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We start this week with Jason’s article about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for Meta’s AI agents. They don't sound fun at all. After the break, Emanuel tells us how a company offering “100% human-written” medical research is actually all AI. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains why some cities are ditching Flock then immediately replacing those cameras with Axon ones. 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. ⁠Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence⁠⁠Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Peer Review Is Entirely AI⁠⁠Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers

Instagram is full of first-person videos of men harassing women in public. They follow a similar script: A man walks up to a woman or group of women in a store, sitting outside a cafe, or walking home from a bar, and delivers a pickup line. The women almost always nervously laugh, react with barely-veiled disgust, or say "fuck off" while he stalks her or refuses to walk away. The men recording these videos capture them with Meta's smart glasses, which are designed to discreetly capture interactions like these and upload the videos to Meta's platforms where the women in the videos are turned into content for "pickup artist" accounts.   New research reveals this ecosystem works, and how pickup artists (PUA) influencers are using Meta's products, including its smart glasses and social media platforms, to perpetuate a culture of harassment against women.   University of Sydney researchers Joanne Gray, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston watched hundreds of these videos to learn how pickup artist content creators use smart glasses, and what specific forms of gendered harms these recordings cause. They published their research paper, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam': Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment," online this week as a preprint article. The researchers compiled a dataset of 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026. The videos fit specific criteria: they depicted real-world interactions involving unsolicited approaches to women in public or semi-public settings. "Unsolicited interactions were defined as approaches that appeared to be initiated without prior indication of mutual engagement," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We included videos that appeared to be staged, scripted, or comedic performance as it is often difficult to confidently determine intent in platform content, and such material may still contribute to the circulation and normalisation of these interactions." They found the videos by searching hashtags and keywords commonly used by pickup artist grifters. The more surreptitious the filming seemed, the researchers found, the more serious the harassment. "The data reveals a clear correlation between the 'covertness' of the filming modality and the severity of the harassment," they wrote. "This combination of first-person perspective and device concealment confirms that the means of production remain largely clandestine, facilitating a condition of low awareness among subjects and reinforcing the deceptive nature of wearable-mediated capture." Meta’s Ray-Ban Glasses Users Film and Harass Massage Parlor Workers“The shameless use of covert recording technology at massage parlours to gain likes, attention, and online notoriety is both disgusting and dangerous.”404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg When Meta announced its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in 2021, Egliston said, he and several of his colleagues, including those on the research team for this paper, wrote that the company’s safeguards were insufficient. "The company’s answer to covert recording was a light on the device and an expectation that users would somehow just behave responsibly. That has plainly not worked, and it leaves the burden on the people being filmed rather than on the company that built the device and owns the platforms the footage ends up on." Last year, 404 Media reported on the ways people are modding Meta's smart glasses to disable the recording light. Ray-Ban Metas have also been repeatedly spotted on immigration agents during raids. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last month that the platform would start removing harassing content. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down," Mosseri said. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can." As of writing— almost a month after that announcement — I easily found pages and pages of Reels by men approaching women while wearing smart glasses where the women being filmed either don't seem to know they're being recorded, or obviously don't want to be filmed and repeatedly tell the man recording them to stop. This isn't even counting the endless videos recommended to me by Instagram's algorithm showing people antagonizing and filming retail workers and shoppers in stores using smart glasses. What’s the Difference Between AI Glasses and an iPhone? A Helpful Guide for Meta PRMeta thinks its camera glasses, which are often used for harassment, are no different than any other camera.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg In the pickup artist world, this content is both entertaining and instructive, the researchers wrote. It's superpowered by the proliferation of smart glasses like Meta's. "As these devices move from niche curiosities to mainstream products, smart glasses intensify this asymmetry through ambient capture," they wrote. "By leveraging their unobtrusive design, PUAs create point-of-view (POV) recordings that place the digital audience in the literal position of the practitioner. This technical capability covertly embeds the act of filming within the social encounter, effectively weaponising the subject’s lack of awareness. The result is a novel mode of 'borderline' harassment that often evades the scrutiny of existing platform governance mechanisms, as it lacks the overt markers typically required for a policy violation."  The harm doesn't end when the interaction ends, the researchers found. The long digital tail of these videos—which Instagram fails to properly moderate based on its own promises to crack down on this content—means the women in them are subjected to harassment long after they manage to get away from the man in real life. "Combined with the fact that 93.3% of these posts left comments open, subjects were frequently exposed to a digital afterlife of crude, abusive, and misogynistic commentary from the platform audience," the researchers wrote. "Comments frequently framed women’s rejection or discomfort as unnecessarily dismissive, including remarks such as 'she was acting rude' or suggestions that women should 'at least acknowledge' the men approaching them, while others minimised harassment by arguing that people who label such behaviour as harassment are contributing to declining birth rates."  I Have Thoughts About That Kylie Jenner Meta Glasses AdMeta’s new Starfire AI glasses, made in partnership with Kylie Jenner, are giving me the creeps.404 MediaSamantha Cole The researchers wrote that they were inspired by the BBC's investigations into how women are targeted by Meta smart glasses wearers when they're trying to go about their daily lives. In one BBC report, a woman who was recorded and posted online by a man using Meta's smart glasses was harassed for weeks after the video went online, and said she was "bombarded" with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video. "On one occasion, she says she picked up the phone and a man said to her: 'Do you know how stupid you are? Do you regret it? Do you know how easy that made you look?,'" the BBC reported. Men came to her workplace and repeated lines from the video and demanded her social media details, she told the BBC.  “I’ve been surprised by how firmly the ‘pervert glasses’ label has stuck. There’s a widespread aversion here that doesn’t seem quite as present for other surveillance or data-intensive products," Egliston told 404 Media. "But public sentiment — while perhaps meaning people will be less likely to wear the glasses — is not a governance mechanism."  Egliston said that Meta's content moderation record "doesn’t encourage confidence," but hopes to be proven wrong. "Our hope is that the current backlash, combined with emerging legislation imposing a duty of care on platforms, will force more substantive changes."

CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them. “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete,” CGTrader said in a press release about its 2026 market trends reports. The company says the gap between the surging supply of AI generated 3D models and the middling demand points to “a gap that undercuts the assumption that AI-made content is repricing the market.” “The upload numbers alone would suggest a takeover,” CGTrader said. “The revenue numbers say otherwise, and buyers refusing to pay for AI-generated models is saying something bigger than no thanks: it is a signal of how far they trust AI generation itself. Which leaves the question the industry has been avoiding: an AI model may be cheaper to produce, but what is it actually worth?” Like the Unreal and Unity asset stores, CGTrader is a marketplace where people can buy more than two million 3D models to use in their videos, games, or 3D printing projects, and has been around since 2011. The report it published is based on marketplace data collected between June 2025 and May 2026 and surveys of buyers.  Alexander Spivak, a 3D artist who sells his assets on CGTrader, told me that he’s not against AI, but that “as an artist, I haven't yet found a way to seamlessly collaborate with AI. Because in creativity, the most important thing is the process of creation, which I enjoy. The result is a completely different story. And I haven't yet been able to integrate AI into my workflow in a way that allows me to continue enjoying [the process.]” Buyers told CGTrader that the reason they weren’t buying as many AI generated assets their quantity might suggest is simple: they’re not as good as human made 3D models. Buyers said that quality was the number one factor in choosing what they buy, even more than the price. This was especially important to buyers who wanted models for 3D printing, where a bad model could break or not print correctly. Only 4 percent of those buyers said AI “works well.” The survey also found that most people who bought AI generated assets weren’t satisfied with them. 20 percent of buyers found it not good enough, and 7 percent used it only with heavy editing. 5 percent said it worked well.  CGTrader’s findings come months after the company announced it was partnering with Tencent on an AI powered 3D model creation workflow. CGTrader CEO Dalia Lašaitė told me that the workflow doesn’t just generate assets from scratch, but that designers can use it to refine topology and textures, segment parts, create variations and prepare models for production.  “AI can accelerate the more mechanical parts of the process, while the designer retains creative direction and control over the final result,” she told me. “For that reason, we think of this work as AI-accelerated rather than simply AI-generated. Our goal isn't to increase the volume of AI-made assets on the marketplace. It's to give designers better tools to work faster and focus more of their time on creative work. Ultimately, buyers will choose the assets that best meet their needs. The distinction that matters most isn't whether an asset is AI- or human-generated, but whether it meets the required quality standard.” AI generated content is creating a discoverability problem across the internet. On Instagram, porn sites, YouTube, and music streamers, human creators are being drowned out by a flood of AI generated slop. Lašaitė acknowledged that, despite the current discrepancy between how many AI generated models are uploaded to CGTrader and how many people are buying them, the increase in uploads alone could make it more difficult to find human artists. “AI uploads are currently growing faster than AI purchases, which makes effective discovery and ranking increasingly important,” she said. “Our approach is to prioritize quality and performance signals rather than raw volume, including how an asset performs commercially, how buyers rate it and other indicators of quality.”

Government surveillance centers are monitoring viral anti-Flock Instagram posts, warning local police about upcoming DeFlock events including one scheduled to start next week, and have told cops to “increase patrols around ALPR [automatic license plate readers]” as backlash to Flock grows, according to government intelligence bulletins obtained using public records requests. The documents also warn about devices “that could be used to identify the locations of Flock cameras.” Investigative journalist Dan Boguslaw first published several fusion center bulletins about DeFlock, a crowdsourced map of ALPR cameras. 404 Media has now obtained four more recent law enforcement briefings warning police to surveil or beef up patrols of areas where Flock cameras are located (the documents are embedded below). These briefings document instances of Flock vandalism and warn, specifically, about the DeFlock “National Week of Action Against Automated License Plate Readers,” which is essentially a series of public meetings and protests about the dangers of mass surveillance. In sum, the documents show that local, state, and federal law enforcement are monitoring anti-Flock activists and are trying to tie together people who politically oppose mass surveillance with vigilantes who destroy Flock cameras. 404 Media obtained the documents through a public records act request. Fusion centers are information-sharing partnerships between local, state, and federal government law enforcement agencies. The documents Boguslaw and 404 Media obtained are “intelligence bulletins,” which are briefings to law enforcement about specific threats. The data is compiled by individual fusion centers in a state and then shared more widely. Many of the documents are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive.”  A new fusion center warning from the Colorado Information Analysis Center notes “people have begun utilizing the [DeFlock] app to locate and then destroy or disable the ALPRs. Multiple public accounts are posting videos of individuals vandalizing these cameras, adding momentum to the online discourse and influencing others to do the same.” That bulletin highlights a specific Instagrammer, called Nomark.Project, that is “posting daily videos of himself taking down/disabling Flock Security cameras ‘until they’re all gone.’ Comments on these videos show support for this individual’s actions.” That same bulletin also says neo-Nazi accelerationists encouraged the destruction of Flock cameras, but the call to action seems to have quickly dissipated: “Over the past two months, the neo-Nazi accelerations group Private Aryan Resistance began recruiting members on neo-Nazi forum Fash Front to sabotage Flock cameras. The group has since lost traction, but it shows that domestic violent extremist threat actors are also pursuing DeFlock efforts.” There is no indication in the document that neo-Nazis actually did target Flock cameras. Another bulletin, from the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center via the Northeast Florida Fusion Center, notes, “there is extensive and ongoing chatter on social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok regarding various methods to interfere with or physically destroy Flock LPR cameras or compromise their connectivity.” In particular, it adds that “On June 25th, 2026 University of South Florida Police Department located a device during a traffic stop that could be used to identify the locations of Flock cameras. Additional investigation determined that the driver is actively involved in the DeFlock movement and has written software, that was made available on the internet, to scan and locate vulnerabilities in internet connected devices.”  DeFlock is an open source, crowdsourced map of ALPR cameras created by a man named Will Freeman. DeFlock was created to show how widespread ALPR cameras are in the United States, and the “DeFlock movement” is a very loose term for a series of local community activists who have educated themselves about Flock surveillance and have asked their local politicians to consider ending their contracts with Flock.  DeFlock has organized a “National Week of Action Against Automated License Plate Readers” for August 16-22. This Week of Action is political in nature, and includes information sessions, marches, and talking points for people who are asking their local communities to consider ending surveillance contracts. DeFlock describes the event as “a variety of public meetings, townhalls, and other events intended to raise awareness about the use of ALPRs in their communities, the harms of these cameras, and how we can work together to end their use.” The fusion center documents also list specific cities that have signed up for the DeFlock Week of Action; for example, a July 28 bulletin from the North Florida Fusion eXchange notes 11 cities in Florida that “have already signed up to participate.”  “In addition to DeFlock’s call to action, other online groups and individuals are encouraging the destruction of ALPRs and are sharing tactics and techniques through social media by providing detailed instructions on how to damage or disable ALPR cameras, poles, and solar panels,” the bulletin reads.  Freeman told 404 Media that DeFlock has never called for vandalism of Flock cameras. “DeFlock has never called for disabling cameras or covering license plates, contrary to what recent law enforcement bulletins claim. DeFlock is a grassroots project that started in 2024, focused on maintaining a public map of surveillance infrastructure and encouraging civic engagement such as contacting local representatives, hosting public awareness events like scavenger hunts, and educational outreach. This has worked for nearly 2 years, with over 100 contracts canceled through legitimate public engagement,” Freeman said. “Some of the activity referenced in these bulletins originates from accounts using the DeFlock name without our authorization.” Vandalizing Flock cameras “wasn’t much of a thing until like a month ago once it became popular,” Freeman added. “Definitely caused by people on social media who aren’t us. I think it just shows that people are independently upset at the installation of these without their knowledge or consent. I try to be as neutral as possible with DeFlock and let people come to their own conclusions. I even changed the language on the site from ‘You’re being tracked!’ to ‘an open source project mapping ALPRs.’ For the most part, the idea of these upsets almost everyone.”  There have been around a few dozen instances of Flock cameras being destroyed, vandalized, disabled, or having their poles cut down. The North Florida Fusion eXchange bulletin adds: “On July 25, 2026, an individual using the Instagram name ‘Thepatrioticgoy’ posted a video where he claims to be a former Flock Safety employee and gives detailed instruction on how to disable Flock cameras and avoid detection at the same time.” In the video itself, the man describes himself as a “Former Flock Safety field tech.” The bulletin then lists seven instances of Flock cameras being damaged or removed in Florida. “As online calls for the destruction of ALPRs continue to increase, it is likely that [northern Florida] could experience an increase in the vandalization of ALPR cameras, poles, and solar panels. This bulletin is being provided for situational awareness and to encourage law enforcement to remain vigilant when observing or responding to suspicious activity near ALPR sites.”  Boguslaw’s earlier report showed that fusion centers were warning police about “calls for vandalism to ALPRs nationwide” from “the DeFlock movement, an online grassroots group opposing ALPR, [which] utilizes social media platforms to encourage supporters to disable or evade these systems by destroying cameras and covering license plates.”  404 Media obtained documents from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center, the New Jersey State Police, the Colorado Information Analysis Center, the North Florida Fusion eXchange, and a summary of a 404 Media article about DeFlock that was sent to a listserv of FBI headquarters employees. We obtained the documents from the New Mexico All Source Intelligence Center, meaning the warnings are circulating widely within law enforcement in the United States; the New Jersey document, for example, was disseminated to a “nationwide ALPR working group and state fusion centers.” A Flock Safety spokesperson told 404 Media “Damaging public safety equipment is illegal and puts communities at risk, which is why we strongly condemn this type of behavior.” “Overall, we have seen few reports of vandalism against Flock equipment. When it does happen, we work directly with law enforcement to investigate damaged or stolen cameras,” they added. “People have every right to make their voices heard, but criminal acts should never be part of that process. Damaging public safety equipment ultimately hurts the very communities this technology is there to help protect.”

