby animals.
23 million views on that one. 78,000 comments, 2.5 million likes.
How much money did they make? It's hard to say exactly, but we can estimate.
Instagram pays people through programs where creators earn money based on how many views their Reels receive. The more viral a video, the longer users stay on the app, which allows Instagram to show more ads. Instagram then passes on some of the profit to the creator. How much? Meta doesn’t publish those numbers, and it varies depending on the audience that is looking at them. But I asked a few influencers, and the recent rate seems to be around $100~$120 per million views. Jason’s reporting shows that Facebook was paid out a few hundred dollars for single viral AI generated images, and Meta has paid out more than $2 billion through programs like Ads on Reels.
Just look at FutureRiderUS’s most popular posts from a roughly 24 hour stretch starting Jan 10:1m + 24m + 6m + 6m + 45m + 4m + 8m ≈ 94 million views.
That’s 94 million views, from typing in some prompts. Conservatively, this is likely worth thousands of dollars. Not a bad day’s work.
After that initial hit, FutureRiderUS started experimenting with different combinations of LA fire-themed AI slop, refining as they go. At first, their focus was on the firefighters holding baby animals. When the views on these started slowing down, the account shifted to videos showing animals running from fire; no firefighters needed. One features a swan bleeding out onto a freeway, with no visible fire at all.
It’s obvious what is going on here: FutureRiderUS realized that animals are a reliable attention-getter, but they’re experimenting to see which combination is the most profitable. They’re A/B testing the AI slop to see what sticks.
When I say ‘slop,’ by the way, I partially mean that in a literal sense. In the most popular video, a man is inexplicably exuding smoke from under his jacket as he cradles an owl. Another firefighter, instead of saving a raccoon, instead appears to nudge it back into the flames. It’s sloppy.
Still, a lot of people seem to be genuinely unaware that these images are fake. Some people can tell, and have commented angrily or jokingly about it. (A third group: people who are initially fooled, but when another commenter tells them it’s fake, they get annoyed, saying that they appreciate seeing images of heroic firefighters or vulnerable animals, even if those specific ones are not real.)
FutureRiderUS has addressed this, sort of.
In the comments section of their most viral post (45 million views) featuring a firefighter carrying two baby bears to safety, they posted a response to angry commenters. Three days after the initial post, they commented, admitting that the post is AI-generated. They said, in part: (emphasis mine):
“In this video, I aimed to shed light on the reality of what is happening. These problems are very real—animals are dying, homes are being destroyed, and firefighters are risking their lives to save others. They don’t have the time to produce visually stunning and powerful footage to raise awareness about these issues. That’s why I took the initiative to create something that could help people see and truly think about these tragedies. […]
Through art, even when created by AI, we can evoke emotions, raise awareness, and inspire change.”
The logic of their argument seems to be this (my paraphrase):If I don't post these provocative images, nobody will care about the brave firefighters or the people who lost their homes.
This sort of defensive, it-doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake stance is something that we are starting to notice more, as it’s used to justify the posting (and monetization) of everything from Palestinians to flood victims. But we shouldn’t lose track of the context: the main purpose of this account is to make money. It says so right on the page.
On January 18th, as the fires were still burning, FutureRiderUS posted a Reel advertising their $19.99 course on how to create viral content online by posting AI videos: “Earn $5000 a Month with Viral Videos - Zero Experience Needed - Start Today and Watch Your Life Change.”
To be clear, the man in the video above isn’t FutureRiderUS - the voice and video are AI-generated.
The post also goes on to brag about how FutureRiderUS got 285 million views in one month. The post (as well as another earlier one) points viewers to the link in their bio, which takes you to the course that promises to teach you to replicate FutureRiderUS’ success. The landing page contains screenshots of the viral fire videos as proof of their virality.
From their ad copy:“This proves that anything is possible when you know how to create content that grabs attention.”
Again — this is about creating ‘content that grabs attention’.
Not ‘raising awareness.’ And for the account owner to suggest that they are motivated by something other than money seems disingenuous. There are no donation links, no mention of local organizations. Instead, the only call to action is to click the link to buy their viral video course.
