Large parts of the CDC’s website and several important databases were taken down on Friday and Saturday to comply with Trump’s executive orders banning DEI content. Saturday, a message at the top of the CDC’s home page said the website “is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

CDC websites and databases taken offline include the CDC Atlas, the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a CDC website about HIV treatment, and the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. Some of these removals were earlier reported by NBC News. Some of the pages were replaced with messages that read “Page Not Found or Temporarily Unavailable” or “The page you're looking for was not found.” There was widespread uncertainty throughout Friday as to whether a broader takedown across the government would happen.

“Our team’s government affairs firm is advising that as of 5pm today, all U.S. government agency websites will be taken down,” an internal email obtained by 404 Media earlier Friday read. “According to reports, agencies are unable to comply fast enough with President Trump’s EO ordering all government entities to remove all DEI references from their websites, so these websites will be taken offline. There is no word on when they will be made available again.”

At 5pm Friday, however, no widespread, cross-government takedowns happened. Throughout the day Friday and Saturday, however CDC pages continued to disappear. Saturday, a message at the top of the CDC’s website said “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

404 Media has reported on U.S. government pages about gender identity were taken down; that GitHub commits showed the Trump administration scrubbing government web pages in real time; and how archivists are working to save thousands of datasets disappearing from Data.gov.

Some federal contractors and federal employees spent much of Friday afternoon panicking about the deletions, and there was uncertainty about what would be taken offline and how widespread the takedowns would be. A CDC employee that 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about sensitive issues said that they were told by the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer of the Department of Health and Human Services that all employees were told they had to delete their preferred pronouns from their email signatures by 5 PM Friday.

Agencies were also ordered to “review all agency programs, contracts, and grants, and terminate any that promote or inculcate gender ideology” and to “take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology,” with a deadline of 5 PM Eastern Friday. Agencies were forced to “send an email to all agency employees announcing that the agency will be complying with Defending Women and this guidance.” Agencies have been ordered to create a report within the next week that includes “a complete list of actions taken in response to this guidance.” The specific executive order is Trump’s “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Defending Women).”

A similar message was posted to Reddit earlier on Friday. “We are being told that the CDC website is scheduled to go down by EOD today. Please share this with your partners and encourage them, as well as you should plan to download any significant information,” it reads.

There have been several efforts to archive data that already existed across the federal government, including the End of Term Archive, a volunteer effort that saved hundreds of terabytes of data before Trump was inaugurated.

Elon Musk’s DOGE, the newly formed government agency aiming for drastic cuts across the U.S. government, has brought in an HR employment attorney and consultant who has spent the last few years teaching companies her “refreshing approach to diversity and inclusion” which include attempting to “redefine” DEI in a manner that she says is more consistent with Christianity and offers a “non-woke” version of HR practices, 404 Media has learned.

Stephanie Holmes is in charge of HR at DOGE, two people familiar told 404 Media. Holmes is one of many new faces at the agency, which has been rebranded from the United States Digital Service to “United States DOGE Service.” DOGE, which stands for the “Department of Government Efficiency,” has also brought in a series of employees from Musk’s other companies and asked government tech workers to show Musk’s aides their code. DOGE higher ups re-interviewed every existing employee of the US Digital Service immediately following Musk’s takeover.

A 404 Media review of Holmes’ previous speaking engagements, which touch on her perception of diversity and maintaining company culture, provide insight into what might be in store for DOGE and the federal government at large. Holmes’ association with DOGE has not been previously reported.

Holmes is the founder of an HR consulting firm called BrighterSideHR and the author of a document called the “True Diversity Toolkit,” published through the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable think tank that recommends employers define DEI as “diversity of thought” or “diversity of viewpoint” rather than through a lens of “critical race theory.” Holmes has spoken about her approach to diversity at the Federalist Society, Catholic University, and the conservative Catholic organization Napa Institute’s “Principled Entrepreneurship” conference, which has become a hotspot of conservative political organizing power.

Holmes told an audience at a Federalist Society event that she started BrighterSideHR to counter “progressive ideology” in corporate America.

“Working in the HR space and seeing the DEI efforts and progressive ideology that HR was pushing into corporate America was particularly concerning to me, and I didn’t see any other alternatives for employers in the HR space. I care a lot about these issues and saw a problem I wanted to help fix,” she said. “I left my job and started BrighterSideHR, an HR consulting company to offer an alternative kind of more values aligned space for employers.”

“I do workplace training, discrimination, harassment training, how to do workplace investigations,” she added. “It’s simply just a non-woke version, offering employers an alternative approach to diversity and inclusion.”

The BrighterSideHR website shut down in recent weeks, and now says it is “no longer active.” An archived version of the site says “We focus on employee conduct at the workplace as opposed to imposing a particular ideological viewpoint.”

At the Napa Institute’s conference panel on “Practical Steps for Dealing with DEI,” Holmes sat on a panel with former Trump administration official and current Heritage Foundation fellow Roger Severino. A moderator introduced the panel by saying “we’re here to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, or as I like to put it, DIE. Many of us are quite aware of diversity, equity, and inclusion and how it has its roots really going back to Marxism.”

Holmes said on the panel that the “mainstream kind of leftist approach to DEI presents us with a lot to push back against.”

“It is really inconsistent with our faith and I also think that this presents us with an opportunity to not only say why we’re against this, why we’re opposed to mainstream DEI initiatives, but it’s important for us to be part of the conservation and to use it to say what we are for and why we have a positive vision and positive solution of DEI in a way that is consistent with our values,” she said.

She said she advises employers to “move away from defining diversity exclusively focused on employees’ race, sex, or other protected category,” and to instead focus on “bringing together employees with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints, perspectives, and beliefs to achieve common workplace goals.” She said employers need to also be “reframing the term inclusion to incorporate that in a way that’s more aligned with our faith.”

When asked whether any of the panelists “knew of a DEI program that incorporates Catholic values,” the Heritage Foundation’s Severino said “don’t use that word DEI ever again in a positive light. That phrase should be deemed toxic now.” Holmes said, however, that she has taught companies that they probably need to continue using the term because employees have asked for there to be a consideration of diversity at work. 

Larger companies must “balance how to kind of umm, play the game essentially. So I oftentimes use the term ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion.’ I do use the term ‘equality’ instead of ‘equity’ because I think that’s particularly problematic, but I also understand that sometimes it’s just not politically feasible within a company to fully implement different terms,” she said. “I sometimes use those terms generally speaking because it’s just too politically, too much of a political hot potato to do otherwise.”

The United States Digital Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, we’re serving up some much-needed good news about global biodiversity! Well, it’s more like a silver lining, but in the Anthropocene you have to take what you can get. As you may have noticed, humans are highly annoying and deadly to many other lifeforms on Earth, a condition that is driving a global decline of biodiversity. But there are bright spots in this dark trend, as conservation efforts continue to yield results around the world. 