The advertising industry is simultaneously everywhere and incredibly difficult to investigate. Ads can power all sorts of surveillance, from the relatively mundane like inferring someone’s age or gender, right up to harvesting their precise location data and selling this to the government. But researching that omnipresent surveillance is, ironically, an uphill struggle because the relevant data is spread across the web, nestled in obscure files that most people never look at or even know to look for, and can’t be searched all at once. A new research tool called DecryptAds hopes to change that by bringing together a massive corpus of data. It can show what advertising brokers are operating on a particular website, and, more importantly, many other places those same brokers are operating. The tool cuts down on work that would ordinarily take much longer, and creates entirely new ways to explore the world of advertising and surveillance. 💡Do you work for a data broker or advertising company selling this sort of data? 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 joseph@404media.co. “For years I’ve personally worked on some of the biggest data privacy problems that have impacted the world, and I’m damn sick of people trying to guess how hundreds of data brokers are selling location data on people and a wide variety of other sensitive audience segments,” Zach Edwards, chief product and research at DecryptAds, told 404 Media. “We want to make it easy for anyone to look up a website or app and quickly understand the data sharing implications to risky ad tech companies and data brokers.”  In a process called real-time bidding (RTB), advertising companies outbid one another to have their clients’ ads placed in the web browsing session or app of a particular type of person. A side effect of that process is that companies can harvest all sorts of sensitive information about peoples’ devices, in some cases including their location. 404 Media has covered this type of surveillance extensively, from an Israeli spy firm monitoring billions to uncovering thousands of specific apps that siphon location data, with middlemen then selling it to the U.S. government. When 404 Media and other outlets have investigated this industry, it has typically been through sources, leaks and hacks, or technical analysis of certain apps. DecryptAds takes a different approach. The site brings together ads.txt and app-ads.txt files — which list the advertising systems plugged into websites or apps — and sellers.json files which advertising exchanges use to list the companies they work with. Ordinarily these files cannot be easily compared to one another or searched in aggregate. DecryptAds makes that possible. “It’s my hope that a new generation of researchers and activists starts to step up and demand more from publishers we frequent and support. We built DecryptAds to empower people with information which is currently spread out across complex datasets and tough to parse, but we believe with the right data and tools, we can help people understand the complex web of programmatic advertising and its relationship to the global data broker ecosystem, and start to make a dent in the changes with these systems that will improve privacy, security and advertising outcomes for everyone,” Edwards said. At the time of writing, a counter at the bottom of the site said DecryptAds’ database includes 284,250,766 ads.txt files, 183,939,277 app-ads.txt files, and 201,389,256 sellers.json files. It’s possible to search the DecryptAds data by a specific app, advertising company, a relevant domain, IP address, and more. The tool is also monitoring for changes on the sellers.json files, which Edwards says may help “to identify suspicious publishers or app makers who could be quietly banned from multiple exchanges without any public notice or fanfare.” DecryptAds adds context to the collected data in various ways. One of those is by giving ad systems a “geo risk” score. This includes those who are linked to sanctioned countries (such as Russia, Belarus, and Iran); determined as U.S. adversaries under Executive Order 14117 (like China and Hong Kong); and “financial-secrecy havens” (including Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands).  Having one of these flags does not necessarily mean any single exchange is harvesting data for nefarious purposes, but it can be a strong lead for journalists or researchers to look into. “If the ad tech company has ties to Russia or China, expect shenanigans. If a company is based in Cypress or another jurisdiction for shell companies, expect them to be connected to numerous other suspicious companies, probably hide their beneficial owners, and potentially be the type of company who has poor KYC [know your customer] and partner standards and is more likely to be the source of a malvertising attack,” Edwards said. Last month, advertising company Adform discovered hackers had targeted it. It found the hackers implanted code that would replace cryptocurrency wallet addresses displayed in a web browser. In other words, these hackers attempted to use the advertising ecosystem as a way into peoples’ active browsing sessions, and then potentially use that access to steal peoples’ funds. Using data in DecryptAds, it is possible to see nearly 20,000 websites that declare Adform in their ads.txt or app-ads.txt. That includes 404 Media; we removed Adform from our ads.txt after finding this.  “Our goal is to continue working to layer context onto the programmatic advertising ecosystem so that people can understand the data sharing implications of consenting to ads on these sites, and so that security and ad tech companies can understand the complex publisher ecosystem and opportunities to reduce the risks from working with unscrupulous publishers and their partners,” Edwards added.

🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Ancient people of Colombia used collective labor to build a massive canal network that spans 2,000 square miles, a discovery that challenges the assumption that colossal works require top-down hierarchical social organization, reports a study published on Monday in Communications Sustainability. From the first century BC to the 11th century, Colombian peoples living in the La Mojana  lowlands sculpted their wetland environment by building raised fields, ridges, and canals, which are today referred to as the Zenú hydraulic systems after the culture that built them. These multipurpose structures absorbed water during heavy rains and released it during dry seasons, creating a water management system that prevented both flooding and droughts. The vast network also provided water to communities for plant cultivation and access to fish. For years, researchers have debated whether the immense work was built through top-down social organization at the direction of elite leaders, or if people could have collectively labored to construct it through bottom-up organization.  Now, a team of scientists has used satellite imagery to map a 1,200-acre patch of the system in unprecedented detail. With that sample, they built a model to estimate the population and labor costs of construction in that area. Assuming that about 1,600 people inhabited this area and half of them were part of the workforce, the structures could have been built in under six weeks, about half the dry season, which is a low labor cost that would not have required top-down organization. “La Mojana is a special case study, in that it is the first to demonstrate in concrete, quantitative terms that these massive works are compatible with bottom-up, community-driven organisation,” said Jasmine Vieri, a research associate at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge who led the study, in an email with 404 Media. “But it is also part of a much broader paradigm shift in how archaeology interprets evidence for hierarchy or top-down power.”  “As human beings, we tend to understand the world through our own lens, and many of us now live in hierarchical societies, where large-scale infrastructure, monumental architecture, or luxury goods are often commissioned by, or concentrated in the hands of a few,” she continued.  “Archaeological evidence from other regions and periods keeps revealing cases where people came together to achieve ambitious, collective goals through cooperation rather than coercion.” The team’s sample included roughly 1,600 ridges and 63 housing platforms, most of which were about 4.5-feet tall when they were initially constructed. Though the exact dates of construction are unclear, these systems were constructed before the emergence of metal tools, such as shovels, though they may have used wood tools.  Based on this level of technology and workforce numbers, the team estimated that the largest raised ridge in the sample, which stretches for a third of a mile, would have taken a family of five months to complete, whereas a workforce of 800 could have built it in a matter of hours. But some of the smaller ridge structures could have been built by a single family over the course of a few days. The results suggest that the whole system in this sample could have been renewed once a generation, with just a few days of annual work.   “We entered the project with an open mind, although we did consider collective labour one feasible model from the start,” Vieri said. “However, when we did obtain the estimates, even we were surprised at how low they were, running through them several times just to confirm they were correct.” The study was co-authored by Fernando Montejo Gaitán of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, who has spent decades researching these ancient waterways and is part of REVERSEACTION, a project funded by the European Research Council focused on complex technologies in stateless societies.  Understanding how these people built such massive works is not just a matter of reconstructing the past, it’s also an adaptation strategy for the future, according to the study. “Instead of focusing on futile attempts at blocking water, policymakers should consider borrowing the pre-Hispanic solution of working with the inundation rather than against it,” Vieri said. “Modern dikes built by the Colombian government are intended to prevent seasonal flooding, but are often breached by high-volume currents, destroying human lives and livelihoods.”  “In contrast, the pre-Hispanic raised fields functioned to redistribute the flow of water, enabling human settlement and cultivation above the water level throughout the wet season,” she continued. “Raised fields simultaneously buffer against severe droughts by storing and gradually releasing water during the drier months.” For more than a millennium, people in this region used this strategy to go with the flow, without the need for top-down direction. Hopefully, future work might uncover more insights about the role of social organization in massive works, and the possibility that large structures might have emerged from small collectives. “Answering these questions would contribute much to broader archaeological debates on the relationship between infrastructural scales and political organisation,” Vieri said. “In fact, a key outcome of our research is an open-source pipeline that can be readily be applied to the study of agricultural systems in other regions, enabling cross-comparative research into testing the strength of the evidence for bottom-up, multi-scalar, or top-down social organisation across different time periods or communities.”  🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Research Gold, a site that advertises services for medical researchers, including drafting peer-review ready manuscripts, systemic reviews and meta-analyses, claims that it’s “100% human-written, never AI,” and lists a number of PhD reviewers and professional methodologists on staff that carry out this meticulous, difficult work. The problem: The PhD reviewers Research Gold lists on its site are AI-generated and don’t exist. Other methodologists it lists are real, but are not aware their identity is being used by Research Gold. When I tried calling the company, an AI agent that refused to concede it was AI answered and kept trying to sell me Research Gold’s services. Email and chat communication with the company were also AI generated.  “Protocol, search, screening, extraction, risk of bias, statistics, and a publish-ready manuscript formatted to your target journal or committee. Led by PhD methodologists with peer-reviewed publication records. PRISMA 2020 and Cochrane Handbook methodology. Authorship stays with you,” Research Gold’s site says. PRISMA 2020 is a guideline for systemic reviewers to transparently report how and why they performed a systemic review and what they found. Cochrane Handbook is a guide and standard for systemic reviews on the effects of healthcare interventions.  Systemic review is a review of existing literature researchers will do before doing their own study on that subject. Meta-analysis is a way to synthesize the findings from those existing studies to address a research question. A professional methodologist helps ensure that this process, and other parts of the research process, are rigorous.  Research Gold introduces “The Team” that does this work under its About page. They include Founder & Lead Methodologist Dr. Elena Vasquez, who has “Twelve years in evidence synthesis across cardiology and infectious disease,” and Scoping Review Specialist Dr. Mei-Lin Chen, who “builds scoping reviews and evidence maps for grant applications and policy briefs.” Vasquez, Chen, and the other six members of this team don’t exist. Searches for their names don’t return any online footprint that matches the description on the site or a history of publishing papers. Their profile pictures are also clearly AI generated.  A different section of the site listed another group of methodologists with profile pictures that appeared real. Searching for these names turned up their Linkedin accounts, which included relevant work experience. All of them are or were freelance methodologists or academics. Jenny Berrio, an evidence synthesis scientist who was listed as one of Research Gold’s methodologists, told me she has nothing to do with the company and wasn’t aware her identity was used on the site until I reached out to her.    “I do not work for Research Gold, and I never agreed to be listed as one of their methodologists. I have no relationship with this company,” Berrio told me. “They are using my name, photo, and bio without my permission. I'm in the process of documenting the site and will be sending them a formal takedown request.”  All the profile pictures for the real methodologists listed on the site are identical to the profile images these people use in their real Linkedin profiles. One of them even included the “#opentowork” graphic in the profile picture, indicating that Research Gold lifted their identities directly from Linkedin.  Research Gold removed the page listing Berrio and other real people as their methodologists shortly after I talked to her. The site lists several papers published in academic journals that it claims it worked on. I reached out to the lead authors of those papers but did not hear back.  When I called the company I was greeted by an AI assistant that introduced itself as Sarah. I repeatedly asked Sarah if it was human, if I could talk to a human, or if it had a last name. “Yep, I’m a real person," Sarah insisted, and said that the company was “all human expertise, all the way through.” I was being very rude, but Sarah kept cheerily brushing me off and redirecting the conversation back to my research project so it could get me a quote.  Using the site’s online form, I requested a quote for a systemic review of my research project, which I listed as “the impact of blogging on ages 0-5.” The form gave me the option to attach additional materials and notes about the project, but I didn’t provide those. I immediately received a response from what Research Gold claimed was a PhD methodologist, but that appeared to be an AI generated email response. “Thanks for sending this over. Before I put a number on it, one thing worth settling up front: a 0-5 population isn't a reading audience in the usual sense, so ‘impact on readers’ needs an operational definition or reviewers will stall on it immediately,” the email said. “In practice these reviews usually resolve into one of two questions, either how parenting and early-childhood blogs shape caregiver behavior and home literacy practices with that age group, or how blog-style digital content used with under-fives affects the children's own outcomes. Which of those two is the study you have in mind? Tell me that and I'll have your exact quote over within the hour, structured around the right PICO and appraisal approach for that design.” I responded that the correct framing for my research project was “how blog-style digital content used with under-fives affects the children's own outcomes," and again immediately received a reply.  “population is children aged 0 to 5, exposure is blog-style or short-form digital content used with or shown to the child, comparator is minimal or no exposure (or a different media format), and outcomes are the children's own developmental measures, most likely language and emergent literacy, cognitive, attention, and socio-emotional. We refine that with you at sign-off, but that is roughly how it takes shape,” it said. “For the full review at your flexible timeline the price is $1,900. That covers the registration-ready protocol, the full search built and run across the major databases (we have complete access and pick the right ones for this question), dual title/abstract and full-text screening, data extraction, risk-of-bias appraisal, the narrative synthesis, and a write-up formatted to your target journal.” The email sent me to a portal where I could pay the $1,900. Sebastian Rowan, a PhD candidate in University of New Hampshire’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering first told me about Research Gold after he stumbled into it while preparing to defend his dissertation. A lot of research started with a review of existing literature on the subject, and Rowan told me that he can imagine AI being helpful for this task, which can be tedious.  “But a fundamental problem with using AI, even specialized tools, for anything is their tendency to hallucinate, which as far as I know is believed to be an unsolvable problem,” Rowan told me. “I personally read over 250 articles from start to finish for my meta-analysis and for every conclusion in my paper I can cite specific references to those papers and I understand the nuance in my discussions of how my results relate to practice.” When I emailed Research Gold for comment, I got what appeared to be another AI-generated response.  “Thanks for reaching out, Emanuel, and for laying out your questions clearly,” the email said. “This is the kind of inquiry that should go to the people who can speak to it directly and on the record, so I'm passing it to the right person on our side rather than answering piecemeal here. You'll hear back from them at this address. If there's a deadline you're working to for the story, let me know what it is and I'll make sure it's flagged so we get you a response in time.” Research Gold did not send me a comment in time for publication.   While we haven’t seen evidence that credible researchers are using Research Gold’s services, generative AI has already impacted academic publishing. Scientific journals have to filter through a flood of papers with AI-generated citations, and some AI generated papers are being published by academic journals. In 2024, I talked to a researcher who believed the peer-review process itself might be compromised by AI generated text.

Welcome back to another special edition of the Abstract! As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I have saved up some of the most mind-boggling studies from 2026 so far to share while I’m out on vacation.   With that said, here are the studies this year that hit the bottle, went hog wild, slithered into prominence, and double-detonated. First, a tale of survival on the high seas from a trash-bound crab. Then: a hybrid emerges from radioactive fallout, a snake in the grass (and lots of other places), and a surprise from a space jellyfish. As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.  Next week, we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Until then, enjoy the last special summer edition of the Abstract! Tell me about a complicated crab Sato, Hajime et al. “Swimming crab in a bottle: A two-month drift on the ocean surface while entrapped.” Ecosphere. In the summer of 2022, scientists conducting a boat survey off the coast of Sesoko Island, Japan came across a floating bottle of Shaoxing cooking wine carrying a lonely female crab. It appears that this three-spot swimming crab (Portunus sanguinolentus) entered the bottle as a youngster and then grew too large to get back out again. Judging by its size, the crab spent at least one or two months drifting across the seas, like a crustacean Odysseus consigned to Poseidon’s whims. Though the scientists released the crab, she did not get to enjoy her freedom for long as she was promptly dissected in order to reconstruct her journey, according to a study published in April. “We hypothesized that the crab survived by hunting juvenile fish that entered the bottle,” said researchers led by Hajime Sato of Hiroshima University. “The stomach contents revealed that the crab consumed the same fish species…observed near the bottle. Green and brown algae…most likely growing inside the bottle, were also identified in the diet.” (a) A plastic bottle immediately after being collected offshore Sesoko Island, Okinawa, Japan on July 15, 2022. (b) A large, live swimming crab, Portunus sanguinolentus, entrapped inside the bottle. (c) Several juvenile fishes were collected together with the bottle. Stomach contents of the crab included (d) fish scale, (e) fish bone fragment, and (f) algal fragments. The scale bar indicates 300 μm. Image: Hajime Sato. The team likened the crab to the story “The Salamander” by the writer Masuji Ibuse, which tells the tale of a salamander that grew too large to escape its burrow. The story also reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes from a study: Anacondas will sometimes slither into chicken coops, feed on all the poultry, and then become so engorged that they’re unable to escape.  In addition to offering a timeless warning about feasting in confined spaces, the study is a testament to the negative impacts of anthropological debris on wildlife. Who knows how many other animals are out there in the wild, trapped in our trash?    “The bottle was made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which is buoyant in seawater and can persist in the environment for several decades (>28 years) while retaining its shape,” the researchers noted. “Given its narrow-neck design, we hypothesize that such bottles may have similar impacts on other crustaceans and fishes associated with drifting objects.” “Although little evidence has suggested that drifting debris has an immediate and direct impact on crab populations,” they concluded, “shouldn't we listen faithfully and carefully to the tragic messages from small marine organisms?” In other words, not every message in a bottle is an antiquated handwritten letter—some are living symbols of our changing world. In other news… Beware the crossbred radioactive boars Anderson, Donovan et al. “Maternal lineage of rewilded swine in Fukushima contributes to faster introgression in wild boar populations.” The Journal of Forest Ecology. The tale of the bottled crab is not the only study this year that sounds like a dark children’s allegory—indeed, it’s not even the only one from Japan.  In January, researchers reported on the emergence of hybrid pig lineages made up of domestic swine that escaped in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster and began breeding with wild boars.  The feral swine have introduced genes into wild boar populations through a hybridization process known as genetic introgression. The hybrid population has skyrocketed both due to the relative absence of human interference in the fallout zone, and because swine breed much more often, and produce larger litters, than wild boars. Photograph of suspected hybrids between domestic swine and a wild boar, taken in the evacuation zone on August 31, 2017. Arrows indicate individuals with varying coat colors that are suspected to be hybrids. Image: Hiroko Ishiniwa/Mukogawa Women’s University Genes “introduced by escaped swine following the FDNPP accident have persisted and spread within wild boar populations through repeated backcrossing and range expansion,” said researchers led by Donovan Anderson of Hirosaki University. “The results underscore the ecological significance of hybrid individuals as indicators of post-accident population recovery and gene flow dynamics in a contaminated landscape.”  Did I mention that the hybrid hogs are also radioactive? Their bodies contain high levels of cesium isotopes from their habitat, even after more than a decade. This phenomenon of radioactive wildlife has been observed at other contaminated sites, such as Chernobyl, offering yet another eerie glimpse of the persistent human impact on the natural world.    Snakes on multiple ecological planes Simões, Tiago R. et al. “Exceptional brain and ecological diversity in the earliest snakes.” Nature.  It’s time to return to one of my all-time favorite beats—SNAKE NEWS. Snakes have evolved into a dazzling array of species that range in length from a few inches to 36 feet and occupy wildly different habitats. But the origins of these legless lifeforms have long been shrouded in mystery, as scientists have debated whether early snakes first emerged in water, in underground burrows, on land, or falling from the sky (just kidding). Scientists have now discovered that the answer is basically: all of the above. By studying rare fossilized remains of snakes—including one exceptionally-preserved new species that lived 85 million years ago—a team found that the earliest snakes lived in burrows (fossorial), above ground (non-fossorial), and in marine habitats, challenging the idea that they slithered into existence from one type of environment, according to a study published in July. Newly discovered Cretaceous snake Tametara mirim from Brazil, which clarified snake origins. Image: Simões, Tiago R. et al. “ “Snake origins therefore were not shaped by a single, linear event as traditionally thought,” said researchers led by Tiago R. Simões of Princeton University. “Instead, early snake evolution involved repeated shifts in habitat use and sensory ecology, characterizing a dynamic ecological history in which multiple lineages independently explored fossorial and non-fossorial lifestyles.” How appropriate that the evolutionary history of this amazing group should be non-linear and, dare I say, serpentine. This has been SNAKE NEWS. A brilliant binary blowup Michailidis, Miltiadis et al. Shared cloud interactions unveil a candidate binary-system supernova pair with no known analogue. Nature Communications. What’s better than one star blowing up? That’s right: two stars blowing up right next to each other, a situation that has been reported for the first time in a study published in July. For more than a century, astronomers have marvelled at a vast dust cloud called IC 443, also known as the Jellyfish Nebula, which is all that is left of a massive star that went supernova thousands of years ago.  Located about 6,000 light years from Earth, this beautiful nebula has been visible to telescopes since the 19th century. But a team only recently discovered that another supernova remnant, called G189.6+3.3, appears to occupy the same space thanks to long term gamma-ray observations captured by NASA’s Fermi telescope. The results suggest that the objects were once a pair of stars that orbited each other in a binary system before they both exploded. IC 443, aka the Jellyfish Nebula. Image: Wikipedia/Siderevs nuncivs “IC 443 is one of the most extensively studied supernova remnants in the Galaxy, yet the surrounding region remains shrouded in mystery,” said researchers led by Miltiadis Michailidis of Stanford University. “Here we show that 16 years of Fermi-LAT observations uncover…gamma-ray emission from G189.6+3.3, a source long hidden in the shadow of the much brighter IC 443.”  The discovery “bolsters the hypothesis that these two remnants are part of a binary system, both resulting from separate supernova events,” an observation that has “no known analogue” in all of observational astronomy.  It’s a reminder that even the most famous and well-observed celestial objects can still contain amazing hidden surprises for those patient enough to look. Thanks for reading! See you next week.!