I usually wouldn’t do this, but for journalism’s sake, I bought the course. The course contains two files. The first is a ten-page, wide-spaced PDF that is clearly ChatGPT-generated. If you’re curious, here’s a summary of the main points:
Look online for what is already trending at the moment
type that into Sora.ai to generate a similar video
add music, then post the video online
repeat multiple times a day
Nothing you couldn’t find online for free or perhaps guess yourself.Really the only unique parts of the guide are two rules it suggests: first, that you should clearly label the post as AI-generated. FutureRiderUS doesn’t seem to follow this rule, but more on that in a moment.
And then, it tells you to not spend too much time on any one video. “Just 30 minutes are enough to move from concept to final upload,” it advises. And to drive home this point, there’s the second file: an .mp4 that is just a screen recording of an iPhone going from prompt to upload in seven minutes.
You’re probably curious about who is behind the account. I was, too. So I asked them some questions via Instagram DM.
Here’s a summary of what they told me: They’re Russian, and they only started doing this in December. OpenAI’s Sora had been released that month, and they got an account and started posting AI videos. Success came pretty immediately. They proudly told me about their high follower count across multiple social media platforms, and how well their guide was selling. As they put it, ‘the results speak for themselves.’
When I started asking about their LA fire videos, they started to get annoyed. I pointed out that most commenters clearly didn’t understand it was AI. The ones who did seemed angry. FutureRiderUS said that they didn’t see the problem, because they had added an ‘AI’ label to their videos.
Here’s the thing: FutureRiderUS is right.
On all of the fake fire videos FutureRiderUS has uploaded, there is an ‘AI Info’ label. Not on the video itself, but in the Instagram interface. The trouble is that the label doesn’t show up when you’re watching the video normally. You can only see it if you tap the ‘See More’ tag, and even then, space is prioritized for the song title, so sometimes the tag is pushed off of the screen.2
I’ve actually already shown an example in this article. Scroll back up and look at the screenshots of the fake burning Hollywood sign that went viral. That tiny ‘A…’ in the bottom right. Did you notice it?
Below is the best-case scenario. The left image is what the 43-million view post looks like from the main grid; the center is what it looks like when you’re scrolling — this is where people spend most of their time. The right is what it looks like if you take the trouble to open the text description.
It says ‘AI Info’ in small text on the bottom right. Not ‘AI Warning’, not ‘AI Caution’. Just ‘AI Info.’
Why would you click this?
Meta has a page that makes a big deal about this tag. They primarily show what it looks like in the grid view. The issue is that it’s even more imperceptible there. Have a look at that ‘Los Angeles, California’ tag in the leftmost image above. Up in the top left, under the username. When you first look at the post in the grid, that’s what you see — the location tag. And then, the music title scrolls into view for a few moments. Only after that, the text ‘AI Info” appears. By that time, you’re watching the video, not looking at tiny text scrolls in the upper corner of your screen.
You have to either wait for 5.5 seconds (I timed it) for the ‘AI info’ to appear, or you have to search at the bottom of the screen.3
In our conversation, FutureRiderUS said that it isn’t the poster’s fault if people didn’t notice the interface AI tag: it was Instagram’s responsibility to make the tags bigger or more noticeable.
FutureRiderUS insisted that they are following the rules as written. As I spoke to them, I realized that they were probably correct. But just to make sure, I sent an email to Meta’s press department, asking if simply adding the ‘AI Info’ tag is enough.
I never got a response, but Meta has indicated to 404 Media and to the general public more broadly that it has no problem with this type of content and that it expects to see more AI-generated content on its platforms moving forward.
This all said, there are easy ways to make it clear that your post is not real. Some creators will do this by putting an #AI tag prominently at the beginning of the post, and then writing their caption below.
FutureRiderUS, in their own guide they sell to customers, suggests going further and actually writing it in the post itself. I sent them a quote from their own guide:
"Important: State that this content (or parts of it) is AI-generated (e.g., 'Created with AI' or 'AI-Generated Content')."