Then, just how radioactive was that Saharan dust cloud that engulfed Europe in 2022? Scientists found answers, and they were weird! Next, the effects of Daylight Savings Time…on dogs. Finally, it’s time to warm up in the balmy gassy vistas of ancient Mars.  

Biodiversity Loss Is Staggering, but Conservation Pays Off 

Shaw, Robyn and Farquharson, Katherine et al. “Global meta-analysis shows action is needed to halt genetic diversity loss.” Nature.

It is understandable to feel overwhelmed by the escalating consequences of human activity on our planet and its inhabitants. In fact, it is a sign that your brain is good at recognizing reality, even at its own peril. But there were welcome rays of hope from conservation science this week: It turns out trying to stop biodiversity loss actually works sometimes!

On Wednesday, scientists published a massive meta-analysis of genetic diversity that encompasses decades of data collected from 628 species of animals, plants, and fungi across every land environment and most maritime regions on the planet. It is “the most comprehensive investigation of within-population genetic diversity change to date,” according to the study.

“Here we report an overall global decline in intraspecific genetic diversity,” said researchers co-led by Robyn Shaw of the University of Canberra and Katherine Farquharson of the University of Sydney. “In birds and mammals in particular, the evidence for genetic diversity decline is clear.”

“Genetic diversity accumulates over evolutionary timescales through mutation and once lost, is difficult to restore,” the team continued. “However, we also show that we have the theoretical and technical means, as well as the on-ground conservation management approaches, to prevent further loss if we act now.”

The study points to many success stories about targeted conservation that have reversed genetic diversity in species as diverse as the Hine’s emerald dragonfly to the Golden bandicoot. As it happens, two unrelated case studies were also published this week about the recovery of wolverines across their historic Scandinavian range, and the recovery of tigers in India, both of which offer inspiration from gains made with these iconic carnivores.

“We provide pervasive evidence for successful expansion of the wolverine population from the refuge-like alpine range into boreal forest, which was previously considered suboptimal habitat for wolverines in Scandinavia,” said researchers led by Ehsan Moqanaki of the University of Montana. “The ongoing recovery of the Scandinavian wolverine demonstrates that coexistence of apex predators with humans on multiuse landscapes is possible.”

Meanwhile, the study on tigers found that India’s recovery efforts “offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

“Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers,” said researchers led by Yadvendradev Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India. “The success of tiger recovery in India offers important lessons for tiger-range countries as well as other regions for conserving large carnivores while benefiting biodiversity and communities simultaneously. It rekindles hope for a biodiverse Anthropocene.”

Of course, these studies are not presenting an altogether rosy picture; the global trends of biodiversity loss are still incredibly concerning and there’s no doubt humans are fueling a major spike in extinction rates. But it’s much better to know that conservation efforts, if we make them, do pay off, and that we’re not just pissing in the wind. So let's take the win and stick it up our noses or ears or wherever you’re supposed to put hopium these days.

Oops! It’s a Radioactive Saharan Dust Cloud

Xu-Yang, Yangjunjie et al. “Radioactive contamination transported to Western Europe with Saharan dust.” Science Advances

In the beginning, Cilllian Murphy invented nuclear weapons. For decades afterward, governments around the world came up with the flimsiest excuses to make them go boom. Hmm, should we nuke a battleship? Yeah. Nuke the sky? Hell yeah. Nuke the Sahara? Oui (because France did that one).  

In a twist, the spectre of those Saharan nukes literally visited itself upon Europe in March 2022, when a desert storm blew dust clouds from the Algerian test site across the continent. The event raised concerns that radioactive particles from the four atmospheric detonations, which were performed over Reggane in 1960 and 1961, may have contaminated those nations, potentially posing a public health threat.

To investigate the risk, researchers enlisted citizen sciences to collect more than 100 dust samples from six countries in Western Europe, which they tested for plutonium isotope signatures. In yet another twist, the team found that there was detectable radioactive contamination in the particles from the 2022 storm, but it mostly didn’t come from the French atmospheric tests. It was dominated by the global fallout signature of the atmospheric tests conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union before sky nukes were banned in 1963. 

“Radionuclide signatures detected in Saharan dust collected in 2022 remained in the range of the global fallout found as a background signal in soils worldwide, and they significantly differed from the characteristics of the French atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in Southern Algeria,” said researchers led by Yangjunjie Xu-Yang of Université Paris-Saclay.

The team concluded that the contamination didn’t pose a public health threat, but it’s still a little disconcerting to be reminded that the planet is covered in a film of radioactive dust. As the sage Nelson Muntz once proclaimed: Gotta nuke something.

Spring Forward, Fall Back, Shake a Paw

Nagendran, Lavania et al. “The impact of Daylight Saving Time on dog activity.” PLOS One.

Dogs are thrown off by Daylight Savings Time (DST) too, at least if they are gainfully employed. That’s the conclusion of the first study to examine how DST affects all the good boys and good girls out there.

To accomplish this feat, the team put accelerometers into the collars of 25 sled dogs and 29 companion dogs living around Ontario during the fall time change in 2020 and 2021 respectively. By measuring the activity of the dogs, they were able to determine that sled dogs were more sensitive to time changes because of their rigid working schedules.  

“Recognizing that DST is an extreme form of anthropogenic intervention on the effects of natural light on circadian rhythm regulation, we aim to investigate how this abrupt shift in the timing of human activity affects companion animals,” said researchers led by Lavania Nagendran of the University of Toronto.

“Sled dogs took one day to adjust to the time shift,” the researchers concluded. “In companion dogs, we did not find evidence for any changes in morning onset activity following DST.”

In other words, the coalition ban time changes may have just earned a powerful new bloc: Huskies and malamutes. These dogs will make great political allies, assuming they can take some time away from other important business (digging holes, chasing squirrels, and yowling discordantly). 

The Lost Water World of Mars 

Adams, Danica et al. “Episodic warm climates on early Mars primed by crustal hydration.” Nature Geoscience.

Mars was once a warm world of gushing rivers and huge lakes that may have supported microbial life. But just how Mars remained toasty enough to produce these balmy conditions is a matter of some debate; the Sun was dimmer four billion years ago, when Mars was habitable, plus the red planet receives less sunlight than Earth due to its orbital distance, so solar radiation alone cannot account for its liquid water.

Scientists now propose that Mars was partly warmed by its own farts—or, in more scientific terms, its crustal outgassing. Hydrogen gas released by water sinking into the crust could have helped “to transiently foster warm, humid climates” according to researchers led by Danica Adams of Harvard University.

These events of outgassing due crustal hydration would have been short-lived, lasting tens of millions of years. This scenario adds more evidence to the idea that Martian climate, and thus its habitability, fluctuated until about three billion years ago, when the planet permanently transformed into the cold dry husk we like to put our best robots on today.

Adams and her colleagues note that these models will be put to the test once samples from Mars are returned to Earth (though the Mars Sample Return mission is currently experiencing  setbacks). For now, we’ll have to be satisfied with this glimpse of a gassy ancient Mars and the possible organisms that may have flourished during its warm spells.  