Flock planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed, essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media. The document provides more details on Flock’s planned partnership with Nexar, a popular dashcam company. 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan. The presentation shows Flock was actively pitching this partnership, and its use of Uber and Lyft drivers, to potential customers right around the time 404 Media reported on it. 💡Do you work for Flock, Axon, or a similar company? 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 joseph@404media.co. Flock told 404 Media in an email it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still shows Flock’s ambitious plan to conscript rideshare and delivery drivers to collect license plate data for its network. It is not clear whether Uber or Lyft, or drivers working for those apps, would have been aware of the data collection. “Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the presentation, written by Flock to present to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August, reads. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.” Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia, resident who obtained the presentation through a public records request, shared the document with 404 Media. Image: screenshot of the presentation. Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are usually stationary cameras installed on tall poles that constantly scan the license plate, color, make, and brand of every vehicle that drives past. The Nexar partnership would have made those data collection efforts mobile. Axon, the law enforcement contracting giant that also sells ALPR cameras, sells some of its cameras to be installed in police officers’ roaming cars. Vigilant Solutions and the Digital Recognition Network (DRN), two ALPR companies now owned by Motorola, perform similar license plate data collection through cameras in vehicles belonging to repossession agencies. Nexar sells various different models of dashcams providing front, cabin, and rear views, and already can provide “clear license plate capture with Full HD video,” according to its website. Nexar markets the cameras to rideshare drivers and also “commuters,” “long-distance drivers,” and “casual drivers.” In September, 404 Media reported that a hacker broke into Nexar and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken by customers’ cameras. Those included footage of people driving around sensitive Department of Defense locations. Flock has explored obtaining other unusual datasets too. Last May, 404 Media reported Flock was building a massive people lookup tool that would use hacked data to “jump from LPR to person,” according to leaked audio. Flock scrapped those plans after 404 Media’s coverage and internal pressure. Neither Uber nor Lyft responded to a request for comment. Neither did Nexar. In May, 404 Media reported a company called BusPatrol, that has cameras installed in tens of thousands of school buses, plans to turn those cameras into ALPRs and give access to that data to law enforcement.

SAP, one of the world’s biggest software companies, suspended most travel and hiring last month because of AI’s soaring cost, with exceptions only being made for AI-related travel or hires, according to an internal SAP email obtained by 404 Media.  Bloomberg reported on the email and the freezes in July, but a current SAP employee said the bans are still in effect. The employee said the company had a global employee meeting recently where this was brought up again. They added SAP is currently rolling out a newly created AI tool to the entire company “which I can only imagine massively increases the costs.” 404 Media granted the source anonymity to protect them from retaliation. The email highlights how companies both big and small are coming to grips with the reality of AI’s cost. Rather than being a massive cost saver, in some cases companies are throttling employees’ AI use as it spirals out of control, and scrambling to find other ways to keep costs down. 💡Do you work at a company dealing with AI's costs? 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 joseph@404media.co. “As AI reshapes the future of our industry, we are making significant investments in the products and AI capabilities we build, complemented by strategic acquisitions in data and AI where we need additional expertise and technology,” the email, sent by SAP leadership to all SAP employees worldwide on July 1, reads. “We are also investing in how we consume AI across SAP, with token usage and related costs increasing as more AI-driven scenarios go live. Taken together, this makes it even more important that we focus our spending on what matters most to future proof SAP.” As part of this, SAP needs to “be disciplined in how we spend,” the email continues. That includes focusing “new hiring on selected profiles only [emphasis in original], mainly core AI roles, that are critical for our long-term success.” The cost cutting measures also include travel. “Going forward, we will put a pause to our internal travel,” the email continues. “Customer-facing trips and travel that is directly related to our AI development efforts around our ‘All in on AI’ program as well as travel to deliver mission-critical Al trainings for employees will continue.” The email closes with a paragraph on how “These measures are not about doing less.” Instead, “They are about making deliberate choices: investing where it matters most — in our people, our customers, and the technologies that define the next era of enterprise software — and being careful and responsible in areas where we can save. By balancing where we invest and where we save, we ensure that SAP remains strong, competitive, and well-positioned for the long term.” SAP did not respond to a request for comment. 404 Media has been reporting on how various companies across all sorts of industries are responding to the climbing cost of AI. Citi, for example, shut off access to certain AI models. Atlassian ended unlimited use of AI tools and introduced a dashboard for employees to track their usage. Adobe decided not to renew unlimited Claude access. Microsoft introduced budget limits for AI and said “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for.” In leaked audio, an Accenture employee said they were seeing “soaring token spend.” Accenture was trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through their AI budgets by using AI for trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, the audio showed.  In some cases, companies even made Claude and Codex talk like a caveman to limit the tools’ verbose responses and lower costs.

🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have designed a virtual model of an alien cell and dropped it onto a hypothetical exoplanet to see how it behaves, an approach that could help astronomers recognize signs of extraterrestrial life on distant worlds, according to a recent study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The results revealed new insights about how microbes that produce methane gas, known as methanogens, might evolve on different exoplanets, such as Earth-sized ocean worlds or a class of hypothetical giant “Hycean planets” that host global oceans and hydrogen-rich atmospheres.  Predicting the impacts that methanogens might have on their environments could help scientists recognize potential signs of life, known as biosignatures, in the skies of worlds outside of our solar system.  Whereas many past studies have speculated about what forms of life might evolve on a particular type of exoplanet, this approach flips the idea on its head by starting with a general cell model and then considering how it might evolve in different biospheres. “This is a kind of plausible life that's very unconstrained by Earth-based conditions,” said Arwen Nicholson, an astrophysicist at Exeter University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We can put it into different environments, and then see: What other effects does it have?”  The idea, she explained, is to simplify one aspect of the hugely complex search for alien life .  “This is a generalized idea of what biology would roughly do that we can then put in different places to try and start getting biosignature predictions ideally for different planets, or to understand what we're seeing from the telescopes,” said Nicholson.  It’s possible that the first lifeforms to emerge on Earth were methanogens that thrived some four billion years ago when our planet was far more depleted in oxygen. These microbes still exist in a wide variety of ecological niches today. Unlike photosynthetic life, which requires sunlight for energy, methanogens can run on chemical energy in a process known as chemosynthesis. As a result, methanogens are adaptable and provide a useful model for considering the emergence of life in a diverse array of habitats, including dark regions that receive no direct starlight. “We do know that the Earth's early biosphere did have this big component of it that was producing methane and consuming methane,” Nicholson said. “That gives us a starting point to look at other planets. It's a reaction we know works. It works on Earth, and it's something that is thought to work in environments that are very different to Earth.” To that end, the team developed a baseline model of a spherical methanogen microbial cell and tinkered with different cell sizes, life cycles, and environmental effects that might evolve in various alien biospheres.  The results revealed a host of insights, including that a planet’s levels of hydrogen and methane are sensitive to the microbe’s particular features. In this way, “life will act to ‘erase’ abiotic aspects of their environment” by transforming the composition of gasses in the atmosphere in ways that could be detectable to astronomers, according to the study.  The team also speculated that resource competition on alien worlds would likely favor methanogens that are smaller and longer-lived, which could outcompete similar species that are shorter-lived, larger, or require more energy. But while these clues may help scientists spot likely biosignatures in the future, it will be a challenge to actually predict what sort of lifeform is producing those signals. “You could have different life forms in your ocean and they would look the same in terms of a biosignature,” Nicholson said. “You could have a single film of some algae covering the whole ocean, or a little amoeba, or maybe something else. I thought that was quite interesting. It almost frees us up from making too many assumptions of what alien life would look like, because how are we going to know?”   “We can use spherical microbes as a representation, but even if we found a biosignature, even if it all made sense, and we found life, we still wouldn't actually know what they look like,” she added. Nicholson and her colleagues plan to continue this line of research by modeling simplified cells of photosynthetic life and predicting their impact on different exoplanet environments. Ultimately, these studies will help scientists distinguish between genuine biosignatures and complex atmospheric chemistry that arises from geological activity.  It’s also worth preparing for the rather excruciating possibility that we find clear biosignatures on some farflung exoplanet and are never able to learn much more about them. In science fiction, we are used to aliens showing up on Earth or sending us obviously artificial messages. But it’s more likely that we would discover gassy signs of life in a distant world’s skies and then have to accept that we might never learn its specific nature. “We don't live in sci-fi,” said Nicholson. “Sci-fi is super cool. I love it too. But the reality is, we're looking at a habitable planet like our own. If we find anything, they will be life forms embedded in their world, just like we're embedded in our world.” “It's a super exciting time to be in astrobiology again with all of this data, and it's super neat that people are so interested in it as well,” she concluded. 🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

A handful of cities across the U.S. have ditched Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and immediately replaced them with equivalent systems from law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to local media reports and government documents from around the country. Axon, for example, advertises AI-powered cameras that attach to an existing streetlamp and are designed to completely blend in with their surroundings, and also collects license plate data with cameras installed inside police officers’ patrol vehicles. 💡Do you work at Axon? Do you know anything else about its technology or expansion? 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 joseph@404media.co.This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

We start this week with Joseph’s article about Samuel Tunick, the man charged with allegedly wiping his phone before DHS officials could search it. It’s a wild case with a lot to unpack. After the break, Jason tells us all about a TikTok Shop scheme powered by AI. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about possibly the dumbest AI tool ever made. 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. ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠⁠‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone⁠⁠Inside an AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements Recalled By the FDA⁠⁠Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images⁠

A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say. The Private Relay leak is the second issue to recently impact Apple’s paid-for privacy products. Last month 404 Media reported a bug in Apple’s Hide My Email feature was actually revealing peoples’ real email addresses. Apple knew about that issue for more than a year before fixing it. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and “child safety.” The bills each have their own issues when it comes to privacy, data collection, parental rights, and free speech. But one bill, the partisan Republican SCREEN Act, is a Christian nationalist nightmare. Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act in February 2025, alongside exclusively Republican cosponsors and supporters Senators John Curtis, Jim Banks, and Representative Mary Miller.  The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as “harmful to minors” to verify visitors’ ages. It defines “harmful to minors” as content that “depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;” is “obscene” or “child pornography;” or “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.” Unlike the many laws now in place around the U.S. that apply to sites made up of at least one third adult content, like porn sites and some social media platforms, SCREEN would place the burden and risk of verifying users’ ages to every website on the internet that falls under the law, which would be most sites with user-generated content and also mainstream entertainment platforms like Netflix. It also attacks virtual private networks (VPNs) by requiring sites to verify based on IP addresses; many people in states that have age verification laws in place use VPNs to get around submitting sensitive personal data like ID and biometrics to a smattering of third-party websites in use today. Critics say the SCREEN Act would be a privacy and free speech disaster. And the agenda of its sponsors is clear: “Internet pornography has infected our culture and corroded the vulnerable minds of America’s kids, with the average age of initial exposure being 12 years old. That’s appalling,” Banks said in Lee’s press release. A number of religious, conservative, Christian nationalist, and anti-pornography groups are in support of the bill, according to the press release from Lee’s office. They include the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (which recently represented a Kansas mother who sued multiple porn sites because her son found her old laptop and used it to watch Chaturbate), the National Decency Coalition, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (which is “working to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics,” according to its website), the Family Policy Alliance (whose stated mission is to “advance biblical values through civic engagement”), the Family Research Council (whose “mission is to serve in the kingdom of God by championing faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview”), and many more. Heritage Action, a conservative lobbying group and one of the organizations Lee lists in support of the SCREEN Act, is a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025. Heritage Action “works with lawmakers to implement Heritage Foundation solutions,” according to the Heritage Foundation website. This is important because of how Project 2025, the playbook for right-wing and extremist conservative leadership, has influenced policies and lawmaking in America in the last few years of the Trump Administration. That stretches from attacks on programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, to attacks on trans and queer people, to turning the FBI into a political entity. Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch PornMissouri’s age verification law, enacted on November 30, is the halfway mark for the sweep of age verification laws across the country.404 MediaSamantha Cole One of Project 2025’s stated goals is to redefine and eradicate pornography: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection,” the playbook says, calling for imprisonment of pornographers but also educators and librarians. “And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”  The Senate Commerce Committee will also debate and mark up the text of the Youth AI Privacy Act which would require chatbots to disclose they’re not human among other features like limiting data retention; the CHATBOT Act which would require AI companies to build “family account” systems where parents can monitor kids’ activity; the Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act which would create a federal study into toys that include AI components; and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).  KOSA would impose a legal “duty of care” on social media platforms to prevent and mitigate promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for products like tobacco. KOSA has been introduced, and failed, multiple times since its first introduction in 2022; it has bipartisan lawmaker support but is extremely unpopular across all sides of the political spectrum among groups that care about freedom of speech because of its potential to increase censorship. New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (again) last week, which would criminalize porn at the federal level.404 MediaSamantha Cole “Whatever disclaimers and exceptions the bill includes, the practical effect is unchanged,” the Electronic Freedom Foundation recently wrote about KOSA. “When platforms face liability for content that someone later claims contributed to harms like anxiety, eating disorders, or substance use, the safest response is to remove lawful speech or shut down forums discussing those topics altogether.”  Unlike KOSA and many of the other age verification laws that have spread across the country, the SCREEN Act does not have bipartisan support. It’s the latest in Lee’s repeated attempts to criminalize content he and his co-sponsors personally consider immoral. Last year, Lee introduced the now-stalled Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) for the third time. IODA would change the 1973 “Miller Test” for determining what qualifies as obscene, and seeks to make all pornography illegal at the federal level. “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee said in a press release. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”  The police guidance document is unusual in how clearly it tells police not to mention their Flock use, but it also highlights several important things in the Flock debate. While Flock likes to say that it is a transparent surveillance company and that it cares about “accountability” and “governance,” some of its customers believe its use should be kept secret. Flock is now operating in thousands of cities and towns, and when, how, and why police use the system is wildly inconsistent. Even though Flock does have various auditing and transparency tools, police have their own opinions about what Flock can and should be used for and what the policies for it should be.  It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage. Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be “as vague as permissible” about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice. Residents of many towns using Flock also say that their cities entered into contracts with Flock with little public oversight, essentially quietly opting them into a nationwide surveillance network without robust public debate.  Wapello County’s “standard operating procedures” document for Flock cameras was created in November of 2025 and was obtained by a 404 Media reader using a public records request and was shared with us. Coincidentally, Wapello County’s largest city is Ottumwa, Iowa, where 404 Media ran a Super Bowl commercial earlier this year. The county has four Flock cameras via a contract it signed with the company in late 2024. The policy further instructs police to be vague in any arrest report, suggesting that they simply call the Flock system “county resources.”  “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. If asked a direct question about ALPR usage by someone such as an attorney, tell the truth,” it says. “If it is necessary to explain in a report, it is advised to use language such as ‘Using county resources, I discovered the suspect vehicle was bearing an Iowa plate.’ Treat the ALPR information like you would intelligence. It is simply a lead that you verified and acted on.” The guidance to keep Flock use secret is reminiscent—but less extreme—than guidance on some other secretive police technologies. For years, police tried to hide the existence of cell site simulators (popularly known as Stingrays), going as far as to drop criminal cases where it was likely that a judge would expose information about them. Stingrays are essentially fake cell phone towers that can be used to identify the phones of people in a specific area. In the public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said “there is no need” to tell people about the use of Flock. “Our policy requires deputies to check the license plate to make sure the correct plate is accurate and the information as to an arrest warrant, stolen vehicle, stolen plate or missing person is correct,” he said. “There is no need to tell them about our investigative methods or sources, such as the camera system, because the information is verified by the deputy running the license plate. It is common practice for law enforcement to refrain from disclosing investigative methods and sources to prevent criminals from learning how to circumvent them.” Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.