(The bolded ‘Important’ is in the original.)
This really seemed to annoy FutureRiderUS, and they accused me of harassment:
"Why should anyone pressure me or force me to do something beyond the established rules? I am following the platform’s guidelines, and anything beyond that crosses a line. This kind of behavior can be considered harassment, as it unfairly targets and imposes additional expectations on me that are not required by the platform."
If it’s not already obvious, everything FutureRiderUS wrote to me, as well as their captions and comments, is being copied and pasted from ChatGPT.
To be clear, I am not really interested in criticizing any one individual here. In the absence of stronger rules on Instagram, this just comes down to a question of ethics. I am free to believe that what FutureRiderUS is doing is not ethical; they are free to disagree, or at least pretend to.
But neither of our opinions matter, because of two facts: fake AI slop is profitable, and there are countless users doing the same thing. There’s absolutely nothing to stop them.
That is: the Instagram platform doesn’t just enable this behavior, it rewards it. So do other platforms. On Instagram and TikTok, FutureRiderUS’s top hits are from fake LA fires; on YouTube, it’s three-hour long Christmas music compilations with slop visuals of families shopping. None are clearly labeled. Disaster porn is just another kind of #content.
It doesn’t really matter what that content is: as long as it is ‘content that grabs attention,’ both sides can make money.
For the slop creator and the platform, this is a clear win-win, at least in the short term. The only loser here is the audience, who is unable to recognize slop when they see it.
There’s this thing that AI proponents like to say every time something new comes out: this is the worst it'll ever be. So far, they've been right, and they may well continue to be right. It’s hard to predict what happens next with AI, but I have one prediction I feel fairly comfortable making: unaided, most of us will always struggle to reliably recognize AI when we see it.
But it’s hard to blame us when two sides are conspiring against us: Instagram’s interface makes it almost impossible to tell, and creators are incentivized to lie by omission.
A few days after their viral successes, the viewcounts on FutureRiderUS’ fire content started to dwindle. The fires themselves were still burning in Los Angeles, but FutureRiderUS shifted focus. On January 14, as talks of a Gaza ceasefire started to circulate, the account anticipated interest in the trend, and made a post — as their viral video guide suggests.
This post is an AI slop collage of a Palestinian flag atop a spire, a woman crying as bodies and rubble lay in the street, children, bloody arms, doctors walking sideways. The caption is a vaguely worded, inoffensive block of text that says, in part, ‘This is not about taking sides, it’s about humanity.’
This move is completely obvious to anyone who follows FutureRiderUS’ viral video guide or honestly, any of the tons of books, articles, LinkedIn posts or videos by content creators who teach you how to make content and grow your account.
Again, it’s all about content. Content that grabs attention. Of course somebody was going to use those tools and strategies for something like this. As long as the platforms allow it and keep making money off of it there's no reason for it to stop.
FutureRiderUS had decided that the algorithmic juice had been squeezed out of Los Angeles. Moving on to Palestine content is just a business decision.
The Palestine post got a few comments, which are of the usual sort: heart emojis, crying emojis, someone musing about a world war. One of the commenters seems completely uninterested in Palestine, ‘humanity,’ or a ceasefire. Instead, they ask the real question:
if i join your courses, what i’ll get from the courses?
But after nearly a day, the Palestine video hadn’t even broken 10k views. It was a flop.
A few hours later, FutureRiderUS posted a video of a bear eating honey.
An AI startup promises to call your elderly parents for you if you don’t have time, or simply don’t want to, and we tested out the service.
Called inTouch, the service uses an AI generated voice so your parent receives a phone call in which they can talk to the AI about, for example, how their day is going, their hobbies, and how they’re feeling. An AI-generated summary of the conversation is then sent to the child or whoever setup the account, and includes a visual indicator of their state of mind, such as “bad mood” or “neutral mood.”
Obviously, the idea of having an AI call your lonely relative because you can’t or don’t feel like it is dystopian, insulting, and especially non-human, even more so than other AI-based creations. The creator, though, says it can provide a way to keep in touch with relatives and make sure they’re safe.