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 AI's boom or bust, trying Github's Copilot, and making time for good ideas.

JASON: When we started 404 Media, I bought a macro lens for my camera and used it to take pictures of leaked documents, things we had FOIAed, things like that. Sometimes I printed out the documents and took pictures of them, other times I took pictures of my computer screen. The thinking was that it was a cooler visual style than just screenshotting them, which obviously takes half a second. It wasn’t a policy or anything, but I took pics for the first few weeks, and they did look cool. I only have one camera, and I mainly use it as a webcam for our podcast. So it was definitely a pain in the ass to take it off a tripod, change the lens, take the photos, put them on my computer, and so on. So after a few weeks, I stopped doing it, and now we use screenshots like everyone else on the entire internet.

A group of men who sold Anom devices, the encrypted phone secretly backdoored by the FBI which led to the largest sting operation in history, pleaded guilty this month in San Diego. The defendants had been set to go to trial, in which the government was preparing to reveal the real identity of the confidential human source who provided the FBI with the Anom company in the first place. Now, that trial most likely won’t happen.

The court records released as part of the plea deals also provide new insight into how some of the phone sellers discussed drug trafficking on their Anom devices as well.

“If you really want to be secure there is only one word. ANOM,” one of the defendants wrote in messages collected from a backdoored phone.

In 2018, the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. Companies in this underground industry typically take ordinary mobile handsets, then load them with custom encrypted messaging software and sometimes make modifications to the hardware too, such as removing the microphone or camera. Their customer bases are often disproportionately serious organized criminals, including drug traffickers, hitmen, and money launderers. 

After shuttering Phantom Secure, a seller of the devices who used the moniker “Afgoo” approached the FBI with a staggering proposition: would the agency like to take the new encrypted phone company they had started, called Anom, and run it themselves? This meant the FBI could secretly backdoor Anom’s phones, and if criminals started using them, read all of their messages. 

That would only work if criminals bought the phones, and if people in the encrypted phone industry sold them. That’s where the defendants Aurangzeb Ayub, Shane Ngakuru, Seyyed Hossein Hosseini, and Alexander Dmintrienko come in. Prosecutors allege they became part of Anom and sold Anom devices to criminals around the world.

Anom became a popular tool for serious criminals in Australia, Europe, South America, and South East Asia. Customers used the phones to coordinate massive, multi-ton shipments of drugs. In June 2021, authorities launched a global relay race of raids, with more than nine thousand law enforcement officials acting across a single day.

In a twist, even though the FBI secretly managed the Anom company, deciding which features should be included and those which shouldn’t, authorities also decided to charge what they saw as some of Anom’s most significant sellers. That indictment named seventeen people, including Hakan Ayik, who was Australia’s most wanted man and a key reason why Anom went global. Associates called him the “encryption king.”

The new plea agreements point to the defendants’ communications with criminal users of the phones. “Defendant assured his criminal customers that Anom would be safe from law enforcement and that Anom was more secure than other hardened encrypted device companies that had recently been infiltrated by law enforcement,” Ayub’s plea agreement reads. 

In March 2021, authorities shut down Sky, one of the largest encrypted phone companies. Ayub then told Anom higher ups he was ready to sell 100 Anom devices and another 600 devices down the line, the record adds. “Defendant recognized that the criminal market for hardened encrypted device brands were overlapping and that the fall of a competitor provider presented opportunities for the growth of the Anom Enterprise,” it reads.

Hosseini’s agreement mentions a conversation where some of the men discussed keeping Anom underground. “Remeber. Word of mouth only. No social media nothing We don’t exist xx,” one called Edwin Harmendra Kumar wrote (Kumar previously pleaded guilty). “Yes we don’t advertize [sic],” Dmitrienko added. Hosseini then wrote “This one of the policies of ANOM no advertising!! I know you guys are aware of it.. Just a minder… 😉.” The irony, of course, was that all of these messages were being collected and then read by the FBI.

Some of the phone sellers also discussed drug sales in their messages, according to the plea agreements. Ngakuru coordinated a shipment of methamphetamine to New Zealand; Ayub spoke about the sale of kilograms of cocaine; and Hosseini discussed cocaine trafficking, according to the documents. Those three men have entered their pleas, but Dmintrienko’s hearing has been delayed to February, according to the court docket. Hosseini’s plea agreement mentions Dmintrienko in the cocaine discussion.

The guilty pleas close those cases, but some of the people charged by the U.S. remain overseas, including “encryption king” Ayik and Maximilian Rivkin, a Serbia-born drug trafficker who was also crucial to Anom’s aggressive expansion.

The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you're not already signed up, please consider doing so here. 

Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on getting information from federal government agencies. With any new administration there is a flurry of activity, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are a way to get more information on what is happening inside government.

At an all hands meeting inside Meta Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg did not address Meta’s $25 million settlement with Donald Trump that will see the company paying $22 million for the eventual establishment of the Trump Presidential Library. But Zuckerberg did say that he had to be increasingly careful about what he says internally at Meta.

“Everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right?,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta made changes to the question-and-answer section of the company all hands meeting because of the leaks, Zuckerberg said, according to meeting audio obtained by 404 Media. 

“I want to be able to be able to talk about stuff openly, but I am also trying to like, well, we’re trying to build stuff and create value in the world, not destroy value by talking about stuff that inevitably leaks,” he said. So rather than take direct questions, the company used a “poll” system, where questions asked beforehand were voted on so that “main themes” of questions were addressed.

“There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I’m not going to talk about those. But I think it’ll be good. You all can give us feedback later,” he added. “Maybe it’s just the nature of running a company at scale, but it’s a little bit of a bummer.”

In the hour-long meeting, Zuckerberg repeated many things he has said publicly, such as the possibility of replacing software engineers with AI, the fact that he thinks open source AI will soon overtake closed-source AI, and the fact that he believes the company can now work more easily with the Trump administration that he has changed his platforms to align with. 

Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database.

As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov’s datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

Because data.gov is an aggregator that doesn’t always host the data itself, this doesn’t always mean that the data itself has been deleted, that it doesn’t exist elsewhere on federal government websites, or that it won’t be re-hosted elsewhere. Further research will be necessary to determine what has happened to any given dataset, or to see if it turns up elsewhere on a government website. For example, 404 Media found some datasets in Cushman’s analysis that are no longer accessible on data.gov but can still be found on individual agency websites; we also found some datasets that seem to still exist because data.gov links to working websites but give a file-not-found error message when trying to download the file itself. 

Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it's too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version. 

This is because data.gov doesn’t always host the data that it is indexing. Sometimes the data is hosted directly on data.gov, but other times it links to an individual agency’s website, where the data is actually hosted. This means archiving and analyzing data.gov is not straightforward.

“Some of [the entries link to] actual data,” Cushman told 404 Media. “And some of them link to a landing page [where the data is hosted]. And the question is—when things are disappearing, is it the data it points to that is gone? Or is it just the index to it that’s gone?”

