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 our top games of the year, air traffic control, and posting through it.

JOSEPH: Jason did a bit of this last week, but here’s my stab at reflecting briefly on the past year. Here are my favourite articles I did this year: I published detailed documents on what phones Cellebrite and Graykey are able (or unable) to unlock; I revealed Apple quietly included code that reboots iPhones, locking out cops (Apple has still not officially documented this feature as far as I know); I along with other journalists showed how Locate X, a surveillance tool bought by the U.S. government, can be used to track visitors to abortion clinics; I verified that two students combined Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes which entirely shatters our understanding of privacy; I went deep on how the walls were closing in on the hacker suspected of some of the most significant breaches this year (the suspect was later arrested); I found a CISA official had broken with his agency’s narrative on SS7, and shown the issue is much more pressing than some may want to admit; I found a site was selling Discord messages and that it was linked to notorious harassment site Kiwi Farms; I showed that money launderers were using betting platform FanDuel; I continued to verify real world acts of physical violence emerging from the cybercrime underground; I mapped out the complex supply chain that ends up with hackers ordering mountains of oxy and adderall; I revealed that a site called OnlyFake was using “neural networks” to churn out realistic photos of fake IDs; and I exposed a global phone spy tool monitoring billions (which Google then took action on).

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 archiving nostalgia, newsworthiness, and plans for 2025.

SAM: Between the four of us, we’ve written dozens of stories about archivists, internet archival efforts, and general attempts to save what’s ephemeral, whether it’s rotting links or literally-rotting magnetic tape in VHS cassettes. 

Earlier this month, I was looking for costume (cosplay?) ideas for a “yuletide” themed Renaissance faire, and was trying to track down video from my favorite Christmas movie: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a stop-motion movie from the 80’s by Rankin Bass. This is difficult for a couple reasons: the movie has an extremely generic name that’s also the name of the 1985 book by L. Frank Baum (the guy who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) that it’s based on, and a remake in the 2000's that is nowhere near as weird or cool; the plot is nearly incomprehensible, and in my child-memory feels more like a dream or a nightmare, so it's impossible to put into a search bar; and it’s apparently not on any streaming service or YouTube, at least that I could find.

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 talk about health insurance.

EMANUEL: Publicly traded companies have to disclose who their CEO is and what they are getting paid to the SEC because as publicly traded companies they owe shareholders and potential shareholders a degree of transparency about the company they are investing in and doing business with. 

UnitedHealth Group, whose CEO was gunned down in the street this week, is a publicly traded company, as is the parent company for health insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which, as Sam reported last night, is one of a number of health insurance companies that took down the “leadership” pages from their sites, naming and showing their CEOs and other top executives. 

I’m not going to jump into the fray here about the morality of murdering a CEO of a company that greedily makes life and death decisions that haunt countless of people and families for the rest of their lives other than to note that clearly a large segment of the public has responded to it with a certain sense of righteous glee. What I think is interesting is the decision of these companies to now try and hide their leadership teams. Obviously, this is a pragmatic choice of whatever person or team is now responsible for their safety, but it also highlights one of the many hypocrisies that I believe makes people feel okay celebrating someone’s murder. 

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 talk about traffic, a return to Azeroth, egg prices and bullying.

EMANUEL: For years, when I typed the letter “C” into my address bar it autocompleted to Chartbeat.com, the tool VICE used for tracking traffic. There were a few ways to track how Motherboard was performing that were more meaningful, but the traffic data was clear and in real-time, allowing us to see exactly how many people were on any given story at any given time, so I checked it obsessively for years, typing the URL multiple times a day or just leaving the chart open on a second monitor to see how our stories were doing. 

What was considered good numbers changed wildly over the years. When I first started at VICE the numbers were very high because they were artificially inflated by Facebook and the company itself doing shady traffic arbitrage to juice its ad business. When that shell game ended, the new normal was much lower traffic but we’d still get occasional reminders on how absurd it could be to chase those numbers.