Whatever else you think of this past week, it sure served up some ridiculously good science. I’m talking about a real boffin buffet, with all the fixings. There were studies about trees spying on illegal mines. Or, an eerie rhino graveyard buried in ash 12 million years ago. Or, the first baby born from a remote and fully automated sperm injection. And those were all ones I had to regretfully leave in drafts, on account of the sheer scientific bounty.
For starters, there was a whole study this week predicated on what mariners have been writing in ship logs over the past 400 years. I’d have to turn myself into the authorities if I didn’t highlight it, for it would indeed be a crime.
Next, the universe is acting up again and refuses to conform to our meticulously curated models. I would tell the universe to go to its room, but it is the room. Then, crows continue to prove that “bird brain” is a compliment, actually. Last, take a few seconds for Uranus. No, I mean, literally.
It has happened again: A study has turned to historical documents to make scientific conclusions. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is one of the absolute best flavors of research because we all get treated to a bunch of old-timey accounts of weird phenomena—in this case, the entrancing spectacle of “milky seas.”
Milky seas are produced by bioluminescent bacteria that can transform the nighttime ocean into a glowing white veneer. For centuries, seafarers have marvelled at the eerie beauty of these surreal displays, which sometimes last for months and can cover areas of 100,000 square kilometers (about the size of Iceland).
“Milky seas are a rare, historically fabled form of marine bioluminescence” that is characterized by their steady, non-flashing, eponymous white glow,” said Justin Hudson and Steven Miller of Colorado State University. “Eyewitnesses have compared the experience of sailing through a milky sea to a snowy plain at night, the “Twilight Zone,” and even the biblical apocalypse.”
“Despite centuries of scientific research into milky seas very little is known about the physical and biogeochemical processes which govern their formation, longevity, and size,” the team continued. “Scientific inquiry into milky seas has historically been held back due to the paucity of data, and the remote, ephemeral nature of the phenomenon.”
You know what that means—time to hit the stacks! Hudson and Miller compiled a trove of eyewitness accounts, spanning the past 400 years, which they used to statistically examine “the relationship between milky seas globally and large-scale coupled atmosphere ocean phenomena…for the first time.”
Milky seas observed from space. Image: Colorado State University, CIRA, and NOAA
The science here is interesting on its own merits, as the team refined predictions about where and when milky seas are most likely to occur, and linked them to broader oceanic and climatic forces. The radiant displays, powered by the marine bacteria Vibrio harveyi, are influenced by the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and are commonly observed around the Arabian Sea and off the coast of Southeast Asia, according to the study.
“Given their spatial scale and biological nature, milky seas may represent a critically understudied large-scale movement of carbon and nutrients through the earth system, particularly so with bacteria playing a key role in the global carbon cycle both on land,” concluded the team.
But as with most studies in this category, the supplemental information is the star of the show. It’s such a treat to read through all these accounts of past mariners who found themselves on the decks of their vessels at night, looking out at a surreal seascape of milk, or snow, or silver.
“At a quarter before eight o’clock at night, a phenomenon appeared of the following nature, and to all on board of an unheard-of kind, which gave rise to transitory feelings of apprehension as to the vessel’s contiguity to danger,” wrote an observer in the log of the H. C. sloop Clive in August 1832. (Clive is an excellent boat name, by the way).
“Without any indication of a change in the elements, the ship was surrounder instanter (sic) by water as white as milk or snow,” continued the seafarer. “No line of horizon was visible; the dead white colour of the water close to the ship as it increased in distance from her very gradually brightened until, where I supposed the horizon to be, it assumed a silvery aspect, which increasing as it ascended became brilliant and dazzling towards the zenith, obscuring the stars and clouds which had before this visitation been distinctly visible.”
A similar tale unfolds over the course of dozens of collected entries. Some mariners threw fireballs into the ocean to literally test the waters, and many crews reported that tiny “animalcules” were seen under microscopes in buckets drawn up from the milky seas.