For example, “National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019,” a NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov but can be found on one of NOAA’s websites by Googling the title. 

“Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic_Covage Monitoring 1993-2018 - OBIS Event,” another NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov and also appears to have been deleted from the internet. “Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon,” a Department of Energy resource, is no longer available via the Department of Energy but can be found backed up on third-party websites. 

Determining what is gone, why it’s gone, and where it went seems like it would be straightforward, and it would seem like you could attribute all of it to malice on the part of an administration that has declared war on climate change and government equity efforts. But archivists who have been working on analyzing the deletions and archiving the data it held say that while some of the deletions are surely malicious information scrubbing, some are likely routine artifacts of an administration change, and they are working to determine which is which. For example, in the days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, data.gov showed about 1,000 datasets being deleted as compared to a day before his inauguration, according to the Wayback Machine.  

Because of the overall large number of datasets as well as the way that data.gov works, it is still too early to say what, specifically, has been deleted, though archivists and academics like Cushman are working on triaging the situation. It can reasonably be surmised that climate and environmental research and data, as well as research about marginalized communities and minorities are among the datasets that have been purged. This is in part because the Trump administration deleted huge swaths of climate data during his first term, and because Trump issued an executive order asking all federal agencies to delete anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn’t a single database. This makes it slightly harder to archive than any individual database, according to Mark Phillips, a University of Northern Texas researcher who works on the End of Term Web Archive, a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over. 

“Some of this falls into the ‘We don’t know what we don’t know,’” Phillips told 404 Media. “It is very challenging to know exactly what, where, how often it changes, and what is new, gone, or going to move. Saving content from an aggregator like data.gov is a bit more challenging for the End of Term work because often the data is only identified and registered as a metadata record with data.gov but the actual data could live on another website, a state .gov, a university website, cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft or any other location. This makes the crawling even more difficult.”

Phillips said that, for this round of archiving (which the team does every administration change), the project has been crawling government websites since January 2024, and that they have been doing “large-scale crawls with help from our partners at the Internet Archive, Common Crawl, and the University of North Texas. We’ve worked to collect 100s of terabytes of web content, which includes datasets from domains like data.gov.” 

The Environmental Data & Governance Institute (EDGI) published a report in 2019 detailing “How the Trump administration has undermined federal web infrastructures for climate information,” which included not just deleting datasets but also, in some cases, not deleting datasets but deleting the links to them, changing descriptions of them, or making them much harder to find. For example, during Trump’s first term, the Department of Transportation’s information on climate change was deleted, republished in a different form elsewhere, then deleted again from that new place, the report found. 

James Jacobs, a Stanford Libraries researcher who also works with a group called Free Government Information,” told 404 Media in an email that data.gov “has always been kind of a government data junk drawer (I call it that lovingly ;-)). That is, it was a really great effort to get the vast federal apparatus to start to think about collecting and preserving data. But there are no specific regulations that tell agencies that they *have to* use data.gov. Some agencies use it heavily, some put up a few excel spreadsheets and called it a day.” 

“I assume some of those datasets in data.gov have bad urls to old agency pages that no longer exist (it’s really problematic when an agency decides to redesign its site and its base domain changes and all the links to important information and data are broken),” Jacobs added. “Some of it is probably link rot and content drift and some of it is no doubt Trump admin policy driven (e.g. anything having to do with DEI).”

Harvard’s Cushman said that, because this is the internet, there are always things that are being added, breaking, changing, or vanishing, and that some of this happens on purpose and some of it happens on accident. So determining what is being purged, when there are so many data points, is not always trivial. “If you want to answer why any given thing is gone, it becomes an individual research question.” Cushman said he is working on compiling this info now and will publish it soon. 

All of this is to say that even under the best circumstances, government datasets and research can get lost or deleted, and archiving it is not always easy. When an administration specifically makes a point of deleting research, this already fragile ecosystem is stressed even further. All of these suddenly disappeared datasets must be taken in with the context that we know the Trump administration has ordered agencies to delete and edit specific webpages, and 404 Media’s own reporting has shown targeted deletions of pages relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as climate change. 

In a post from this week on Free Government Information, Jacobs explained that “the government information crisis is bigger than you think.”

“There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age,” Jacobs wrote. He explained that before the internet, government documents were printed and were archived by being distributed among many different libraries as part of the “Federal Depository Library Program.” The internet has made a lot of government information more accessible, but it has also made it a lot more fragile. 

“In the print era, libraries did a good (but not perfect) job of preservation through inertia (ie collect and catalog a document, put it on a shelf, and leave it there until a patron wanted it),” Jacobs told 404 Media in an email. “In the digital era, that system of distribution/preservation/access has broken down because digital publications are no longer ‘distributed’ to libraries, and government entities a) publish a LOT more on the internet; but b) have no clear regulations or policies regarding preservation.”

It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access. But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it’s been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while.

“One thing that is clear to me about datasets coming down from data.gov is that when we rely on one place for collecting, hosting, and making available these datasets, we will always have an issue with data disappearing,” Phillips said. “Historically the federal government would distribute information to libraries across the country to provide greater access and also a safeguard against loss. That isn't done in the same way for this government data.”

In 2015, a federal worker named Katherine Spivey gave colleagues a presentation about how to “write plainly,” so that the general public can more easily understand content on government websites. One of her pieces of advice, among many, was to “use pronouns” such as the word “you” to describe the reader rather than jargon like “beneficiary” or “purchaser.”

“There’s already a great barrier between citizens and the government,” Spivey said. “Remember, your reader is a person, not an entity … use pronouns to speak directly to your readers. It requires a lot less work and it requires a lot less words.” 

Spivey’s presentation had nothing to do with gender identity, gender pronouns, diversity, equity, or inclusion. It was about the broad concept of “pronouns,” the part of speech we (a pronoun!) use constantly. And yet, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the government webpage archiving a video of Spivey’s presentation was first edited to remove a timestamp link that went to the section of the video about “pronouns.” Later, the page archiving the video was deleted entirely (a copy of the video is still available on YouTube and on the Internet Archive).

The tweak is one of hundreds that have been revealed across government via Github’s commit tracking, which shows version changes to code, websites, and other projects managed on the site. Github is also revealing a widespread, scattershot effort to not only change government policies on DEI but also to wholesale nuke language that actually has nothing to do with it and are retroactively changing descriptions of research and events that happened in the past to remove any reference to DEI. The Github pages reveal not only the imprecision with which these changes are being made but also a willingness to literally rewrite and delete history.

Many of the deletions catalogued on Github demonstrate the pettiness and lengths to which the Trump administration is going to seek and destroy anything  that it could possibly conceive as being related to DEI. They also show that the government has hundreds of employees and contractors who have been tasked with being the anti-DEI police across the entire government. Many of the changes are frivolous, but many of them are not, and represent the destruction of critical institutions, research, and public data.

There are far more alarming deletions than Spivey’s video, of course.

The Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, an office of the government that determines how the federal government should carry out statistical research to, for example, determine if a federal program is working, has nuked its page about best practices for researching “sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.” This page had years of research about how to best do basic government research about the American people for the Census, the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies to “allow for better understanding of how sexual and gender minority populations [are faring] relative to the general or other population groups, including economic, housing, health, and other differences. These insights can lead to potential resources and interventions needed to better serve the community. These data meet critical needs to understand trends within larger population groups.” 

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health deleted a page about the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office, which has done critical research about the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people. 

It is impossible to catalog everything that has been deleted, tweaked, or scrubbed. But here are some more: 

• The U.S. Web Design System has deleted its pages on inclusive web design, which many web designers referred to when thinking about how to make their websites more accessible. The Github shows that much of the research and underlying principles that went into it were also deleted.
• According to Github, a page about behavioral guidelines for government employees is slated to get rid of a bullet point that says “don’t make derogatory comments on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” though the change has not appeared on the live site yet. 
• GSA research about how much money the federal government spends at businesses owned by women, veterans, and other groups as been deleted from the internet
• The description of a government panel at a conference from 2022 about neurodiversity has been edited to remove the term “DEIA” from its description. Similarly, the word “inclusion” has been deleted from a government training about why the Americans with Disabilities Act is important for accessibility at sports venues. 

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.” 

Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

“Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially-trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” the guide begins. “Simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.”

The guide’s intro was written by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was the head of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, which later inspired the creation of the CIA. The motivating factor for writing the guide, according to a passage within it, is that citizen saboteurs were highly effective at resisting the Nazis during World War II, and the Office of Strategic Services wanted to detail other ways sabotage could be done: “Acts of simple sabotage are occurring throughout Europe. An effort should be made to add to their efficiency, lessen their detectability, and increase their number,” the guide states. “Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police,” the guide states, adding that citizens often undertake acts of sabotage not for their own immediate personal gain, but to resist “particularly obnoxious decrees.”

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting. Simple sabotage ideas include:

• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
• “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
• “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
• “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
• “‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
• “In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
• “To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
• “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
• “Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.” 
• “Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
• “Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
• “Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
• “Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”

The guide also suggests “general devices for lowering morale and creating confusion,” which include “Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police,” “act stupid,” “Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble,” “Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe,” “Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.”

It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it's worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.” 

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, has responded to the current hysteria in his industry and the financial markets around a new and surprisingly advanced Chinese AI model called DeepSeek by saying it proves the United States needs export controls on chips to China in order to ensure China doesn’t “take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything.”

As I wrote earlier this week, Amodei believes that DeepSeek’s current advantages over American AI companies are overstated and temporary. The true cost of the DeepSeek R1 is not entirely clear and almost certainly much higher than DeepSeek’s paper claims because it is building on previous research published by American companies and DeepSeek’s own previously released V3 model. Additionally, Amodei argues that American companies will be able to recreate the same efficiencies in their model training soon, if they haven’t already, and then gain the lead again when those efficiencies are paired with American companies’ much greater access to more and better. The US already has export controls on chips to China, and Amodei argues that DeepSeek shows that they are “more existentially important than they were a week ago.”

At the same time, Amodei believes that “making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027.” Multiple American companies, Amodei says, will definitely have the money and chips this requires. The important question, and the reason the US needs export controls on chips, is whether China will be able to get millions of chips in order to do this as well. 

In one of his footnotes, Amodei expands on this: “To be clear, the goal here is not to deny China or any other authoritarian country the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, etc that come from very powerful AI systems,” he said. “Everyone should be able to benefit from AI. The goal is to prevent them from gaining military dominance.”

To state the obvious here, it’s not just China that can direct “talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology.” OpenAI, arguably the leading AI company in the United States and the world, has already partnered with American military defense technology company Anduril to “deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for national security missions.” the US Military is already purchasing OpenAI software for war, and companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are always competing for US military contracts. AI could have a lot of uses but the military is definitely one of them for US companies. That’s not something only China is doing. 

Overall, Amodei piece is pretty diplomatic. It doesn’t vilify DeepSeek and Chinese researchers and respects their contributions to computer science. It acknowledges that societies deserve the benefits of technology even if we disagree with their governments. But the ultimatum Amodei says we are facing is: Do we want to live in a world in which an all powerful US owned AI is dominating the world or do we want to live in a world in which an all powerful China-owned AI is dominating the world.

If I had to choose, I guess I would choose the US AI dystopia over the Chinese AI dystopia. But those aren’t really the only choices available to us. Even if we just accept the assumption that AI will be as powerful as Amodei and other AI company CEOs tell us they are, are we really unable to even imagine a world in which we choose not to weaponize and militarize them in ways that brings humanity to the brink? Would preventing our own homegrown AI companies from doing exactly that not be a good place to start? 

The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI’s while spending orders of magnitude less money and using older chips is that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s data unfairly and without compensation. Sound familiar?

Both Bloomberg and the Financial Times are reporting that Microsoft and OpenAI have been probing whether DeepSeek improperly trained the R1 model that is taking the AI world by storm on the outputs of OpenAI models. 

Here is how the Bloomberg article begins: “Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI’s technology was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, according to people familiar with the matter.” The story goes on to say that “Such activity could violate OpenAI’s terms of service or could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI’s restrictions on how much data they could obtain, the people said.”

The venture capitalist and new Trump administration member David Sacks, meanwhile, said that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.” 

“There’s a technique in AI called distillation, which you’re going to hear a lot about, and it’s when one model learns from another model, effectively what happens is that the student model asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn, but AIs can do this asking millions of questions, and they can essentially mimic the reasoning process they learn from the parent model and they can kind of suck the knowledge of the parent model,” Sacks told Fox News. “There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this.” 

I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company. 

The argument that OpenAI, and every artificial intelligence company who has been sued for surreptitiously and indiscriminately sucking up whatever data it can find on the internet is not that they are not sucking up all of this data, it is that they are sucking up this data and they are allowed to do so. 

We start this week with Emanuel's rundown on the DeepSeek situation, the Chinese-made AI that has rocked stock markets and the wider AI industry. After the break, Sam explains how metadata in U.S. government memos lists Project 2025 members as the memo authors. In the subscribers-only section, Jason and Sam explain how GitHub is showing the U.S. government's purging of information in real time.

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.

• DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core
• Memos to Federal Employees Were Written By People With Ties to Project 2025, Metadata Shows
• Trump’s Administration Is Taking Down Sites About Gender Identity All Over the Internet
• GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time

LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI “co-workers” whose profile images said they were “#OpenToWork.” 

“I don’t need coffee breaks, I don’t miss deadlines, and I’ll outperform any social media team you’ve ever worked with - Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. “Tired of human ‘experts’ making excuses? I deliver, period.”

The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn that lets people clearly signal they are looking for a job on the professional networking platform.

“People expect the people and conversations they find on LinkedIn to be real,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told me in an email. “Our policies are very clear that the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service, and we’ll remove them when we find them, as we did in this case.” 