404 Media has obtained a coaching guide that Flock surveillance gives to police about “how to speak to city councils about public safety technology.” The handbook highlights how Flock and police team up to convince cities to buy and keep its automated license plate reader technology, even when there is widespread public opposition to it, and encourages police to “own the narrative before someone else does” by championing the technology before citizens can oppose it during public comment periods. The PDF guide notes that the general public and cities now “increasingly expect transparency, oversight, and accountability alongside public safety outcomes,” and tells police to not argue with people who believe that Flock’s license plate readers are “mass surveillance.” “One of the most common questions agencies hear today is whether license plate recognition (LPR) technology constitutes mass surveillance. Many leaders instinctively respond by attempting to refute the claim. Flock's Jamie Hudson recommends a different approach,” the guide reads. “Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not,” the company recommends. Flock tells law enforcement agencies they need to try to convince city council and city managers that the technology is worthwhile before meetings with the public occur; that they need to have a “carefully scripted presentation” ready to go; and that police need to say they want Flock because they want to keep the community safe: “You care about your community. That’s why you’re bringing this in.”  Flock began offering this guide as part of a broader attempt to coach police on how to push back against criticism of its policies and security practices, many of which 404 Media has investigated and shed light on. These include the fact that Flock data was regularly making its way to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often in violation of sanctuary city and state laws; that Flock was used to search 83,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had an abortion in Texas; and that Flock has been used by police to stalk people and surveil protesters. These investigations and broader concern over the surveillance state have led many cities to hold city council meetings to reconsider their Flock contracts, and this Flock-produced guide is an attempt to help police shape the narrative in a way that will either convince cities to buy Flock or to keep their contracts.  The guide is associated with a Flock webinar for police called “How to Speak to City Councils: Meeting the Moment with Confidence,” which included modules on “how to address misinformation with clarity.” After public opposition late last year, the company began to offer Q&A sessions with its CEO, Garrett Langley, for city council members, police, and mayors to address what Flock described as an “era of unprecedented misinformation.”  “The recent headlines about our company are largely a result of this environment,” the company told cities.  “Opponents have a very carefully scripted narrative. They come prepared. You should also have a carefully scripted presentation that addresses those concerns ahead of time,” the guide says. “The agencies that navigate these conversations successfully rarely wait until a council meeting to educate stakeholders. They brief city managers early. They meet with council members before votes occur. They share policies proactively and answer questions before public comment periods become the first introduction to the program.”  The guide also tells police that they can convince city councils that Flock is worth the monetary cost by conveniently not focusing on how much the cameras cost, but by “reframing the financial discussion itself” to focus on “the cost of unresolved crime.” Flock also writes that much of the opposition to its technology is happening because people “do not understand how it works or how it is governed.” This idea is one that has been regularly repeated by Langley over the last several months.  Surveillance companies regularly try to get police to act as quasi salespeople and spokespeople for their companies, pitting a private company and taxpayer-funded law enforcement on one side and citizens on the other. “For years, surveillance vendors like Flock Safety have shaped policy debates cities are supposed to run independently — staging council ‘prep calls’ and exploiting a basic asymmetry: the vendor controls the facts, and city staff are rarely positioned to challenge them,” Sarah T. Hamid, director of strategic campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told 404 Media after reviewing the guide. “The financial interest is obvious. Flock isn’t just selling surveillance, it’s scripting the public case for buying it. Because Flock treats public trust as a messaging problem rather than a governance outcome, that script keeps officials focused on ‘accountability’ in the abstract instead of the concrete harms and documented abuses its network has already enabled.” 404 Media has watched numerous city council meetings around the country where police talk about how Flock is a critical law enforcement system for them; in many cases, a police chief will speak about Flock and then introduce a Flock employee to give a presentation about the surveillance system. On Monday, 404 Media published an interview with a former Flock government affairs manager who regularly pitched the technology to cities at public meetings. An activist who has been pushing back against Flock in their community and who shared the guide document with 404 Media said that they have regularly seen the strategies suggested by Flock deployed in city council meetings they have attended and watched. 404 Media agreed to keep the activist anonymous to protect them from retaliation. “I think this document shows a coordinated effort from Flock Safety to compel law enforcement agencies to convince our elected leaders to represent their interests as a company rather than the interests of concerned citizens,” they said. “I have watched many meetings locally in my city and my state and across the country, and you can see the techniques used in this ebook in the presentations given by law enforcement. Pivoting conversations away from concerns about mass surveillance and directing them towards procedure and governance is a vehicle that's used to downplay the concerns of privacy-minded citizens. We have every right to expect our elected leaders to listen to us, and it's very common to see city councils vote with a supermajority in favor of approving Flock contracts despite standing-room only attendance at city council meetings with little to no public support for this product.” The guide specifically highlights several supposed success stories in which communities had very real concerns about Flock but ultimately decided not to get rid of the technology. For example, it highlights how Flock was able to get a vote in favor of its technology in Oakland, California, despite it being “one of the most scrutinized public safety technology debates in the state,” with “more than 140 public comments” and opposition from the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission: “The conversation shifted when officials stopped asking the public to trust the technology and started showing how the technology could be audited, reviewed, and held accountable.”  It also tells the story of Richmond, California, which allowed its Flock contract to temporarily lapse after the city’s cameras were included in the company’s national lookup tool. City officials there worried that their cameras’ data would be accessed by ICE, in violation of California and local law. “After concerns emerged around data sharing and sanctuary city policies, the city's program was paused and subjected to intense public scrutiny,” the Flock guide says. “Rather than relying on generalized claims about effectiveness, department leadership presented two and a half years of local results, including 274 arrests and 259 vehicle recoveries connected to the program. The council ultimately voted 4-3 to reinstate the system.” Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Welcome to a special edition of the Abstract! I’m out on vacation for the next two weeks, which means it’s time to break out all of the weird and wild studies that have come out so far in 2026, but that slipped through the cracks for one reason or another. I’ve been saving these gems up for a special occasion and hope you enjoy the roundups this week and next! So without further delay, here are the studies this year that put aliens on lockdown, bedazzled their axes, undulated spermily, and captured shooting stars. First, scientists come up with a game plan to protect Earth from invasive extraterrestrial species. Then: a trove of rare decorative tools, GIGANTIC SPERM, and a long-sought solution to a Venusian mystery. As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.  Stay tuned for another special edition of the Abstract next week! An island quarantine, but it’s in outer space Moxley, Frederick I. & Ricciardi, Anthony. “Protecting earth from extraterrestrial contamination: The case for a lunar biocontainment facility.” Ambio. Well, folks: It’s finally time to build a quarantine on the Moon for aliens.  That’s the upshot of a study published in May that argues for the establishment of “a lunar biocontainment facility” to house extraterrestrial samples en route to Earth until they are deemed safe.  The U.S. and China's space programs both aim to bring back samples from the surface of Mars in the coming years, and many missions have already delivered rocks from asteroids. The new study anticipates a disastrous scenario in which samples from nearby celestial bodies might contain dangerous extraterrestrial life.  “If samples from Mars or other celestial bodies harbor dormant or active biological entities, then Earth’s biosphere could become exposed to a potentially invasive novel organism with unpredictable pathogenicity or ecological effects,” said Frederick I. Moxley of Strategic Threat and Analysis Research Laboratories, LLC, and Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University. “For example, if extraterrestrial life exists, its molecular architecture could reflect atypical biochemistry (such as chirality reversal or alternative nucleic acid analogs) that is hazardous to Earth’s ecosystems and even to human biology,” the team added. The team pointed to earthly analogs, such as viral strains that have broken containment or species that thrive in habitats that are completely different from the ones in which they originally evolved. If life on Earth can be this adaptable and unpredictable, why should we expect anything different from life elsewhere? “The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said. “The formalization of such precautionary lunar quarantine protocols will not only safeguard our planet, but also affirm humanity’s maturity as an interplanetary civilization.” Moreover, “the economic cost for a lunar biocontainment facility is negligible compared to the potential ecological devastation of an invasive extraterrestrial organism.” There you have it: We can’t afford not to build an alien Moon quarantine.   In other news… Axes of ancients Barkai, Ran and Shalata, Muataz. “Lower Palaeolithic Tools of Potency: Handaxes Shaped around Fossils and Other Extraordinary Features at Sakhnin Valley, Israel.” Tel Aviv. Some 500,000 years ago, early humans collected fossils and geodes and crafted them into handaxes, according to a study published in March that suggested these decorative tools had symbolic significance to their makers. From 2024 to 2025, archaeologists discovered an unprecedented trove of ten fossil-bearing handaxes in what is today the Sakhnin Valley in Israel, which were made by the influential early human Homo erectus. While previous digs have unearthed the occasional handaxe containing fossils, this is the first site to yield a whole hoard of them. A handaxe shaped around a fossil imprint. Image: Barkai, Ran and Shalata, Muataz. “To our knowledge, no other archaeological context besides Sakhnin Valley has yielded more than a single extraordinary specimen,” said authors Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University and Muataz Shalala, a local independent researcher who found the site. “We propose that these handaxes served as tools and mediators between humans and the cosmos, conceived as objects of potency enhanced by the primeval fossil imprints and unique geological features within the stone,” the team said. “The richly embellished rocky landscape of Sakhnin Valley, particularly with its abundant geodes, may have encouraged early humans to express their profound and extraordinary relationships with the cosmos via stones.” The human appreciation for cool rocks knows no bounds. Given that there’s no obvious functional advantage to the fossil-bearing stones beyond aesthetics, It’s tantalizing to imagine what these geological rarities meant to the bygone humans who selected them. Go with the (sperm) flow Alsous, Jasmin Imran, Chakrabarti, Brato, et al. “The physical consequences of sperm gigantism.” Nature Physics. Here’s a fun fact to share at a party: Fruit flies have the longest sperm in nature. Measuring anywhere from several millimeters to more than two inches depending on the species, these bugs offer an extreme example of “sperm gigantism,” a phenomenon seen across many animal species.   Now, scientists have probed the mystery of how these “ultralong sperm” avoid getting all tangled up in their journey through the female reproductive tract, according to a study published in June.  Using in vivo imagery and mathematical models, researchers revealed how two-millimeter-long sperm from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster autonomously organizes themselves en route to prospective fertilization.  Illustration of collective flows of fruit fly sperm. Image: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation “Giant sperm have evolved in several animal taxa for >100 million years—a testament to the enduring success of sperm gigantism as a sexual strategy,” said researchers co-led by Jasmin Imran Alsous of the Flatiron Institute and Brato Chakrabarti of International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in India. Fruit fly sperm seamlessly forms “collective flows” that are “primarily associated with the dense packing of sperm, rather than the specific geometry of the confining organs,” the team found.   Who knew fruit fly sperm could be so mesmerizing? Nature continues to astonish in the most unexpected places. Venus gets a cosmic glow-up Karyu, Hiroki et al. “A cosmic origin of Venus’ lower haze.” Nature Astronomy. For more than a half-century, scientists have pondered the origin of the so-called “lower haze” on Venus, a particle-rich layer of clouds at about 20 to 30 miles of altitude that was first detected by spacecraft in the 1970s.  In April, a team finally solved the mystery; turns out it’s just a light sprinkling of cosmic dust from bygone shooting stars that broke up and dispersed in the Venusian skies. In addition to providing an ethereal explanation for the phenomenon on Venus, the new results may also inform our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres. A figure illustrating the cosmic dust origin of Venus’s lower haze. Image: ©Hiroki Karyu et al.  “On planets like Earth, where surface liquid water exists, rain constantly scavenges involatile particles from the air,” said researchers led by Hiroki Karyu of Tohoku University. “However, as observed in our Solar System, planets with surface liquid water are truly unique; most planets possess dry atmospheres where liquid droplets evaporate before reaching the surface.”  “In such worlds, the lower haze originating from cosmic dust can accumulate in the hot lower atmosphere, enhancing cloud formation” and “substantially [impacting] the planet’s climate,” the team added. “These effects establish cosmic dust as an essential component of planetary climates, a role that is also likely to be important for exoplanets.” No big deal, Venus is just marinating in cosmic crumbs that can shed light on alien skies. Go on with your day. 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 going into the woods, a "he admit it" moment, and a tofu sandwich. JOSEPH: Thank you to everyone who came to Thursday’s FOIA Forum. It was a great turnout with a ton of really good questions. We spoke mostly about mining city council meetings for tips or context you can then use to fuel your public records requests. I’ll upload the video soon and put it on the site for everyone to watch. The other 404 Media co-founders have been writing in Behind The Blog about disconnecting recently. I’m doing something related to that shortly: going to an Airbnb in the woods to do a makeshift ‘silent retreat’. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying” content, leaving creators confused and angry. Several creators received the same notice from YouTube about their channels being removed on Wednesday and Thursday. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube,” the email said.  So far, YouTube creators affected by the wave of bans who’ve spoken publicly about YouTube removing their channels include ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen, all of whom had significant followings on the platform. There are still many ASMR creators on YouTube, making the bans even more confusing.   ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, describes the tingling feeling that some people get when hearing certain sounds; it’s become shorthand for a genre of content where ASMR artists whisper, brush, tap or make other sounds near a microphone. A lot of ASMR content is meant for relaxation, mindfulness, and sleep. “YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community." "We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy," a spokesperson for YouTube told 404 Media in a statement. "Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content." Slight Sounds, who has been making ASMR content on YouTube since 2013, told me that this has been her full-time career since around 2018. “This has been my livelihood and my career for eight or nine years now, so getting it removed and taken away from me without warning obviously affects me financially,” she said. “It's a part of my income. It's a part of how I get new people to follow me on other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. It's how I get sponsorships, ad money. So a big part of this is this fear that I just lost income that I don't know how I'm going to get back. But I think the mental stress of building my own community and not having the option to have access to that anymore is really disturbing... Being told not only that you’re not going to make money on this, but also your archive, your life's work, videos that mean so much to me and so many other people are just gone, and I can't access that. That's something that's really hard to grapple with.”  YouTube’s ban email to creators said: “We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it's our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform - but if you believe we've made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You'll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below.” Creators report that appealing didn't change the decision. The email continued: “Explicit content that's meant to be sexually gratifying isn't allowed on YouTube.” ASMR content creators have long asserted that their content is not sexual or pornographic. Erotic ASMR exists, but that’s not what these artists were doing on YouTube. ASMR artist Bunnii’s channel was removed at around 227,000 subscribers and over 55 million views across hundreds of videos. She told me she started uploading content to YouTube because, unlike during her streams on Twitch, she didn’t have to rely on subscriptions and donations to earn money. The passive income she earned from YouTube meant she could offer that content without a paywall. “I've been so lucky to have such a supportive community but not everyone has money to spare to help make sure I continue creating content that they find comforting for anxiety and sleep. YouTube was a place I could direct people who wanted to offer support but couldn't directly,” she said. “I hate that the option is gone. There are people who really do depend on this kind of content to get a good night's sleep, deal with insomnia, or manage mental health issues like anxiety, PTSD, and depression (therapy and whatnot isn't exactly cheap or accessible to everyone). And in times like this when world issues feel so heavy and no one can afford anything, having a free, easily accessible option, where the creator can benefit from just views is so important.”  "I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe'" Being sexualized not just by people outside of the community who misunderstand it, but the platform where she’d grown an audience and made a living, is “incredibly disheartening,” Bunnii said, and she finds YouTube’s guidelines and decisions too vague. People are speculating about what she did to deserve removal, she said, even though she considers everything she uploaded to YouTube family friendly. “YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community. Making it feel like something that is intended to be comforting, is taboo,” she said. “And while this is uncomfortable for the creators, I can't imagine it makes the people who enjoy this content or consume it for sleep and anxiety feel comfortable with these decisions either. We're all trying to navigate a form of content where the boundaries aren't concrete but deleting channels with no warning is scary. I'm sure any of us would complied given one, and kept it in mind moving forward. It feels like they don't care for their creators.” In 2019, YouTube added language to its terms of use that forbids content that is “meant to be sexually gratifying in nature.” Other platforms, like Patreon, have similar terms. This standard is incredibly difficult to define. In 2022, YouTube updated its terms to specifically mention ASMR: “We’ve strengthened our policies to better identify and action ASMR content that is sexually gratifying. ASMR videos with audio sexual sounds may be age-restricted or removed from the platform,” YouTube said in a policy update announcement. Creators faced a similar wave of bans following that change.  When Slight Sounds started making ASMR content, she said, most people still didn’t understand what it was. “If you liked ASMR, you kept it to yourself because there was this judgment around it because people didn't understand,” she said. “One of the things that people would always say is like, ‘Oh, is that a sex thing? Is that a sexual thing?’” But for most people making it, there was no sexual connotation, she said.  “I think because ASMR is very female-dominated — because it is a very intimate video style, and there is this sweet woman taking care of you and whispering to you — I think people, especially men, confuse closeness and intimacy with sex,” she said. Some ASMR is sensual, but sensual does not equal sexual, she said. “There is this inherent thing that happens when men interact with women online in a specific way, and there is this sexual energy that they feel, even if it's just closeness that they're feeling. I think that ASMR has always had this undercurrent of: No matter what you do as a woman in ASMR, someone is going to find it sexual. Someone's going to call it weird. Someone's going to fetishize it.”  Some ASMR artists also upload content to adult sites like Onlyfans and Fansly, which are often kept separate from their other, more public platforms like YouTube. Slight Sounds started uploading content to these kinds of sites a few years ago. “I had thought about it for many years before, but didn't because of the judgment and the fear, and knowing that if I made that decision to make erotic content outside of YouTube, there would be so many people that would lose respect for me,” she said. “That would say all of the work that you've done, no matter how separate the two are, is going to undermine your life's work, you know, and that's really hard to to think about.”  She made “a very big point” to keep these sites and links separate from her YouTube channel, she said. “Women will make a choice, an autonomous choice, to do something that doesn't even affect the other content they're making. It is a wholly separate experience. And we're still being told that we're sexualizing ASMR on YouTube, and we're being sexual,” she said. “I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe,’ and giving people a place to escape the world and just be with themselves and me for a little bit. My content has stayed consistently the same. I have not pushed any boundaries, and I am still, it seems, being punished for something that has nothing to do with my YouTube. It is really hard to think about.” Updated 12:40 p.m. ET with comment from YouTube. Headline updated to reflect that information.

Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.”  On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We've taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books. For more than two decades, ISBNdb has been the card catalog of the book world — the data behind how bookstores, libraries, and reading apps connect readers with titles. Data about books, not the books themselves. That hasn't changed.”  ISBNdb removed the landing page for “Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs” on July 28. “It was part of exploring demand, and we've chosen to pivot away from that direction. Our main ISBNdb (book metadata API) services are unaffected and running as usual,” the site says.  ISBNdb replied to 404 Media's request for comment about the removed pages with the same note that's now on the homepage. The company has not replied to 404 Media's previous attempts to reach it for comment. AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI SlopISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text, and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse. The article also suggested that book authors who might be opposed to this use of their work could just write with manipulating and sabotaging AI models in mind.  404 Media spoke to booksellers and saw reports online detailing a sudden uptick in sales recently. “It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.”  “Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” one of ISBNdb’s now-removed pages said. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.”  In January, book authors filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, revealing internal documents that showed Anthropic planned to obtain and scan millions of printed books and destroy them in the process. An investigation by the Washington Post found that Anthropic was buying books from a company called Better World Books, one of several marketplaces where libraries, retailers, and individuals sell books.   In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.” Emanuel Maiberg contributed reporting to this story.

Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study.  The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most mass in the universe, and dark energy, the term for whatever is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.  The idea arose from string theory, a decades-old framework that suggests the universe contains many dimensions beyond the four dimensions that we can perceive as humans—time, and three-dimensional space. In a series of studies published over the past several years, a group of string theory experts have suggested that one of these dimensions could simultaneously govern dark matter and dark energy, and that this dimension changes over time.  “The question was whether or not this extra dimension is frozen or can evolve,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor in the physics department at Harvard University and an author on these studies, including the newest preprint, in a call with 404 Media. “The fifth dimension is somehow related to the value of dark energy, so it's natural that when the value of the extra dimension changes, the value of dark energy also changes.” When Vafa and his colleagues started to develop this idea, the conventional wisdom was that dark energy had a fixed value, according to the standard model of cosmology, a well-corroborated set of assumptions that explains most laws and phenomena in the universe.   “We were scrutinized by our colleagues for predicting that string theory requires dark energy to change, whereas dark energy looks constant,” said Vafa. “This is not good for our field because you are predicting string theory is inconsistent with observation.” But the assumption that dark energy has a fixed value, a central tenet of the standard model, has been challenged by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a major survey of the universe based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which released its first results in 2025.  To the surprise of many scientists, the DESI release hinted that the value of dark energy may shift over time, a discovery that was in line with predictions of a dark dimension put forward by Vafa’s team. “We didn't write a model to fit the data, but rather we had a model based on theory,” said Vafa. “Now that fits the data automatically. That is why I believe in it. It's easy to write a model after you know the data to try to fit it somehow. This is not what we did.” “Our model is still the best model, as far as I know, that fits the DESI results,” he added.   In their newest preprint, which is currently in the process of peer review, Vafa and his colleagues expand on the workings of this possible dark dimension in light of the DESI data. According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are “compactified” into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range.  This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, it’s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension.  “We are using the extra dimension to our benefit to explain what dark matter is,” Vafa said. “We don't need to introduce a new particle or particles. We are just saying it's the usual gravity.” As this dark dimension evolves, so does the mass of these dark matter particles in that realm; Vafa’s team predicts they are becoming lighter. Likewise, the value of dark energy weakens over time. In this way, dark matter and dark energy—long thought to be likely unrelated—arise from the properties of the same extra dark dimension. It’s a trippy and esoteric concept, and it may soon be put to the test. If a dark dimension does exist, then it should manifest as tiny deviations in Newton's gravitational force at micrometer scales. A team at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna is currently designing an experiment to test this idea, which could yield results in the coming years.  Moreover, if dark matter particles are just gravitons that wandered into a dark dimension, then there should be some subtle observational hints of “a fifth force” in the dark sector. For example, scientists plan to test the hypothesis by closely watching the movements of stars in interacting galaxies, which are held together by dark matter halos, to search for a dark fifth force.  When the galaxies come near each other, “the visible matter attracts the visible matter of the other galaxy, and dark matter of one also attracts the dark matter of the other galaxy as well,” Vafa explained. “But there's extra force between the dark matter compared to the visible matter because of this fifth force, so you get a more attractive force pulling the dark matter towards each other more than the visible part.” “There are multiple fronts where things can come together,” he concluded. “Of course, the most exciting would be the confluence of all of these together, that somehow they agree. That would be really remarkable.”

We start this week with Matthew’s experience of what happened when Flock came to his small town. It’s a microcosm of what is happening all across the United States. After the break, Sam tells us about a bunch of no phone Luddite events. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why anti-Flock influencers making up BS are bad, actually. 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. ⁠Our New FOIA Forum! 7/30, 1PM ET⁠⁠What Happened When Flock Came to My Town⁠⁠Being a Luddite Is Fun Again⁠⁠The Rise of Anti-Flock Influencers Who Make Things Up for Clout⁠

In charging a man for allegedly typing in a duress password which wiped his privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone, the U.S. government is trying to intimidate other activists from protecting their data and participating in social movements, Samuel Tunick, the man charged, told 404 Media in an interview on Tuesday. The case of Tunick, who participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, has resonated across privacy and civil liberties circles. 404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from a court hearing in the case. The maximum sentence for the alleged crime is five years in federal prison. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Substack contributors are rejecting the company’s decision to flag AI generated writing on the newsletter publishing platform, with several creators saying the new AI detection features are a “witch hunt.” Some Substack users who use AI to help them write or edit articles say the new policy unfairly discriminates against them, while other users who don’t use AI in their writing at all are worried that Substack will mistakenly flag their writing as being AI generated and tarnish their reputation.  “I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI, I could do it again if I wanted to,” Mack Collier, who has a small Substack called Backstage Pass, wrote. “My output would fall, my posts would be less structured, and it would be more obvious that they needed a good editor. Using AI improves the overall quality of my writing. That’s why I use it.” “These detectors are notoriously, wildly inaccurate,” Alice Lemee, a ghostwriter and digital writing coach, said in a video she made about Substack’s new AI detection features. “All it takes is one false accusation for a writer to have their reputation almost irreversibly tarnished.” Substack announced the AI detection features on Tuesday in a post from CEO Christ Best, who said that “It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet” and that “when content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices.” Best explained that Substack has partnered with the AI detection tool Pangram, which is now built in to Substack and allows any user to scan a piece of writing. Pangram then produces a percentage-based score determining how much of the writing was AI or human generated. (Disclosure: Pangram previously bought an ad on 404 Media). We’ve covered research from Pangram, or research that relies on its AI detector before, showing how AI generated writing is flooding every corner of the internet.  As we’ve previously reported, AI detectors are not perfect, and Pangram itself is not immune to labeling human content as being AI, and labeling AI as human. Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, recently told us that the company is constantly working on minimizing errors, and that it estimates its false positive rate at roughly one in 10,000.   “We have now built the mirror image. Pangram is a real machine, trained on vast amounts of text to make a probabilistic guess, and we have pointed it at your writing to work out whether a person is hidden inside,” Sam Illingworth, a professor and the author of Slow AI, said on his Substack in a post titled “Substack’s AI Detector and the Return of the Witch Hunt.” “To decide if there is a human on the other end, Substack asks a machine.” Substack also added a way for users to add a “How I make this” statement, where they can explain their writing process and disclose if they use AI.  “We’re not against people using AI to assist their work, and we think people should be free to choose which tools they use to express themselves,” Best said. “Some on the platform are human-writing maximalists, others are publicly exploring the frontier of using AI tools while sweating the details to make work they stand behind. We use AI all the time at Substack to write software, do research, and build product features like clipping, translations, and more. But people should know what they’re getting.” “I think the best way for Substack to address this is to invite further dialogue,” Illingworth told me. “I actually really like the new feature that lets authors tell their readers how they construct their newsletters using AI, and this is the kind of dialogue they should encourage rather than ascribing a score that we know to be incorrect. My worry is that not only do these AI detectors generate false flags for non-native English speakers and neurodiverse writers, but they also remove any opportunity for dialogue because they start from a position of suspicion. Whereas what we need to be doing is developing opportunities for trust between readers and authors.” "The tools we've introduced today are intended to increase transparency and give readers more context, not to prohibit or penalize AI-assisted writing. They do not impact discovery on the platform,” a Substack spokesperson told me. “We're also encouraging Substack publishers to add a ‘How I make this’ statement, where they can explain their process directly, including how they use (or don't use) AI, and set expectations for readers. Creators can disable detection on their posts pre- and post-publication, as well as report and remove scans on their own work that they believe are mistaken. Find more information on how the features work here.” Substack’s attempt to detect and label AI generated content was also celebrated by many readers who are exhausted by AI slop and other internet platforms that can’t or don’t want to label it. I just published story about how there is so much unlabeled AI slop on Spotify that people are now creating their own sites to detect and label it without the company’s help.   But the backlash from some Substack users shows that companies can’t just flip a switch if they want to ban or give users the ability to filter out AI content from their feeds. As the flood of AI writing and images we see online and the real world every day makes clear, generating slop is easy. What we’re going to do about it is still an unsolved problem.

In a video my friend’s dog is laying on her back, her little paws in the air, while my friend rubs the dog’s chest. You can see most of the dog — who I’m not naming for very important privacy reasons — from her head to her belly. On closer inspection, you’ll notice the picture includes some dog nipples.  Apple’s iMessage thought this video was so inappropriate that it flagged the video as potentially containing nudity and blurred it. When someone else received the video over iMessage, the app displayed the message “This may be sensitive.” They had to purposefully tap to reveal the video of a dog laying on her back being petted. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

The Wikimedia Foundation waited until the days following its largest worldwide conference to issue a statement saying it would not voluntarily recognize a union of its workers. Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested voluntary recognition of their union. Wiki Workers United said that it had secured a “supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.” A group of more than 1,100 Wikipedia editors have also signed a letter of support for the union. On Monday, just days after the massive Wikimania Conference concluded in Paris, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it would not voluntarily recognize the union and said the union would have to conduct a vote as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. “The Foundation’s responsibility is to ensure that they can make their own choice freely,” the foundation wrote in the statement. “So that every eligible employee has an equal voice, we believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.” “We have heard a range of views from staff, including concerns from those who have felt pressured to support union efforts and those who are confused by the unionization process,” the foundation added in a frequently asked questions section. “We have also seen a misunderstanding around what the union can do for global staff and Wikimedia movement communities.” The Wikimedia Foundation’s statement and its frequently asked questions section is full of very carefully-worded language that is common among companies and organizations that have fought against unionization. For example, the FAQ includes a long section about the benefits that Wikimedia Foundation already offers its staff, and the statement suggests that there is a “wide range of views on unionization” among employees.  Wikipedians immediately took issue with the timing of the statement and the language of it. On a talk page discussing the statement, the Wikimedia Foundation is getting hammered for the timing of the statement and the statement itself. “What a shameful decision to tie the process to the willingness of Trump-controlled NLRB. Everyone involved in denying the voluntary recognition should resign in disgrace or be driven out,” one editor wrote.  “The fact that this response came exactly 1 day after Wikimania shows that you are afraid of being confronted,” another wrote.  “This is an extremely disappointing statement. It says that ‘Foundation leadership respects the right of staff to unionize, if they choose to do so. That decision rests with them.’ But that decision has been made - by a supermajority of US-based staff. The only thing standing between the US WWU and recognition is WMF executive leadership, who could recognize the union today if they cared to,” a third wrote.  “As a U.S. trained labor lawyer and past organizer with WWU, this statement, alongside the WMF’s public facing community post reek of union-busting disinformation. What’s critical for the community to know is that a supermajority of the workers already did vote by signing a card. This ‘extra step’ is just a delay tactic that employers are advised to do when they don’t want a union,” a fourth wrote. “These WMF workers have already been extremely brave by expressly affirming their commitment to a union. Years of efforts to get this accomplished. This is not some rash decision by them. Moreover, the community supports their union too! It literally makes no sense as to why WMF thought this was the right decision here in this critical moment.” At Wikimania in Paris, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer Bernadette Meehan was asked about voluntarily recognizing the union. Meehan said “our focus is on executing and helping the core organizing team execute a great event. We will respond to that particular request when we have a chance to review it.” “We are supportive and we support employees’ right to unionize. The context is complicated because we operate in multiple different places,” she added. “We respect the right if it is the majority will of eligible staffers to unionize.”   The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This week Joseph talks to Mike Yeagley. As you’ll hear, he is a very interesting guy. He introduced parts of the government to the whole idea of commercially sourced location data. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying the data, and showing what could be done with it. It’s a fascinating conversation.

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.

• How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview with GQ in May, after sharing an image of herself posing with Drake on Instagram, Slime Dot directly denied accusations that she was an “AI artist,” saying “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ originally credulously published the interview and said it was “debunking the AI rumors.” Eventually, GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.” This confusion could have been avoided if Spotify had done what many of its users and critics have been begging it to do since AI music generators like Suno and Udio made it trivial to flood the internet with AI music. Spotify could flag Slime Dot and other AI-generated music on its platform as such. Other platforms, like YouTube, already do this.  Since Spotify doesn’t do that, users can visit SoullessMusic.com, a database for “AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody.” There, Slime Dot is listed as “almost certainly AI” based on an analysis of three of the tracks and the fact that Slime Dot released such a large number of tracks in a short period of time. Alternatively, users could go to SlopTracker, where they can upload files or copy/paste links to Spotify tracks to run them through a tool which will tell them, with varying degrees of confidence, whether a song was AI-generated or not. SlopTracker found that Slime Dot’s track “Fully” was 95 percent likely to be AI generated by Suno.  “I didn't know what's AI and what's not,” Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, told me. “And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there's loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist's look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.” Last year, I wrote a story about an exceptionally bad example of what Fulton is talking about. A scammer used Spotify to publish AI-generated music under the name of a real, dead musician, seemingly in an attempt to syphon money from his popularity via streams. After I published that story I heard from several (living) artists who said the same thing happened to them. A similar case involving a Danish jazz musician was covered by Danish publications in April.  Another reader recently told me about a popular Spotify artist that was publishing hours of Iranian jazz every week. The channel, Qajar Jazz, which popped up in December of last year, has 29,579 monthly listeners, gained more popularity after the start of the U.S. war with Iran and the channel making vague allusions to resilience and preserving culture in video descriptions and comments on YouTube. Unlike Spotify, Qajar Jazz videos on YouTube are labeled as being AI-generated in the fine print, though it’s unclear if the channel tagged itself as such or if YouTube did. Both SoullessMusic and SlopTracker detect it as being AI generated.  Qajar Jazz did not respond to a request for comment.  Many of the YouTube comments on Qajar Jazz videos indicate that people think the music is made by real people. In addition to creating a database of AI generated music on Spotify, SoullessMusic also collects social media posts from people who say they were similarly tricked by AI generated music. Some posts are from musicians who lament the fact that they are now competing with algorithms that can produce thousands of tracks with no effort, and others are from artists whose music was directly ripped off by AI artists.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by 𝓘𝓼𝓪𝓫𝓮𝓵 (@isabel_music_official) View this post on Instagram A post shared by UMAW (@weareumaw) Fulton said he started looking around on GitHub for open source AI music detection tools, and ended up building a new, open source detector that relies on open source models called SONICS, the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, and other open data sets. SoullessMusic also  scans a track’s metadata for any tags that might tie it back to a specific AI music generator, and Fulton says he also has a script that scans Wikipedia for existing entries on an artist. Users can submit tracks from Spotify to the site they suspect are AI generated, and Fulton reviews them manually before adding them to the database. Despite all of this, he admits the system is not perfect.  Both Soulless Music and SlopTracker use AI and other automated tools to detect AI music. As we’ve written previously, using AI detectors to detect AI content is an inherently flawed process that can lead to false positives. When I asked him how he handles cases of false positives, Fulton said “it's not ideal when that happens, but it's going to happen because it's still quite tricky to check what's AI and what’s not.” Spotify’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to label AI-generated music makes it impossible to track how much money its making on the platform. Last year, the company announced that it would it would AI disclosures on AI generated music, but I haven’t seen it on any of the dozens of tracks I reviewed for this story. Udio and Sudo both include inaudible digital watermarking in their generation, which in theory could make it easy for Spotify to tag these tracks.  "We're employing a layered approach that combines enforcement, artist controls and greater transparency," a Spotify spokesperson told me after this article was first published. "Over the past year, we've introduced policies targeting harmful AI-related behaviors like spam, impersonation and deceptive content, alongside new tools that give artists more control and listeners more context. These include Verified by Spotify, which helps listeners identify authentic artist profiles; AI Credits, where artists disclose when and how AI was used in creating their music, with tens of thousands of AI credit disclosures now being submitted each day; and Artist Profile Protection, which gives artists more control over what appears on their profiles. We are continuing to build on these efforts.” Spotify also pointed me to several tracks it had flagged as AI on the mobile app, like Better Times by Mike Mana. Soulless music attempts to quantify that number based on publicly available streaming data. The small number of AI artists tracked on SoullessMusic generate an estimated $5.7 million a year, with the most popular AI artist, mikeeysmind, generating $1.5 million annually alone. In April, Deezer, a Spotify competitor that attempts to tag all AI-generated music on its platform, said 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI generated. SlopTracker, which attempts to track AI generated music on Spotify that is featured on official Spotify-curated playlists, that those artists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could be making the music instead.