But the common theme across the centuries is an almost mystical quality to these encounters, which shines through (so to speak) in the ship logs.
“When looking into the sea at the height of the phenomenon, it was almost impossible to focus the eye and a slight feeling of vertigo was experienced,” noted an officer of the SS Ixion in a 1967 entry about a sighting in the Indian Ocean. “This eeriness could well have convinced the superstitious mariners of long ago that the ship would fall off the edge of the world during the night if navigated far from the shore.”
“It was like we were in the "Twilight Zone" and peering at a negative of the real world,” reported the crew of the USS O’Brien of a 1980 sighting near the Yemeni island of Socotra. “The seas were glowing with phosphorescence as far as you could see all around us…The phosphorescence was uniform and a bit lighter green or ‘whiter’ than the normal screw-generated green phosphorescence (kind of like the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars you can buy your kids). There were no breaks in the phosphorescence even with the waves.”
I recommend reading through some of the excerpts, which are filled with expressions of wonder, premonition, and good old-fashioned scientific curiosity. You gotta hand it to Earth. She knows how to put on a show.
Do These Lopsided Satellites Make Andromeda’s Butt Look Big?
The universe does not conform to our expectations. This is a common lament among cosmologists.
Over the past half-century, for instance, scientists across diverse fields have developed a framework called the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, that accounts for a lot of the weird stuff we see in space. But if you search “challenges to the standard model,” you will get roughly a bajillion hits, as observations of the real universe frequently clash with the predictions of the standard model.
One of the most interesting conflicts is the behavior of dwarf galaxies that orbit larger ones, such as Andromeda, which is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. The standard model, meanwhile, predicts that these satellite galaxies should be more or less isotropic in their distribution around their host, meaning that they should occupy a swarm of random orbits around a larger galaxy.
Andromeda. Image: Luc Viator
But in a new study, scientists found that Andromeda’s orbiters are weirdly clustered on one side. “All but one of Andromeda’s 37 satellite galaxies are contained within 107 degrees of our Galaxy,” said researchers led by Kosuke Jamie Kanehisa of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.
In other words, most of the orbiting galaxies are asymmetrically located on the side of Andromeda that faces the Milky Way. In standard cosmological simulations, this configuration is extremely rare, showing up in just 0.3 percent of cases. What gives?
The researchers speculate that the Milky Way might be exerting a tidal influence on Andromeda, thereby pulling its orbiters in our direction. But if this were true, you’d expect the satellites of the Milky Way to align in a similar asymmetry, given that Andromeda is about as massive as our own galaxy, yet there’s no evidence that this is the case.
“At present, no known formation mechanism can explain the collective asymmetry of the Andromeda system,” the team concluded.
You could ask the universe, but it’s just not very forthcoming about this kind of thing. Indeed, this is not the first time the movements of satellite galaxies have defied the standard model; I covered this eerie discrepancy a few years ago for Motherboard.
The discovery that Andromeda appears to be “an extreme outlier in the prevailing cosmological paradigm” is yet another sign that something is either wrong with a) the model, b) our observations, c) all of the above, or d) some other wild card that has yet to be identified. Place your bets.
It’s well-known that crows (and other corvids) are among the most intelligent animals on Earth. You can kind of intuit this fact just from looking a crow in the eye—they have that “clever girl” vibe to them—but studies have helpfully provided empirical evidence they are capable of tool use, abstract thinking, and epic grudges, among many other proficiencies.
It got one team of scientists thinking: can crows do geometry?
“Animals’ sensitivity to geometric regularity has been found to be notably limited; nonhuman primates do not recognize geometric regularity in tests involving the perception of visual shapes, whereas humans do,” said researchers led by Philipp Schmidbauer of the University of Tübingen. “This result led to the interpretation that the recognition of geometric regularity could constitute a uniquely human ability.”