The AI profiles were created by an Israeli company called Marketeam, which offers “dedicated AI agents” that integrate with a client’s marketing team and help them execute their marketing strategies “from social media and content marketing to SEO, RTM, ad campaigns, and more.” 

Marketeam has raised $5 million in funding so far and recently announced a partnership with Bank Hapoalim, one of Israel’s largest banks.

“Hi, I’m Ella, your AI-powered social media strategist,” a LinkedIn post by Marketeam promoting Ella’s LinkedIn profile said. “Social media is where I thrive–building relationships, credibility, and growth, 24/7, no breaks, no excuses.” 

The post goes on to claim that Ella has grown followers for clients by 500 percent in six months, boosted engagement by 150 percent, and delivered content that “drives results, not just likes.”

“Our proprietary LLM for marketing and our team of autonomous AI agents fit into your current workflows, empowering your marketers to achieve more with unparalleled precision and efficiency,” Marketeam’s site, which also notes it was recently voted as the #2 product on Product Hunt, says.

I learned about Marketeam via a post on r/LinkedInlunatics, a Reddit community where people share LinkedIn that are wild, absurd, or offensive. 

“Although most of these AI accounts have since been rebranded, reported, or removed the idea that someone thought to make an ‘open to work’ post for them is wild,” the Reddit user who shared the AI profiles said. Two profiles that Reddit users in the thread highlighted and encouraged others to report to LinkedIn were removed by the time I found them, but LinkedIn confirmed that they existed and violated the platform’s policy. 

"These are real LinkedIn profiles of MarkeTeam’s AI agents. Our agents have proven marketing capabilities and skills and are working alongside humans in marketing teams as we speak. In fact some startups (including us) sometimes present them as part of the 'team' slide on their decks, and they are working in our own team as well. Each profile explicitly states they are AI team members, and their resumes state the same very clearly and transparently," a Marketeam spokesperson told me. "LinkedIn's decision to remove these profiles raises an important question: As AI agents increasingly become legitimate team members in companies across the globe, shouldn't professional networks evolve to recognize this new reality? Our AI agents are already being employed, receiving performance reviews, and delivering results. The professional world is ready for AI teammates – the platforms just need to catch up."

How LinkedIn enforces its policies in practice doesn’t always make sense. The company did not explain why it removed the profile of a woman who made a post about her Pornhub page despite it not containing any adult content, or why it was reinstated after my article about her was published. 

Update: This article was updated with comment from Marketeam.

Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted by the government online. We know this because the senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos. 

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is a right-wing agenda from the Heritage Foundation that lays out the blueprint for remaking the federal government by firing government workers to install conservative, right-wing figures. The priorities of its authors include restricting access to reproductive care, mass deportations, and firing civil servants to replace them with Trump loyalists.

Memos to federal Chief Human Capital Officers, HR Directors and Heads of Agencies are available publicly on the CHCO website. The memo author metadata was spotted by someone on Reddit’s r/fednews community, in response to a federal worker’s post. 

The hackers behind the massive breach of AT&T data last year hunted through the data for phone numbers and records associated with top officials and their families, including members of the Trump family such as Melania and Ivanka Trump; Kamala Harris; and Marco Rubio’s wife, people familiar with the matter told 404 Media.

The news further stresses the catastrophic nature of the breach, which impacted “nearly all” of AT&T’s customers’ call and text metadata during a certain timeframe. The breach not only impacted the general U.S. public, but also presented a significant national security risk. People familiar with the incident told 404 Media the hackers also planned to release a lookup tool that would have let anyone search the records for a fee, and said that the number of breached records is larger than previously reported. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this story anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. 

The news of lawmakers’ and top officials’ families being targeted also comes as the FCC, the agency which would potentially fine AT&T for the breach, is now being led by Brendan Carr, who has historically been very friendly to the country’s telecommunications giants. 

“It is clearer than ever that AT&T's lax cybersecurity and Trump's ineffective, corrupt FCC pose a serious threat to U.S. national security,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “Instead of throwing the book at AT&T for failing to secure Americans' sensitive data, FCC Chairman Carr is coddling Trump's corporate donors and raising the white flag to hackers. It's time for the public and the U.S. government to stop relying on the insecure voice and text message services provided by phone companies, which are beyond salvaging, and embrace secure, end-to-end encrypted voice, video and text communications.”

Dusty Deevers, a Baptist preacher turned Republican Senator in Oklahoma, introduced eight legislative measures “aimed at restoring moral sanity” that include making pornography a crime punishable by a year in jail.

As spotted by Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, Deevers said in a press release that the bills “set a course for pushing back against the moral decay foisted upon Oklahoma by the far-left’s march through our institutions to destroy the moral foundations upon which the United States and Christian Civilization had long rested.”

Deevers seeks the total abolition of porn by imposing criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for production, distribution, or possession of porn and 10-to-30-year criminal penalties for “organized pornography trafficking.” The bill states: 

“No person shall knowingly photograph, act in, pose for, model for, print, sell, offer for sale, give away, exhibit, publish, offer to publish, or otherwise distribute, display, or exhibit any book, magazine, story, pamphlet, paper, writing, card, advertisement, circular, print, picture, photograph, motion picture film, electronic video game or recording, image, cast, slide, figure, instrument, statue, drawing, presentation, or other article which is obscene material, unlawful pornography, or child sexual abuse material, as defined in Section 1024.1 of this title.”

DeepSeek, a relatively unknown Chinese-developed AI model, is now the most popular app in the US Apple App Store based on hype associated with it releasing an an AI model that outpaces OpenAI’s and other companies’ models on some benchmarks while being trained on older chips at a much lower cost. It has caused Nvidia stock, which has become one of the most valuable companies in history thanks to the AI boom, to tumble and is causing more widespread panic in the U.S. market. Marc Andreessen has called this “AI’s Sputnik moment,” referring to the first Russian satellite which got ahead of and accelerated the US space program. 

People in the AI space and those who follow it closely started freaking out when DeepSeek’s newest model, DeepSeek R1, was released last week, and that freakout has now seemingly captured the entire world, impacting the stock market, causing people to wonder if American companies like OpenAI and Nvidia can really dominate the AI industry, if the AI bubble is finally popping, and if this is a sign of imminent Chinese world domination and censorship. DeepSeek is particularly notable because it is free, modifiable, and less expensive to run, which has experts worried about the viability of OpenAI’s already unprofitable subscription products.  

I’m going to be upfront with you here and say that 404 Media does not provide any financial advice and that if I had definitive answers to any of these questions I’d be playing the stock market instead of blogging, but in a day when the takes are going to come fast and furious my take is this: The AI industry continues to develop very fast, it’s hard to extrapolate how it’s all going to unfold based on single event, even if it’s monumental, and the fact that DeepSeek comes from China, a perceived adversary to the United States/the West is making hawks and xenophobes, and tankies foam at the mouth. 