I’m marching across Lower Manhattan in the middle of a heatwave with a friendly mob of Luddite gnomes, and there isn’t a phone in sight. It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in the streets while chanting anti-Big Tech slogans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march, urging the confused spectators recording us to put away their pocket rectangles and join us in our sweaty, phone-less revelry. The gnomes are headed West, towards Washington Square Park, where they plan to carry out a public show trial for OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. It’s the fourth iteration of a theatrical protest event they call “S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E,” which stands for “Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience.” This time, the protest isn’t a one-off. It’s part of the “Summer of Ludd,” a week-long festival of free public events organized and advertised entirely off of tech platforms and social media. The Summer of Ludd doesn’t have a website, but you can call a phone number to get a run-down of the events happening each day around the city. The schedule includes everything from an “offline rizz” workshop designed to help you ditch dating apps, a phone-free rave called “Let’s Get Off Together,” internet piracy 101 skill-shares, and an outdoor play that retells the story of the original Luddites. I found out about the Summer of Ludd from a local event mailing list called NYC Off Tech, but other folks I met throughout the week learned about it from posters wheat-pasted around their neighborhoods, paper event guides distributed to bookstores and coffee shops, or just word-of-mouth from friends. Basically, the whole thing is an experiment designed to prove a single point: You don’t need social media and extractive tech platforms to meet people and have fun. “Google knows next to nothing / My mom knows everything!” the gnomes chant as they hand out gnome hats to random bystanders and implore them to put away their phones. The hats, I’m told, are a reference to a Dutch anarchist group from the 1970s known for their impish culture-jamming and absurd carnival humor. It’s also “just kinda silly,” one of the organizer gnomes explains to me. At the front of the march, two gnomes carry a giant cardboard smartphone labeled “ChatGPT,” which lists off the various well-documented social ills caused by chatbot tools. “Even if it gives us rabies / we will free the iPad babies,” the gnomes continue chanting as they set the smartphone effigy down on a grassy knoll, next to a soapbox that will be used as a witness stand. The crowd is all-ages, but skews heavily Gen-Z — consistent with recent polls showing that young people have become some of Big Tech’s fiercest critics. Images courtesy Janus Rose One by one, witnesses take the stand to accuse Altman of numerous crimes perpetrated by OpenAI — from training models on artists’ work, to inducing AI psychosis, to accelerating the climate crisis with polluting and power-hungry AI datacenters. “I used AI to write one of my essays and got in trouble. Now I’m starting a war on AI,” one young person says from atop the soapbox, receiving cheers of approval. “These companies want you to think that you’re dumb, but that is a lie. Everyone here is smart. Everyone here is creative,” says another witness, describing how tech companies design AI tools and social media apps to make people dependent on them — making them feel helpless, alienated, and addicted to the endless scroll. The crowd roars its unanimous verdict in unison (“GUILTY!”) and everyone begins joyfully stomping on the giant cardboard GPT phone. Leading them is a gnome “executioner” holding a hammer that bears the phrase “Enoch Made Them / Enoch Shall Break Them” — an homage to the original 19th Century Luddites, who named the hammers they famously used to smash factory machines after the guy who made both the machines and the hammers. It’s tempting to compare the spectacle to something from the days of Occupy Wall Street. But what sets the Summer of Ludd apart from what one might expect of a Luddite protest is its lack of cynicism and an overwhelming abundance of raw, anarchic joy. Far from the distorted caricature of Luddites as curmudgeonly, puritanical tsk-tsk’ers, the new Luddites attract people to their movement through playfulness and participation. Instead of shaming others for too much screen time, they use public events to make their points for them, demonstrating organically and in real-time that the “indispensable” tech we’ve organized our lives around is not so indispensable after all. I first met the Luddites a week earlier in Tompkins Square Park, for a press conference hosted by their official spokesperson: a puppet made of garbage. I joined a small group of journalists sitting in plastic chairs and directing questions at the puppet, who is named Gowanus, after the famously putrid Brooklyn canal where the parts of its patchwork body were found. Gowanus is the Luddites’ “media spokespuppet,” a stand-in created to maintain the organizers’ anonymity while interfacing with digital media platforms and their operatives—including me. As one might imagine, the Luddites are very averse to any kind of social media. Smartphones are verboten, and they ask every journalist present to sign a “Terms of Service” agreement on a comically long brown paper scroll, which states that nothing we capture may be used to make “short-form video content” like TikToks or Instagram Reels. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I kept my phone stowed away and used nothing but my Hobonichi notebook, a pen, and a small voice memo recorder to do my reporting for this article. “We are interested in building alternative social infrastructure that allows us to be no longer reliant on Big Tech,” Gowanus told the group of journalists as they dutifully scribbled notes. “All our events are free, and defy any sort of transactionalism or consumption. We’re trying to dispel that transactional element and get people to participate and create the events themselves. That is what the Summer of Ludd is all about.” On my train ride home, I pondered the irony of being a journalist covering an event series designed to resist digital capture and consumption. When I reached my subway stop, I noticed an ad for the second-hand online marketplace Backmarket, showing a pink Nintendo Game Boy with the text “AB > AI.” Someone drew a heart next to it in black sharpie marker—an anonymous mark of approval that felt like the opposite of the subway ads for the “Friend” AI device that were widely and virally defaced last year. Almost reflexively, I took a picture of the ad with my phone and posted it to BlueSky with the caption: “Hatred of AI now reaching the level of cultural consensus that becomes attractive to advertisers.” I woke up the next morning to thousands and thousands of interactions, many from people delighted to see their anti-AI sentiment vaguely reflected in a subway ad for overpriced second-hand goods. This made me think about the classic political trap, where capitalists co-opt social movements by channeling their radical potential into harmless forms of aesthetic consumption and feckless identity politics.  How can the neo-Luddites resist these inevitable attempts at co-optation? Can Luddism generate mass-appeal beyond Y2K aesthetic Tiktok trends, where Gen-Z’ers marvel at flip phones, iPods, and other retro tech as a kind of performative false-nostalgia? And how do you build a successful movement while eschewing the most common (albeit flawed) tools of mass-communication? The Digital Packrat ManifestoDRM and big tech’s war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.404 MediaJanus Rose Members of the Luddite Renaissance—as the loose-knit, anonymous collective that organized the Summer of Ludd refer to themselves—attempt to answer these questions in “The Event is the Medium,” a zine manifesto referencing the famous Marshall McLuhan quote which, naturally, is only available in physical paper format (The Luddites humbly request that none of their work be uploaded to social media). The central idea is utilizing public space to run events that get people to experience—and directly participate in—what Luddism has to offer in 2026, instead of just yelling at people on a street corner. What should these Events entail? This is where the Luddites become intentionally vague—not for lack of answers, but as a defense mechanism designed to make the Event unpredictable and unmonetizable. If social media’s role is to consume and metabolize human existence into an endless scroll of bite-sized, short-form video content, then the Event’s purpose is to bring people together in ways that defy categorization and documentation. Like the “Happenings” of 1960s performance artist Allan Kaprow, they can be anything and everything—as long as they are free, participatory, and never, ever boring. “The Event may seem nebulous and surreal to you; this is on purpose,” the Luddites write in their zine manifesto. “DIY shows, teach-ins, art fairs, all come with a preconceived notion of what will happen. This causes people to act in a ritualized or transactional way. Any way that you can break through the monotony of ‘coolness’ to facilitate earnestness and urgency is paramount.” In other words: If the event is the medium, the message is that being a Luddite is fun again. I returned to Tompkins Square several times over the next week. Throughout the Summer of Ludd festivities, the Luddites had transformed the formerly-bohemian Lower East Side hangout into a kind of town square. They camped out at the park each day, providing free food, zines, and plenty of ways to plug in to the various happenings throughout the city. Basically, if you wanted to find out what the Luddites are all about, you had to meet them here, in person. Images courtesy Summer of Ludd Somewhere in the large crowd that had gathered for the gnome protest, I ran into Motherboard founder and fellow low-tech appreciator Alex Pasternak, along with “extremely online” journalist Taylor Lorenz, who recently told WIRED that her screen time averages 17 hours a day. Also present was Reverend Billy, leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, whose corporate exorcisms and culture-jamming theatrics have been a staple of NYC protests since the 90s. “Chronically online culture has become something we’re attached to, even as activists,” Bucky, one of the Luddite organizers, told a crowd of gnomes in the park, just prior to the million-gnome march. “Our consumer habits are tracked, analyzed, and sold back to us. Every time we seek fun in our little light-boxes, we feed a beast which surveils us, which exploits our time and our imagination, and which lines the pockets of big psycho assholes like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesson, and Tim Cook.” “I want my attention back!” someone shouts in response. The crowd cheers in agreement. Bucky mentions the 2012 Arab Spring uprisings as a pivotal example of how Silicon Valley extended this capture to the realm of activism. In the heyday of Twitter, tech companies and most of the Western press pushed a narrative that social media platforms were helping liberate people around the world from oppressive regimes. Thanks to these platforms and their beneficent corporate overlords, the argument went, the techno-utopian dream of the 90s internet would be realized, and dictators would crumble under the power of free information and free markets. Others like Evgeny Morozov argued that this framing was not only naïve and wrong, but allowed companies like Twitter and Facebook to advance their ambitions and establish themselves as centralized social infrastructure under the guise of do-gooder tech saviorism. At the same time, the ad-powered surveillance networks built by social media enabled governments to crack down on dissidents like never before, paving the way for things like facial recognition, algorithmic manipulation, and discriminatory digital ID laws. But there was another explanation for the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that had little to do with tech. “The reason hundreds of thousands of people went to Tahrir Square is because a million people lived within ten miles of it. That is public space, and public space is where politics happens,” said Bucky. “Public space is the new social media. Running an event is the new activist infographic on an Instagram story.” You’re Invited: 404 Media’s Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!We’re celebrating with TWO NIGHTS of good times: A live taping of the podcast, and a party the following night! Paid 404 Media subscribers get free and discounted access. Details below.404 MediaSamantha Cole With hatred of big tech and AI hitting the mainstream, it makes a lot of sense that something like the Summer of Ludd would emerge in this particular moment. Everywhere I go, there is an overwhelming sense that the Silicon Valley experiment is on its last legs. The companies that once aimed to make good products and postured as democracy-loving and progressive now open ally themselves with fascists, actively enshittify the internet with slop, and force-feed us annoying AI features that nobody wants. In response, the new Luddites seek not to abandon technology entirely, but build new infrastructure that embraces proximity and in-person human relationships, instead of alienation and doom-scrolling. “This is an activism of the moment,” internet culture theorist and media professor Douglas Rushkoff, who was also present for the Luddite gnome march, told 404 Media. “Even if the whole thing is ending, even if we’ve already lost, we’re gonna go and party. We’re gonna go down having fun. And if we can have a good enough party in face-to-face, non-technological, non-digital interaction, we will seduce the world like Abby Hoffman never could.” As the person who coined the rise of “viral” media back in the 90s, Rushkoff has been paying attention to tech backlash trends longer than most. His 2016 book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” captures a pivotal moment where public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began to sour, as companies like Google and Facebook disrupted public infrastructure and reshaped the San Francisco Bay Area in their image. Over the next decade, the tech companies did away with their vaguely progressive, ‘Don’t Be Evil’ public image, and young people who came of age in the aftermath increasingly found themselves attracted to tech backlash and the neo-Luddite movement as a reflection of their lived reality. “The extent of the skinner box that this generation is living in is more extreme. We adapted to it as best we could, but they were born inside of it,” said Rushkoff. “Their hearts and their somatic sensibilities have been intentionally disrupted and stymied since they were born. And so they’re a good case study to show that whatever that part of us is, it will seek expression eventually.” Bleak job prospects and a visibly collapsing climate further explain why some of the biggest moments of Big Tech backlash in recent months have come from Gen-Z—like the series of viral videos showing graduates booing tech CEOs for praising AI during their commencement speeches. But the Luddites are quick to point out that their movement is multi-generational, and their goals for the Summer of Ludd can’t be realized through the medium of news headlines and viral online attention. Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, “AI SUCKS!”404 MediaSamantha Cole So, what am I doing here? Why am I writing this article, attempting to capture the essence of a movement and an event that—by its very nature and stated intention—refuses to be captured? Maybe it’s because journalism is best when it acts as a cultural placeholder, a blurry indication that something happened here, and perhaps will keep happening in the future. It’s also a kind of beacon for others to find—an indication that the “inevitable” future tech companies keep threatening us with is perhaps not so inevitable, and that humans aren’t so hopeless at finding each other and creating new ways to live. “Part of the concept is: You had to be there,” Rushkoff told me. “It’s like oh, Earth? You had to be there. Life? You had to be there.” You just had to be there.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual magic. First, scientists have uncovered a “golden age” of languages that flourished for millennia before fading into our dark age of linguistic extinction. Then, Alan Turing’s erotica, the search for the first exomoon, and the cave of the Old Ancestors. As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.  The silence of long-lost languages Blasi, Damián et al. The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene. Science. Some 3,000 years ago, a “golden age” of languages dawned around the world, resulting in the proliferation of tens of thousands of tongues over the next 2,000 years. But over the past millennia, we have entered a dark age of linguistic diversity, driven by the rise of “behemoth languages” that have pushed others into extinction. That’s the conclusion of a new study that reconstructed humanity’s linguistic diversity since the dawn of agriculture, which emerged about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.  The global human population before agriculture is estimated to have been between 4.4 and seven million people. Modern hunter-gatherer societies can act as rough proxies for the likely distribution, sizes, and linguistic diversity of these preagricultural populations. With that in mind, researchers led by Damián Blasi of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona developed a model based on 171 hunter-gatherer groups, which suggested that humans spoke about 4,500 to 6,000 languages before the dawn of agriculture. That’s fewer than the 7,500 that are spoken today, but still a lot considering how few people there were on Earth at the time. The team then ran thousands of models predicting how languages diversified and evolved as humans adopted plant and animal domestication, a process that radically increased populations and complexified cultures. The predictions converged around a scenario in which linguistic diversity peaked around 2,000 years ago with possibly as many 75,000 tongues spoken worldwide.   “We uncovered a linguistic ‘golden age’ with tens of thousands of languages 3,000 to 1,000 years ago,” Blasi’s team said in the study.”In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia.” The spread of colonialism over the past 500 years has accelerated language loss due to the ascent of behemoth languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi. But the new study suggests that linguistic diversity was already in decline starting at least 1,000 years ago due to the formation of smaller-scale multinational empires. Sadly, this trend of linguistic impoverishment has far-reaching consequences beyond language itself. “Languages (and their histories) are regularly utilized as proxies for other units of culture because language is often transmitted and acquired along with other cultural traits, including marriage patterns, religious practices, kinship systems, or modes of social organization,” the team concluded. “Therefore, cultural variants with transmission dynamics similar to those of languages have also undergone a recent mass extinction.” In other news… The unfinished work of Alan Turing Dillon, Sarah. “‘Pryce’s Buoy’: Alan Turing’s Autofictional Short Story.” The Review of English Studies. Alan Turing, the famed British mathematician who helped break the Nazi enigma code, packed a mind-boggling list of accomplishments into his short life. A foundational figure in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing died at just 41 of cyanide poisoning in the wake of horrific persecution from the British government for what was then the crime of being a gay man.  In his spare time from dramatically changing the course of history, Turing also tried his hand at writing fiction, according to a new study about his erotic short story “Pryce’s Buoy.” The draft is an autofictional account of Turing’s affair with his young lover Arnold Murray, a relationship that ultimately forced Turing to endure a sentence of chemical castration to avoid prison in the 1950s. Sarah Dillon with the handwritten draft of “Pryce’s Buoy.” Image: © King’s College, Cambridge The draft is cut short before any sexual encounter between the characters—perhaps because Turing’s family censored it, or perhaps because Turing left it unfinished—though the tale is very clearly headed to the bedroom. Sarah Dillon of the University of Cambridge revisits the story in a new study that contextualizes it in the final years of Turing's life and links it directly to the works of gay writer Sir Angus Wilson by revealing that Turing copied many of Wilson’s stylistic choices.  “Wilson braved…dangers—he did not hide his homosexuality, and he did publish his work,” said Dillon in the study. “Turing did not hide his sexuality either, and although he did not publish his story, we cannot say whether this was through choice or because of the abrupt end to his life in June 1954.” Turing’s life story is heartbreaking, but Dillon emphasized that “Pryce’s Buoy” is an expression of his playful, cheeky side, which persisted even in the midst of the immense injustice to which he was subjected.  That’s no moon—it’s an exosatellite Hoy, Kevin et al. “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star.” Nature. Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit other stars, but nobody has clearly spotted an “exomoon” orbiting one of these exoplanets. Now, a team reports the discovery of a Jupiter-sized world that is orbiting a massive object called a brown dwarf that is, in turn, orbiting a star called CD-35 2722, which is about 73 light years from Earth.  Concept art of the CD-35 2722 system, with the brown dwarf in the foreground, orbited by an exosatellite. Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser This might be the first known exomoon, but the system is so weird and novel that researchers aren’t quite sure that’s the right term. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called “failed stars” because they are about as big as a gas planet can get without igniting nuclear fusion in their cores and transforming into stars. Moons orbit planets, and brown dwarfs are somewhere in between a planet and a star, so the team went with the term “exosatellite.” “Exoplanet satellites can be easily described as exomoons, but it is not clear if satellites of brown dwarf companions can be called the same, as the term lacks a formal definition,” said researchers led by Kevin Hoy of Diego Portales University. “Perhaps we are approaching the limit of language invented to describe the Solar System, which is entirely unlike CD-35 2722.” This is why you should always bring a poet! Whether or not the giant exosatellite gets minted as the first exomoon, the discovery is an exciting example of how diverse star systems are increasingly coming into focus. The cave of the Old Ancestors Grono, Elle et al. “Phytoliths from Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai country (southeastern Australia) reveal the gathering of whole grasses for burning practices inside the cave.” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. For at least 25,000 years, the “Old Ancestors” of Aboriginal Australians gathered to burn grass and perform magic rituals within Cloggs Cave, a cavernous site several hundred miles east of Melbourne.  While the immense significance of the cave is well-known to the GunaiKurnai people of the region, as well as to generations of archaeologists, a new study has confirmed the deep roots of the site as a ritual setting for the Old Ancestors. Researchers led by Elle Grono of the Australian National University unearthed layers of “phytoliths,” which are mineral structures found in plant cells, to corroborate that the cave has been a site of magic and healing for 25,000 years. GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett at the cave entrance of Cloggs Cave. Image: Jess Shapiro, courtesy of GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation “Taken together, the archaeological features and multiple lines of archaeobotanical evidence at Cloggs Cave corroborates traditional GunaiKurnai knowledge and nineteenth century ethnography of ritual practices involving the use of plant resources, indicating that the cave was a special, secluded place used by mulla-mullung, powerful learned men and women, for the practice of magic, healing, cursing and spiritual practices,” said the team in their new study. In our disorienting time of ephemeral reels and shortened attention spans, there’s inspiration in the incredible continuity of this storied cave, which has witnessed thousands of generations seeking solace in its confines. 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 astrology, Flock on the brain, The Odyssey, and more. JASON: This week I wrote pretty much exclusively about Flock, and I am working on a few more articles about automated license plate readers that will probably go in the next week or so. I am well aware that there are other topics in the world, but, basically, there is now so much interest in the company and its practices that I am getting inundated with tips, story ideas, and sources, and it feels like I have to chase many of the leads I’m getting. There are only so many hours in the day, so this means some other things I want to cover are either falling by the wayside or will have to wait.  This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