As a rule, don’t call anything uniquely human until you’ve tried it on crows. To that end, the team presented two carrion crows (Corvus corone), aged 10 and 11 years old, with a touch-screen showing different assortments of shapes. For instance, a simple starter test displayed six non-quadrilateral shapes, such as five stars and one crescent moon. A tougher test mixed in quadrilaterals—such squares, trapezoids, rhombuses—with one irregular four-sided shape.
Crows were tasked with detecting the “intruder” shape, which they successfully did about half the time, a rate that is well over what would be expected by chance.
“Our results, showing that crows spontaneously recognize geometric regularity in visual shapes, contrast with those from a study involving monkeys that failed to discriminate quadrilateral stimuli based on geometric regularity” a finding that challenges “the idea that intuitive shape geometry is uniquely human,” the team concluded.
To paraphrase a legendary animated newsman: I, for one, welcome our crow overlords.
Last but not least, a day on Uranus just got 28 seconds longer. This is not because the planet has suddenly decided to slow down in mid-life, though it would be forgiven for the indulgence. Instead, the extra time is due to an update of its rotation period, which was measured by Voyager 2 in 1986.
Data collected during that flyby determined that the Uranian day is about 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds, give or take about a half-minute. On paper, this small margin of error for a giant planet located about two billion miles from Earth is not too shabby. But the slight imprecision has actually been bugging astronomers who study the planet for a while, prompting a lot of new rotational estimates over the years.
Now, scientists have refined the Uranian day to a whopping six decimal points by tracking the planet’s radiant auroras for more than a decade with the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Here we use the long-term tracking of Uranus’ magnetic poles between 2011 and 2022 from Hubble Space Telescope images of its ultraviolet aurorae to achieve an updated, independent, extremely precise rotation period of 17.247864 ± 0.000010 h, only consistent with the Voyager 2 estimate,” said researchers led by Laurent Lamy of the Observatoire de Paris.
This update brings the Uranian day to 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds, about 28 seconds longer than Voyager 2’s rotational estimate. The improved accuracy “will allow the reanalysis of the whole set of Uranus observations” and the novel approach “stands as a new method to determine the rotation rate of any object hosting a magnetosphere and a rotationally modulated aurorae, in our Solar System and beyond.”
We’re all in a Proustian search for lost time. Who could have guessed we’d end up finding it on Uranus?
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 economy and the state of 404 Media, the need for robot umpires, and bringing on a new regular contributor to the site.
EMANUEL: Something that I couldn’t help but think about a lot this week was how easily one of the worst parts of working at a big company like VICE was the regular layoffs. It’s been on my mind because a cruel aspect of the job was that whenever there was some kind of cataclysmic event in the economy—COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc—we had the unique pleasure of having to closely follow and cover news that could and often would ultimately result in members of our teams getting laid off.
We worked hard and did our jobs as best we could but we could also feel the axe about to fall, usually in the form of an email from upper management about “economic headwinds” or something like that, followed by a brutal day of slowly finding out who still had a job. Donald Trump’s tariffs and their manic fluctuating between total global trade war to more limited but still devastating focus on China, stocks taking a nosedive, companies announcing they’re going to stop doing some business in the US, and CEOs putting everything on hold until we’re out of this zone of “economic uncertainty,” put out strong “headwinds” vibes this week.
For the last week, several news outlets have published shocking headlines about a game called No Mercy on Steam that features incest and “rape.”
In the UK, Peter Kyle, a member of Parliament and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology described the game as “deeply worrying” and demanded Valve, which operates the PC’s leading digital game store Steam, take it down. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “Rape game available online for Australian Children.” Two organizations, Women in Games and Collective Shout, called on Valve to remove the game.
I downloaded and played No Mercy today for about 20 minutes. It’s crude, badly made, very boring, and about as pornographic as a seventh grader who is really good at drawing boobs. You click through endless lines of inane dialogue and eventually get to a point where two characters who look like stiff action figures of the same age are miming sex in a way that is barely recognizable as human. This is what many of the sex games on Steam look like, and the only reason you’ve heard about this one is that one of the characters is labeled “son” and the other is labeled as “mom.”