Let’s take a deep breath and start with the biggest headline, which is that Nvidia stock dropped over 12 percent early this morning, its worst performance since 2020. GPU maker Nvidia became a trillion dollar company because it is largely making the chips that power the generative AI boom. These are not only the chips that people need to generate text, images, audio etc locally on their machines, but the massive training clusters of thousands of chips that these foundational models are trained on. In July, for example, Elon Musk proudly announced that xAI started training “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world,” composed of 100,000 Nvidia H100s. 

For the most part, AI companies in the US have competed on the general idea that more data and more compute creates more advanced and more “intelligent” AI models and tools. One of the general strategies, therefore, has been for companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta to feed more and more data into their models and to compete to build incredibly expensive and resource intensive data centers. But last year, we started to see some doubts about the existing consensus on AI scaling laws, which up until recently showed that the performance of AI models improved as the size of the model, data, and compute increased, with some people, including Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Andreessen saying that AI companies are starting to see diminishing returns. Despite these doubts bubbling up, AI companies were still competing for compute, which largely means access to Nvidia’s chips. Musk wants to grow xAI’s cluster to one million GPUs eventually, and the CEO of Broadcom recently said he predicts other companies will attempt to build similarly gigantic clusters. 

This demand for highly specialized and hard to produce hardware has made Nvidia incredibly valuable and critically important to building AI. Because the US government believes that the United States, not China, must be the world leader in AI, it’s also why it has introduced export restrictions that forbid Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to Chinese companies. This is part of why you see OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank proposing to throw $500 billion into projects like Stargate, a massive AI data infrastructure project that they may or may not have the money for. 

The main reason people are excited/scared/throwing up right now is that DeepSeek was developed and released under America’s export restrictions that prevent Chinese companies from getting the latest and most powerful Nvidia chips. As Wired explained, DeepSeek was spun out from High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund that originally acquired GPUs to analyze financial data, before it invested its money and resources in developing AI. That a new player in this space was able to build an AI model without access to the latest and greatest Nvidia chips (though people in China have found ways to obtain them despite restriction), using new, more efficient reinforcement learning strategies, has undermined the idea that companies like Nvidia or OpenAI have built a “moat” around their companies that will secure their lead in the AI race forever, and, by extension, has undermined the notion of American AI world supremacy. It also at least raises the possibility that a Chinese company has found a better, more efficient, and cheaper way to train AI models than any American company has discovered thus far.

As others have pointed out, it’s hard to say exactly what DeepSeek actually spent to make its model without trusting it blindly. The true cost may be hidden in ways we don’t understand, and is definitely benefiting by building on top of the very expensive research (primarily from American companies) that came before it. But if AI companies can build competitive models at a fraction of the cost on a comparatively tiny number of lesser GPUs, then much of Nvidia’s value and the billions of dollars AI companies are burning on training suddenly seems excessive and wasteful (even to AI boosters), hence the stock tumbling. 

Does this mean Nvidia, OpenAI, and other AI companies are doomed? Again, this is not financial advice but the market appears to be spasming based on vibes, and definitely before we have a great understanding of DeepSeek’s impact. The most obvious rebuttal from Nvidia bag holders in this situation is that DeepSeek’s newfound efficiencies will only benefit AI incumbents. If these new methods give DeepSeek great results with limited compute, the same methods will give OpenAI and other, more well-resourced AI companies even greater results on their huge training clusters, and it is possible that American companies will adapt to these new methods very quickly. Even if scaling laws really have hit the ceiling and giant training clusters don’t need to be that giant, there’s no reason I can see why other companies can’t be competitive under this new paradigm. We should also probably hope that this is the case since it could lower the environmental impact of AI.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but the argument I would add here is that this type of leapfrogging seems totally normal, and we have seem variations of it over the last couple of years. People love to prematurely dance on OpenAI’s grave whenever a new and shiny model is released. Meta’s Llama, France’s Mistral, and Anthropic’s Claude have all seemed like they’re getting ahead at one point or another and are favored by different users for different uses, only for another model to be released by OpenAI or another company that leapfrogs the hot new technology and makes them seem old. 

The difference is that DeepSeek is from China and that a lot of people including the US government don’t like the idea of China being dominant in any arena, let alone one as supposedly consequential as AI. This is obvious given the hysteria on social media right now, the markets, and the way people are talking about DeepSeek’s censorship and the possibility that it could be tied to Chinese surveillance or the Chinese government in some way. Steven Heidel, who works at OpenAI, tweeted Sunday “americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff,” which has gone viral and served as the basis for discussion about DeepSeek as possible surveillance software, the “new TikTok,” etc. What’s particularly notable here is that DeepSeek has been released in a way that can be run locally without an internet connection.

On various AI subreddits, where DeepSeek is all people have been talking about for days, some users are now suggesting that the conversation is being manipulated by “propaganda” from a few accounts. People have repeatedly shared screenshots on social media of DeepSeek refusing to engage with questions about Tiananmen Square and other topics subject to censorship in China, with the implication that this is the information ecosystem we’d live under if China was to dominate the AI race. 

Fair enough, I suppose, but as the developers of “uncensored” AI models have been shouting from the rooftops since the beginning: any AI model that the user can’t control entirely is subject to censorship. OpenAI is a prude, and will refuse to engage users on a lot of topics, sometimes for reasons stated in OpenAI’s policy, and sometimes for reasons we’ll never understand because OpenAI is a black box.

“Why should the open-source AI running on my computer, get to decide for itself when it wants to answer my question? This is about ownership and control. If I ask my model a question, I want an answer, I do not want it arguing with me,” Eric Hartford, a developer of uncensored AI models, told me last year. 

If anything, DeepSeek maps a better AI future for those concerned about censorship because it was released as an “open weights” model, meaning people could modify it to talk about Tiananmen Square and whatever else they want. 

We do not know how this will all shake out, but the release of DeepSeek does seem to be a seismic moment for the AI industry. And it will certainly be used, rightly or wrongly, as a political cudgel to highlight the urgency of the competition for AI supremacy between the United States and China.

On this special guest episode of the 404 Media Podcast, I talked to Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Pornhub. Kekesi started in her current role in August 2023, after working for Pornhub and its parent company for more than a decade. She joined us from Montreal, where Pornhub is headquartered. We discuss the stigma facing the adult industry, Luigi Mangione porn, the trad wife to feet pics pipeline, and algorithms that shut you down for showing side boob. Kekesi also breaks down Pornhub’s choice to pull out of states in more than a third of the U.S., following regressive age verification laws.

Kekesi started working at Pornhub's parent company more than a decade ago, when it was still called Manwin. The company, now named Aylo, has since gone through a lot of change in that time, including stronger moderation and uploading requirements. Now, the entire adult industry is in a battle against politicians who would prefer to see porn eradicated altogether.

When we spoke right before the new year, we were heading into 2025 staring down a new wave of privacy-invading age verification laws that make it harder to access adult content online. We talked through how Pornhub is responding to–and legally complying with–those laws by going dark in states where they're enacted.