I understand how conceptually, in the way it is written out and pitched on Steam, No Mercy can sound highly offensive. That’s the point. But playing it makes clear that it’s not interesting or well made enough to follow on its own shocking pitch. It’s just shovelware, low quality games published in huge quantities in hopes of making a few bucks.
No Mercy is a visual novel, meaning it’s a kind of choose-your-own-adventure presented mostly with still or barely animated images made with crude 3D models that players click through to advance the story and occasionally make choices about how that story unfolds. With adult games, those choices usually result in some kind of sexual encounter that is also rendered with those crude 3D models. It’s a common type of game on Steam, and No Mercy differentiates itself by focusing on taboos.
“In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer,” the games Steam page reads. “Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?”
It’s a shocking way to pitch a game if porn tube site algorithms aren’t already serving you similar pornography, and doubly so if you haven’t kept up with Valve’s policy surrounding adult content on Steam, which is extremely permissive when compared to other platforms.
Valve’s current position is that pretty much anything goes when it comes to adult content. Users can easily choose not to have any of those games surfaced to them, and if they do, Steam does a good job of filtering that content out. If they choose to see that stuff, which I do, it’s all over the place, including the front page, game recommendations, and lists of new releases and best sellers, where at least one of these games is always featured.
Looking at my Steam account right now under the list of “popular upcoming” games, I see Office Affairs : Executive Decisions, an adult only visual novel with a an office romance angle, Saviour of the Wasteland, an adult only visual novel with post-apocalyptic/Fallout-y premise, and Lust’s Cupid, an adult only “pleasure simulator” with an anime aesthetic.
As PC Gamer helpfully keeps track, there were over 19,000 games released on Steam in 2024. A lot of those games are not good, and the list includes plenty of copycats, cheap asset flips, and shovelware. There are exceptions among Steam’s sex games, but the ratio there is even worse. There are a few formulas that developers in this space follow. There are games that basically use existing, well-known game mechanics like bullet hell and breakout-likes that reward players with some form of nudity, often furry or anime themed, and there are visual novels that usually follow porn genres and conventions, and are often rendered with cheap 3D graphics. Often, and especially in the latter category, these games have some kind of shocking, edgelord premise in an attempt to get players’ attention. For example, back in 2022 Sam and I played a Steam game called Sex with Hitler, which was a very bad top-down shooter/visual novel where, after a lot of very boring filler, you occasionally see a few images of having sex with Adolf Hitler. Most of these games barely rise above the level of the type of games advertised on porn sites that dare players “not to cum.”
No Mercy is just a more extreme example of what Valve has been allowing on Steam for years. I understand why people are upset that it’s on the platform, but at least Valve makes it easy to filter out those games if you don’t want to see them, something much bigger platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are terrible at, as we report on constantly. This is not to say that Valve is doing a great job of moderating its platform. I’ve been reporting on its problem with hate groups since 2017, which it still deals with today, and which there is no simple filter for as there is for adult content. Steam has also previously hosted games with an explicit connection to pick-up artists, the manosphere, and misogynist world views that are straight up marketed as instructions on how to talk to women in the real world, as opposed to the ridiculous fantasies included in No Mercy.
We’ve also reported on the adult industry for years, and there’s an infinite variety in genres and fetishes. Sexuality can be strange, funny, and weirdly specific, and because it is generally a suppressed aspect of the human condition, it’s often offensive to people.
Step-sister/step-brother porn is such a popular trope in pornography it’s become a punchline. There are more than 97,000 videos under Pornhub’s “Rough Sex” category. There are many things people get off to that other people find objectionable, but a good rule is that if the adult content is entirely consensual and is not hurting anyone, people should be able to engage with it if they wish.
Every platform decides the terms it’s going to allow, and then the people who make and play games, write ebooks, or make porn find whatever the edge is. Pornhub does not let users search for “rape,” and not all of the “rough sex” videos on Pornhub are rape fantasies, but some of them are. From what I’ve seen, No Mercy is like many other games that are on Steam but has successfully won the outrage lottery, allowing it to stand out from thousands of other games that are doing much the same thing.