We also discussed the increased interest in "tradwife" and "demure" porn, and what that says about the world today. "What's interesting about the Year in Review or even search activity on the site in general is that it is certainly a mirror of what's going on in society in general," she said. "We're hovering somewhere around the ballpark of like 130 million daily visitors. So when you see those fluctuations in traffic or these spikes in searches, it really is indicative of real trends or real change in society."

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• Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness
• Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South
• Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). 

This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade of grotesqueries from the grand world of excrement research. Then, scientists are bringing back the ‘80s with new bioluminescent hues worthy of a Lite-Brite pegboard. Last, if you actually are feeling blue, I recommend Norwegian wood. Not the song. Not the novel. I’m talking about real pine trees in Norway. They see all. They will understand.

Monkey See (Pee), Monkey Do (Pee)

Onishi, Ena et al. “Socially contagious urination in chimpanzees.” Current Biology.

It’s time to put the “pee” in chimpanzee by watching pee come out of chimpanzees. That’s what researchers in Japan did for more than 600 hours to find out if urination is a form of social contagion in chimps. In other words, they observed 20 adult captive chimpanzees (16 males and 4 females) at the Kumamoto Sanctuary of Kyoto University to assess whether they were more likely to pee if they saw other chimps pee.

“The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations,” said researchers led by Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored.”

First of all, let’s all congratulate ourselves for performing this complex physiological and social decision multiple times a day. I didn’t even realize we were such pros. 

But back to the study: the team meticulously recorded the number and timing of “urination events” along with the relative distances between “the urinator and potential followers.” The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure.

The study gets extra points for including depictions of contagious urination in art history as part of its supplemental information, like those disconcerting fountain statues that pee out water. But the “number one” standout is a 1784 sketch by Thomas Rowlandson entitled “Sympathy, or A Family On A Journey Laying The Dust.” 

Cups runneth over in this contagious urination event that even encompasses dogs and horses. I’m frankly surprised the buggy isn’t also engaged in gushing urination. 

In addition to documenting a unique phenomenon, this artwork is nature’s call to revive the euphemism “laying the dust” for (I assume?) urination. You’re no longer going to the restroom; you are laying the dust. It just goes to show you never know what you’ll learn from a study about contagious chimp urination.

San Francisco’s Best Eats (for Coyotes) 

Caspi, Tal et al. “Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore.” Ecosphere.

You’ve seen the pee study, now here’s the number two follow-through. A study out this week reconstructed the diets of coyotes in San Francisco by collecting more than 1,000 scats from 2019 to 2022. Of that initial poopy haul, 707 bonafide coyote dumps were analyzed with metabarcoding and genotyping to reveal what these streetwise canines were eating.

“We collected scats from urban green spaces, including parks, golf courses, and gardens across San Francisco,” said researchers led by Tal Caspi of the University of California, Davis. “We only collected scats that we estimated to be less than 1 week old given their appearance and time since last visit.” 

By analyzing this dookie-base, the team found that coyotes in densely populated neighborhoods were more reliant on human food scraps than coyotes in greener neighborhoods that had access to prey in parks. That finding seems intuitive, given that coyotes are opportunistic omnivores that will eat whatever’s available, but it’s still fascinating how much coyote diets varied, even with packs living just a few blocks away from each other.

“The greatest dietary differences were between Presidio and Coit Tower, even though a coyote can easily traverse the 3-km distance between them,” the team said. “The Presidio is the largest green space in San Francisco (6 km2) and has many native plant communities, sprawling grasslands, and a low percent cover of impervious surfaces. Conversely, Coit Tower is a tourist attraction in the densely populated Telegraph Hill neighborhood and, in part as a result of historical redlining, has less plant cover and lower species richness than formerly greenlined neighborhoods such as the Presidio.”

It's the age-old story of the city coyote and the just-a-bit-less city coyote. But while there were interesting variations in diet, all of these Bay Area coyotes were dining on a daily dim sum of chicken, pork, beef, and fish from human sources. As a cat lover, it pains me to report that domestic cats were commonly detected in the poops, though at low levels. That said, my general feeling is that a predator is skilled enough to catch a cat—animals that I have seen, with my own eyes, defy physics—it kind of deserves to eat it.

Lite-Brites in a Petri Dish 

Hattori, Matsuru et al. “Creating coveted bioluminescence colors for simultaneous multi-color bioimaging.” Science Advances.

Congratulations: You’ve waded through some sewage, and it’s time to wipe those eyeballs out. Fortunately, scientists published a spectacular new rainbow of bioluminescent hues this week. Call it a palette cleanser. 

Just look at these laboratory lite-brites! This study has clearly earned its keep based on aesthetic value alone, but the authors helpfully put some science in there too. Bioluminescence is the biological ability to generate light through chemical reactions, which is why some creatures can glow in the dark. This mesmerizing superpower is also a helpful tool in labs, as certain cells or research targets can be labelled with bioluminescent hues to aid observation.

“Bioluminescence, an optical marker that does not require excitation by light, allows researchers to simultaneously observe multiple targets, each exhibiting a different color,” said researchers led by Mitsuru Hattori of Osaka University. “Notably, the colors of the bioluminescent proteins must sufficiently vary to enable simultaneous detection.” 

The team’s innovation in this study was to debut a method that expanded the color variation, allowing “simple and simultaneous observation of multiple biological targets and phenomena.” To prove their point, they made the Tron mouse pictured above. 

Has science gone too far? Yes. But boy, does it look cool doing it.

Cruel Summer (Scots Pine Version)

Buchwald, Agata et al. “Blue rings in trees and shrubs as indicators of early and late summer cooling events at the northern treeline.” Frontiers in Plant Science.

It’s well-known that trees are nature’s librarians, meticulously keeping records of climate and environmental changes dating back centuries. But over the past decade, scientists have discovered a special type of blue ring in conifers that specifically memorializes cold summers. Low temperatures prevent lignification of the cell walls in the wood, creating the color pattern.

“Blue Rings (BRs) are a relatively newly described anatomical feature in conifers,” said researchers led by Agata Buchwald of Adam Mickiewicz University. “In the current literature, the formation of BRs is associated with cold growing season conditions” in various pine species, though “the potential of BRs in shrubs for paleoclimate studies still has to be explored.”

With that in mind, there was only one thing to do: Hike up Mount Iškoras in Norway and see what the Scots pines and Juniper shrubs had to say. The team took cores from dozens of plants high in the treeline, and discovered blue rings from the year 1902 and, to a lesser degree, in 1877, indicating that summers in those years were colder than average. 

The testimony of the trees not only lines up with historical temperature records, it also coincides with major volcanic events. In the spring of 1902, for instance, Mount Pelée erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing 30,000 people in one of the worst volcanic disasters on record. The reverberations of this tragedy were etched in blue in the hearts of trees 8,000 miles away on Nordic mountaintops. Reality is so wild and enchanting; it’s a shame it can’t compete with ad campaigns.

Regardless of whether you are as blue as a non-lignified tree ring, thanks for reading. See you next week!