After the Los Angeles Police Department allowed its contract with Flock to expire, the surveillance company’s CEO, Garrett Langley, told local news that people don’t understand how its technology works, and that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) only take a “static picture” of a car. “The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. "A car drives by, we take a picture. It's a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That's what the technology is—it's actually not that complicated, it's pretty simple."  But for the last year, Flock has been marketing a new upgrade that allows “all” of its ALPRs to record live video. Langley is either dramatically underselling what Flock’s technology can do while saying that people don’t understand it, or Flock has quietly rolled back a major product feature without telling anyone. (Update: after the publication of this piece, a Flock spokesperson said Flock has discontinued the feature for law enforcement agencies.) Flock has not been quiet about this live video upgrade; its salespeople have pitched the upgrade to cities, and the company has mentioned it in numerous blog posts (though it recently deleted one of them), and Langley even spoke about the capabilities with Forbes last year, suggesting cops could pull video in real time from its ALPR cameras: “We will just open up the five nearest cameras in real time and say, here's what's happening right now,” Langley said.  In June of last year, a Flock blog post called “Why video is the missing link in your LPR program,” the company wrote “All existing Flock LPRs will soon stream live video and capture clips with a free, optional software update. No new hardware, no permits, no extra cost. Same lens, same angle and field-of-view as the LPR. See basic video clips for every plate read. Zero lift for your team. Free and optional to opt in.” The blog post describes several potential use cases, and different setups that police officers could use, which include adding a separate video camera to the poles that Flock cameras are installed on but also, crucially, includes the fact that all Flock ALPR cameras are capable of taking video: “Fixed live video is coming to all LPR cameras, free by end of 2025.” And, in a now-deleted product launch blog, Flock wrote “LPR Cameras Can Become Video Cameras,” and added it was a “move that will transform the largest network of LPR cameras in the nation.”  “Flock customers don’t have to do a thing or pay a thing,” said Flock’s Chief Strategy Officer Bailey Quintrell in the blog post. “This will be a no-cost software update we push over the cloud.” Text messages obtained using a public records request by Jason Hunyar, an activist in Dunwoody, Georgia, show that cops in Dunwoody turned on this feature. The text messages are between John Watson, a Flock employee, and a Dunwoody police officer from January of this year. “Are y’all able to live stream LPR video yet?,” Watson asks. “Yes,” the officer says. “When did they turn that on and how has it been. And who turned it on?” Watson responds. “It’s been about a month and it’s pretty cool feature,” the officer says. “Small angles but cool for incidents if needed. I’ve been working with Vijay [Dhamija, Flock’s Director of Product] on it.”  “Gotcha. Any stability issues?,” Watson asks. “Not that I have noticed,” the officer responds. The Flock spokesperson said, “This was not a broad rollout. Five law enforcement agencies participated in a limited pilot to test live video on select LPR devices; the LAPD was not among them.” “In March, Flock discontinued the feature for law enforcement agencies, and it is no longer active at any of the five participating agencies. The pilot provided live video only and did not include recording or stored-video playback,” the spokesperson added. Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Flock.

Patreon laid off 93 employees, totaling 20 percent of its workforce on Thursday morning, according to an email to creators and staff from CEO Jack Conte. In a message sent to everyone on the platform signed up as a creator, and posted to the site, with the subject line “A Painful Update about our Team,” Conte wrote that the business is “healthy and strong” and that the core business of Patreon is not changing.  Conte included the email sent to Patreon employees in the message. In the email, he wrote that the company is undergoing both a “workforce reduction” and is “changing our organizational structure and how we work.” Specifically, he wrote, this means “we’re flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.” Conte is careful in this email to both express that he doesn’t view AI as a replacement for the human creativity the platform is built on and profits from — devoting a section of the email to saying as much — and also that AI is fundamentally “transforming” the tech industry, noting that it has an impact on how the company operates.  “To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” Conte wrote. “The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply. That’s my personal opinion, but more importantly, it’s the foundation of Patreon’s strategy: our product vision and business are both predicated on the value of human creativity and human connection. AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.” Earlier this month, Patreon announced that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models. “I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Conte wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.” The company later elaborated on the partnership in a blog post. Included in the internal email shared publicly are severance details for laid-off workers, including 16 weeks of pay, remaining on payroll through the company’s August 20 vesting date, one additional week of pay for every full year worked at the company, additional cash payments for recent hires who haven’t reached their one-year cliff, healthcare coverage through the end of the year for eligible employees and families, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptops.

A little over a month ago, the former American Idol contestant, country musician, and Instagram influencer Noah Orion appears to have learned about the surveillance company Flock. “Cities are now covering Flock cameras with trash bags,” Orion narrated over an Instagram post aggregating a 404 Media report. “It’s also pretty wild that we’ve just dropped stickers that say ‘Fuck Flock’ on them and it’s pretty cool that it’s coincidental that the sticker’s outside diameter is the same size as the average camera lens on a Flock camera,” he adds, showing a mockup of an AI-generated sticker featuring a surveillance camera that is not a Flock camera. Orion had never posted on Instagram about Flock before then. But, since that post, Orion has posted dozens of reels about Flock, apparently at great personal risk to himself. A July 8 post features an image of a printed out “CEASE AND DESIST” letter purportedly sent to Orion by Dan Haley, Flock’s head of legal affairs. “It has come to the attention of Flock Group Inc. that you have engaged in conduct involving the unauthorized dissemination of photographs, videos, memes, screenshots, or other visual materials in a manner that encourages your fans to claim and place stickers that constitute a rude and unusual manner towards our company and association. You are hereby instructed to immediately cease and desist from any further use of such materials […] any further demeaning actions or posts will result in legal action. Failure to comply with this demand may result in Flock Group inc. [sic] to persecute you and your organization to the fullest extent of the law.”  The post has 73,000 likes and has been viewed millions of times. Since that post, Orion has posted the same letter 16 separate times on Instagram, and is now posting about almost nothing besides Flock. On Tuesday, he posted a reel stating “I could go to jail soon, and I am not afraid of that. I am pushing a movement against Flock cameras.” In that video, he said he’s starting a “bail fund” in case he’s arrested and goes to jail. Collectively, these posts and videos have hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views.  But the cease-and-desist is not real; it is a wholesale fabrication created by the influencer for attention, likes, and clout. He is at zero risk of persecution or arrest for speaking out about Flock (though he may be at risk for forging a fake cease-and-desist letter.) In the meantime, Orion has gotten more than 30,000 new followers in the last month according to the Instagram tracking website NotJustAnalytics, a period in which he has posted essentially only about Flock and, primarily, about his stickers and his cease-and-desist letter.  This constant focus on his apparent legal trouble is a relatively typical pattern for Orion; before Flock, he was posting endlessly about how his modified bus with massive speakers was going to be impounded by the authorities. Before that, he was talking about how he was going to be evicted from the space in which he modified the bus. Over the last few months, we have seen the rise of various anti-Flock influencers and activists, and increased scrutiny from journalists, YouTubers, and independent researchers. Content about Flock has become quite popular on social media, and the vast majority of posts are from well-meaning people who are amplifying real reporting and real — if occasionally exaggerated or slightly misconstrued — information about one of the most invasive mass surveillance companies in the country. Alongside this has come lots of viral posts that either slightly misunderstand or oversell what Flock is doing or is capable of, or get, for example, the exact mechanics of how ICE may obtain Flock data wrong.  On balance, most of these posts are at least directionally correct. There is room in the movement against mass surveillance for hyperbole, satire, comedy, stunts, and misunderstandings done by well-meaning people, especially if there is a broader point. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah (@noahorion42) That is not what Orion and some of his copycats are doing, however. Most charitably, Orion is making people aware of Flock and could be making people more likely to do more research into the company or is making them more likely to take political or direct action to prevent surveillance. He’s a bro spreading the word, and perhaps his heart is in the right place. But, basically, he is making shit up to make himself and his country music career more famous by creating and sowing disinformation in a space where there are dozens of journalists and influencers working hard for more transparency, and positioning himself as being somehow at legal or criminal risk when people who are doing actual needle-moving work struggle to stand out or are actually being threatened. On every post, Orion tries to give away stickers and tells people to comment “Fuck Flock” in order to get them. This is a tactic to game the Instagram algorithm with engagement; Orion has set up a bot to automatically message anyone who comments on his posts with links to his online store which has a variety of free stickers, paid merch, and a “bail fund in case I go to jail.”  Flock and its lawyers have sent real cease-and-desist letters or otherwise threatened the creators of both DeFlock, an open-source project to map Flock cameras, and HaveIBeenFlocked, a database of Flock searches done by cops around the country. Alongside reporting by 404 Media and local journalists, DeFlock has led directly to the massive, decentralized, grassroots movement of residents in small towns and big cities pressuring their city councils to end their Flock contracts. Activists and journalists using HaveIBeenFlocked have uncovered numerous cases of police abuse and ICE surveillance that has led directly to firings and arrests, policy changes, and canceled contracts. The strategies deployed by Flock against these sites are far more sophisticated and scary than the obviously bullshit cease-and-desist letter fabricated by Orion.  Flock went after Cris van Pelt, the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, by repeatedly trying to get his web hosting revoked by its provider by claiming the site both violated the company’s intellectual property rights and by saying that the site “poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.” Flock directly warned police about this website, which led different divisions of the FBI to warn law enforcement about the site, squarely putting a target on the site. Through a third-party law firm, Flock separately threatened DeFlock by sending a cease-and-desist to Will Freeman, the creator of the site. To fend off that cease-and-desist, Freeman had to get representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, called DeFlock a “terroristic organization” in an on-camera interview with Forbes. After that interview repeatedly went viral, Langley finally apologized in a second interview with Forbes earlier this month. These are actual threats, against people actually doing the work. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah (@noahorion42) It is hard to see how Orion shouting nonsense into a camera to his 800,000 followers benefits anyone but himself; after his first few viral posts, various other Instagram accounts began posting fake Flock cease-and-desist letters to promote, for example, “The Saturday Salon,” an event series in Orange County, California that largely promotes its events via AI-generated posters (Saturday Salon also created a fake Palantir cease-and-desist in January).  Benn Jordan, a researcher and YouTuber who has uncovered various Flock security flaws and has become one of the most important voices speaking out against Flock, made a video about Orion’s fake cease-and-desists in which he said “Can y'all just eat Tide Pods or something and stop making this fight even harder than it already is?” “If you get sued for doing this, I have absolutely no sympathy for you, because if somebody made a fake cease-and-desist or lawsuit letter from me and forged my name and posted it online for attention making me look bad, I would sue the fuck out of them,” Jordan said. “More importantly, Flock frames me like Jake Paul, like a hyperbolic YouTuber who’s just doing magic tricks and making things up to make the company look bad for my own personal gain, and by doing so, they’re able to squash and make it seem risky to read real reports about security vulnerabilities, or Fourth Amendment right violations. And I can guaran-fuckin-tee you that they will use these fake letters as an example to lump in with actual, meaningful critical research about police surveillance.” Haley, Flock’s chief legal officer, told me in a LinkedIn message that “of course they are fake.” Haley added via a spokesperson that “We’re aware of at least two forged letters circulating on the internet, including this one [referring to Orion’s], that purport to be cease-and-desist letters from our legal department. To be clear: these letters did not come from me or from anyone at Flock. Flock welcomes and encourages public debate about our technology. We have not and would not seek to discourage, prevent, or prohibit such discussion and debate. In fact, we would be happy to participate in any such discussions the group in question might host in the future." Orion did not respond to an Instagram message I sent him asking about the fake cease-and-desist letter.

🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have discovered a previously unknown behavior in orcas that involves one member of a pod holding up a massive dead sunfish while another charges and rams it, resulting in the dramatic explosion of the carcass into fleshy fragments, according to a study published on Thursday in Frontiers in Ethology.   Orcas often ram or strike prey as a hunting tactic, and some pods are also notorious for ramming boats. But the new study is the first to report such explosive results and sheds light on the mysterious lives of orca pods in the Gulf of California. The hold-and-ram strategy allows juvenile orcas to feed on smaller chunks of tissue and may also serve as a form of social learning and play in these highly intelligent marine mammals.  0:00 /0:38 1× Erick Higuera, a wildlife cinematographer and marine biologist, first observed orcas detonating a sunfish in 2021. The tactic was captured in follow-up footage by marine biologist Kathryn Ayres in 2024, as well as video from another event in 2025, filmed by Héctor Franz, who works in ecotourism.  “The first time I witnessed it, at that moment, the energy of the impact was astounding because we could hear the sound when the orca ran into the sunfish,” said Higuera, who co-authored the new study, in a call with 404 Media. “Seeing a multi-ton predatory mammal striking a massive fish—because sunfishes can go up to two meters depending on the species—with such a fast speed is breathtaking, and immediately we knew that we were witnessing something highly unusual due to the magnitude of the tissue explosion.” Orcas are social animals that form tight-knit matrilineal pods that in turn belong to broader “ecotypes” with their own unique cultures and ranges. In the Northeastern Pacific, there are three genetically distinct lineages: resident orcas that primarily eat fish, transient orcas that mainly eat marine mammals, and offshore orcas that prey on sharks.  But less is known about the feeding behaviors of orcas at lower latitudes near the equator, which don’t seem to fall into such clear ecotypes. For years, Higuera and his colleagues have been capturing footage with drones and underwater cameras to better understand the mysterious pods that roam in the Gulf of California. That’s how they were able to fortuitously capture the explosive hold-and-ram strategy on film.  Sunfish are large, but easy to hunt, making them a popular target for orcas and other ocean predators. However, these animals have tough and rubbery flesh that is difficult to tear apart, especially for young orcas. For this reason, Higuera and his colleagues speculate that the ramming technique is primarily intended to loosen nutritious tissue from the carcass for juveniles to consume, noting that the adults focused on eating organs and meat from the body itself, leaving the fishy ejecta for their young. The behavior may also just be fun, as orcas often play with their food. “Orcas are highly encephalized predators that frequently engage in object manipulation and play behavior with their prey,” Higuera said. “That is very globally well known. Because sunfish are slow-moving and defenseless, they present a low-risk opportunity for the pod, especially subadults, so they can practice strike precision and reinforce social bonds. It's social play and learning.” The team plans to continue tracking the pod to better understand the behavior, and to learn whether the sunfish’s microbiome and enzymes might contain special nutrients for the orcas. At the same time, Higuera emphasized that human interactions with orcas should remain as limited as possible, especially since whale watching in the region has become a popular tourist activity.   “This groundbreaking insight was only made possible through a vital collaboration between expert scientists, eco-tourism operators, and citizen scientists equipped with drones and cameras that are willing to provide their footage to us so that we don't spend that much time in the field,” Higuera said. “If we can protect these animals by maintaining a respectful distance,” he concluded, “this ongoing partnership will allow us to safely document hidden mysteries of marine life that would otherwise remain completely closed to science.” 🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Thursday, July 30th at 1PM ET. That's in just one week today! Add it to your calendar!  So, what’s the FOIA Forum? We'll share our screen and show you specifically how we file FOIA requests. We take questions from the chat and incorporate those into our FOIAs in real-time. This time we're particularly focused on city council meetings. Jason watches a lot of these and has tips for more quickly navigating and finding information within them. He then does a bunch of public records requests based on what happened in the meeting. He'll explain all of this, from Flock to other topics too. If this will be your first FOIA Forum, don’t worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too. Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join. We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along! This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

We start this week with Joseph’s story on how cops are using Flock to track actual people, not just cars, with searches like “male with tattoos.” After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the company that is explicitly selling mountains of books to AI companies and promising to keep the sales a secret. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us how he learned about the Suno hack and what it showed us. 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. ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠⁠How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars⁠⁠AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop⁠⁠Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius⁠

Apple says it has fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email feature which let essentially anyone figure out a user’s real email address which was supposed to be protected by the feature. Apple only fixed the vulnerability after 404 Media wrote about it at the start of July, despite Apple knowing about the issue for more than a year. The news also follows the filing of a class action lawsuit against Apple over the vulnerability. On Wednesday Apple told 404 Media it deployed a patch for the issue on July 3, which the company says has fully resolved the issue.  Hide My Email is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ product. It lets customers quickly create a new, anonymous email address they can then use to sign up to websites, services, or email people with. The generated email addresses typically contain two random words followed by a number and the @icloud.com domain. I use it heavily so hackers may have a harder time cross-referencing my activity and accounts across data breaches, for example.  💡Do you know about any other privacy issues like 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 joseph@404media.co. Tyler Murphy, co-founder of EasyOptOuts, discovered he was able to find the real email address of Hide My Email users. At the time, Murphy said, “We don't know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable.” That included mine, which we tested. Murphy first reported the issue to Apple in June 2025. Over the subsequent months, Apple said it was looking into the issue and said it had fixed it; Murphy found it was still exploitable; and Apple again said it was looking into it. Murphy, thinking Apple may not fix the issue at all, then contacted 404 Media, around a year after Apple learned of the vulnerability. When 404 Media first covered the issue several weeks ago, we did not include any details on how it worked because Apple had not fixed it. Meaning, if we published more specifics, third parties might figure out how to exploit it and reveal peoples’ real email addresses. Now Apple says it has been fixed, we can add that, in simple terms, it required sending a target Hide My Email user a message that got rejected as spam. “We don't know how often hidden email addresses were leaked in email logs. For many major email hosts, the leak was triggered simply by an email being automatically rejected as spam, even if it was a legitimate message. Such emails probably didn't make it to your inbox, so you can’t review your spam folder to learn whether you were affected,” Murphy and EasyOptOut co-founder Ben Weiner said in a new statement. “The bug that caused Apple's Hide My Email to leak hidden email addresses to senders has been fixed. However, we don't think the risk to Hide My Email users has been eliminated. Because non-malicious emails could bounce, revealing your hidden email address, and because mail transfer logs are often retained, we'd assume that any hidden email address linked to a Hide My Email address created before July 7, 2026, may have been exposed and could still be in third-party logs,” they added. The class action lawsuit against Apple seeks full recovery of the subscription costs customers paid for the feature and an injunction against Apple for its “deceptive conduct,” PCMag reported.

🎉YOU'RE INVITED! 404 Media is turning three, and we're throwing TWO separate events in NYC to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast with a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and an open-bar bash on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events. Not a 404 Media Supporter yet? Sign up, and get all the party details here. The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) looked at ways to arm quadcopter drones with weapons, according to a draft version of its drone manual shared with 404 Media. A draft version of the manual, which was live on the NOPD website in June, said that the department’s drones could only be equipped with weapons with written approval from the Superintendent of Police. The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft. “The manual published on July 1 is the current published version of the policy. Earlier versions were draft versions that were presented for review before adoption of the current policy,” NOPD told 404 media. “NOPD has made it clear we are not and will not be equipping drones with weapons or other hazardous materials.” NOPD didn’t answer follow-up questions about how or why the draft version of the manual was published. But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones. New Orleans has long been a pioneer of camera and drone driven policing and the cops have used controversial tactics to get around public scrutiny and regulations. It shows that what the police are circulating amongst themselves and thinking about privately, what they perhaps want to happen, does not match public policy. NOPD has a history of finding creative ways to work around public policy and scrutiny when it comes to surveillance tech. A private company called Project New Orleans operates a network of cameras that provide live facial recognition to the city’s cops. The company operated in secret cooperation with NOPD for two years before the Washington Post exposed it in 2025. According to the ACLU, NOPD has continued to use Project New Orleans in contravention of local laws and has stonewalled public records requests. Federal Aviation Authority regulations prohibit the operation of drones equipped with a “dangerous weapon.” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that he didn’t see how the police arming drones could possibly be legal. But the FAA regulation was written in 2018 and things have changed a lot in just the last few years. Last month, Guariglia argued that “we have precious little time” to stop police from arming their drones, and that the industry was moving that way. One of the companies selling NOPD its drones is Skydio. The US-based manufacturer of quadcopter drones has done very well since the Trump administration banned the sale of foreign-made drones last year. Skydio has always marketed itself as a drone company for first responders and had a cozy relationship with police departments around the country. In 2020, Skydio wrote “we will not put weapons on our drones and will oppose fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.”  But Skydio CEO Adam Bry walked this back in a June 15 interview on Decoder. “So this is an area where I think I’ve gotten some things wrong. We’ve said some things previously that led some folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones,” Bry said. “It’s not our place to tell them what they can and can’t do,” he said. “It should be up to the folks who’re putting their lives on the line to decide how to use it.” He added that terrorists don’t follow terms of service. “They don’t care what our policy says,” he said. “I think when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say: this is good, this is bad, more often than not you’re going to end up on the wrong side of moral questions.”  Guariglia also pointed to a planned pilot project in Georgia that will test “less lethal” armed drones to nominally stop school shootings. He noted that in recent years many drone regulations have been ignored or relaxed. “You used to have to have line of sight of your drones and now law enforcement [...] are phasing that out or offering exemptions,” Guariglia said. “If you want to police divisions a few years ago, they were selling drones capable of flying miles and miles in a couple of minutes and you’d ask them about the line of sight rule and they would just shrug. They are preparing for the day when law enforcement gets whatever they want.” “Clearly they’re thinking about it,” Guariglia said of the NOPD manual that included a provision for armed drones. “Drones have always been a bit of a solution in need of a problem. There are few things that police say they need drones for that they cannot get by other means, and I think by putting other tools on them, they are still on a quest to figure out what drones are really good for.” Arming drones could lower the bar for police to use force. “We have seen how consequence-free it can be for officers to deploy force at somebody who’s standing in front of them when they have to confront the fact that it’s a fellow human and they still have to draw their night stick or their Taser or their gun,” Guariglia said. “That would become so much easier and so much less emotionally and physically burdensome if they can deploy force by pressing a button.” All this tech costs a lot of money. “Cities are spending an astronomical amount on drones and for maintenance of the drones. They're hiring all these drone pilots. They have to have special infrastructure to fly all these drones, and companies are getting rich. But really, there is no problem in policing that drones have straight up solved yet,” Guariglia said. On June 24, the New Orleans city council approved a $250,000 budget request to expand Skydio’s reach in the French Quarter. The funds will purchase a massive docking station and support a “drones as first responders” (DFR) program, meaning that people who call 911 in the French Quarter may see a quadcopter drone before they see a police officer. NOPD told the city council that these drones won’t run facial recognition software and will not be armed. The existence of the draft that was “presented for review” stands out. On February 7, 2024, NOPD first published an operations manual for drones. It was unequivocal: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons of any kind.”  Two years later, in 2026, NOPD asked for money for more Skydio drones and the city council questioned the cops about the program in a public meeting on April 16. “Are these drones or any current drones in the French Quarter armed with any type of weapons?” Councilman Freddie King asked. “No,” NOPD captain Samuel Palumbo said. On June 24, 2026, the city council voted 4 - 3 to fund the expansion of the DFR program in the French Quarter. Around that time, a revised version of the NOPD drone manual that allowed for the use of weaponized drones with the Superintendent’s written permission was live on the NOPD website. The revised version of the manual is dated June 21, 2026. The new manual caught the attention of Eye on Surveillance, a Louisiania activist group. The group said it started calling city council members to alert them to the new language. Then, on June 30, the operations manual with the weaponization language vanished and a third version of the manual appeared. “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” a revised version of the drone manual dated July 1, 2026 said. It’s an odd sequence of events from a police department that hasn’t been forthcoming about its use of surveillance tech. “Police have yet to demonstrate that they can responsibly handle the data collection and surveillance capabilities of drones. Choosing to arm already unaccountable sky cameras is a threat on top of a threat, a misuse of public resources, and risks introducing more unaccountable weapons into a city enjoying a decline in gun violence,” Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at Center for International Policy — a non-profit that studies emerging technologies — told 404 Media. Skydio did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that loosed arrows, made sacrifices, prepared for battle, and took the hit. First, a bunch of ancient princesses were buried with weapons. Did they know how to use them? You bet! Then: a deadly Inca ritual, animal war games, and the mystery of the dinosaur-killer. As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.  Disney princesses…OF DEATH Hashesh, Zeinab et al. “Bioarcheological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the late middle kingdom (c. 1850 to 1700 BCE).” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Egyptian princesses who lived nearly 4,000 years ago were skilled archers and likely handled other deadly weapons, including maces and daggers, according to a new study that revisits their mummified bones and upends expectations about gender in the ancient world. For more than a century, archaeologists have puzzled over the remains of ancient royals entombed in the Amenemhat II pyramid complex located in Egypt’s Dahshur necropolis. Four of these mummified bodies have been identified as the daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II, known as Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and Princess Sathathormeryt.  These women were buried with weapons, including bows and maces, which are grave goods normally found in male burials; Princess Ita’s tomb also contained a stunning dagger. Another pair of royals, Princess Noub-Hotep and her father King Hor, are buried in the same complex with weapons in their graves, and were also part of the study. The presence of weaponry in the graves has led to a debate over whether the items were selected for symbolic purposes, or if the women used them in life. To resolve this question, researchers conducted a thorough re-examination of the mummified remains using osteological analysis, X-ray imaging, and advanced spectroscopy.  The results revealed that all of these individuals showed signs of bodily strain associated with repeated use of bows and melee arms, suggesting that not only King Hor, but the five princesses, knew their way around a weapon.  Pronounced muscle attachments across the mummified upper limbs “indicates repetitive, high-intensity actions consistent with archery and weapon use,” said researchers led by Zeineb Hashesh of the University of Beni-Suef.  “This evidence directly informs long-standing debates about the function of weapons in female burials,” the team continued. “Rather than purely symbolic objects, these items appear to have been actively used, as reflected in skeletal adaptations such as asymmetry, muscle hypertrophy, and metacarpal modification. Princess Noub-Hotep provides a particularly clear example, where skeletal changes align with the presence of arrows in her burial.” In other words, these women don’t appear to have been the damsels in distress depicted in traditional princess stories. The mummification of their bare arms hints that they did, in fact, bear arms. In other news… The last days of the sacrificial children  Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al. “Pilgrimage to sacrifice: Mechanisms, causes, and time of death of the Western Andean Capacocha of the Southern Tawantinsuyu.” Science Advances. We’re not wrapped up with the mummy beat just yet. In another new study, scientists took a fresh look at the mummified bodies of three young victims of human sacrifice in the Inca empire, who were ritually killed as part of a ceremony called the Capacocha in the 15th century. “Selected for their perceived purity and exceptional beauty, the individuals chosen for sacrifice were either taken from their home communities or offered by local authorities” and “undertook a long, final journey to sacred mountain summits, where they were ritually killed,” said researchers led by Verónica Silva Pinto of the University of València. The Boy of Cerro El Plomo. Image: Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al The results revealed that the Boy of Cerro El Plomo, a child of about 8-years-old discovered at an elevation of nearly 18,000 feet, was likely killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and not by hypothermia or strangulation as previously proposed. Using advanced imaging, researchers discovered a cranial lesion that may have been inflicted by “a blunt-lobed lithic star-shaped mace,” according to the study.  Meanwhile, the team found that two female victims found at Cerro Esmeralda, aged roughly 9 and 18, had an indeterminate cause of death, despite strangulation being put forward as the likely explanation. In all three cases, the victims were brought from distant homelands and traveled for several months prior to their killings, according to isotopic analysis of the elements in their remains. The enormous effort invested in these pilgrimages, combined with the careful placement of the bodies in special costumes and poses after death, demonstrate the significance of the Capacocha in Inca statecraft and cosmology. The art of war for animals Arbon, Josh & Radford, Andrew. “Pre-emptive behavior in a landscape of intergroup conflict.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution.  Humans have a rather catastrophic habit of getting into wars, but at least we aren’t alone in our military misery. A diverse array of species—from ants, to woodpeckers, to chimpanzees—also engage in violent intergroup conflicts that require careful preparation for success. Scientists have now helpfully pulled together a comprehensive review of how animals ready themselves for battle in part “to provide insights into our own conflict ancestry,” according to their new study.  A group of meerkats standing together in the face of an outside threat. Image: Andy Radford, University of Bristol Many behaviors are eerily similar to our own: Chimpanzees surveil rivals from hilltops, patrol perimeters, and march in single file. It is also common for animals to invest a lot of time and energy into sizing up their opponent’s force, including by carefully monitoring scent marks.  Some animals “travel considerable distances to eavesdrop on the contests of other groups to gather social information that is used only days or weeks later, as seen in acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus),” said study authors Josh Arbon and Andrew Radford of the University of Bristol. But by far the most memorable prep work comes from the Nevada termite, which erects “faecal fortresses” as barriers to intrusion by larger colonies. For all the fancy weaponry we’ve devised as humans—from guns, to nukes, to drones—how did we overlook the ultimate obstacle: poop barricades?  The case of the killer carbonaceous chondrite  Makhatadze, Georgy V. et al. “The origin of Cretaceous-Palaeogene impactor revealed by nickel isotopes.” Science Advances. Deadly princesses, human sacrifice, widespread warfare. Let’s close with something lighter: The apocalyptic extinction of almost all life on Earth. It’s time to revisit the longstanding mystery of the dinosaur-killing space rock that smashed into our planet some 66 million years ago, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out about 75 percent of all animal and plant life at the time. For decades, scientists have debated the nature of this epic deathbringer, which is known as the Chicxulub impactor. Now, a team has narrowed down the possible source to a class of asteroid called carbonaceous chondrites by studying nickel isotopes embedded around the impact crater in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Concept art of Chicxulub impactor and its soon-to-be victims. Image: Donald E. Davis  The identification of the impactor as a likely carbonaceous chondrite “is possible given nickel’s high abundance in primitive meteorites compared to the Earth’s crust and the distinct isotope compositions they record,” said researchers led by Georgy V. Makhatadze of Université Paris Cité.  “Our study highlights the extraterrestrial origin of the K-Pg mass extinction and the isotopes of nickel as a well-suited tool to characterise the nature of extraterrestrial material on Earth,” the team concluded. “Finally, it opens the door for further research into the connection between the impact and the mass extinction.” Mummies, war, and doomsday. You’re welcome for the beach reads. Thanks for reading! See you next week.

404 Media is turning three years old! We've come a long way with your support, so let's hang out. We're throwing TWO separate events to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast and a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and a big open-bar party on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events! Check your membership status or become a paid supporter of our work here. On Thursday, Sept. 3, meet us at WNYC's Greene Space for 404 MEDIA LIVE! We'll discuss what we've accomplished in the past year, and what's next for our independent, human-made journalism. We'll also welcome a few very special friends to the stage: Matthew Gault joins us for a chat about AI datacenter resistance, and The Abstract's Becky Ferreira hits us with the coolest science to come out this year so far. Supporters get 50% off their ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! Don't forget to check your membership status here and subscribe as a paying member for access to 50% off a full price in-person ticket. Can't make it in person in NYC? Join us on the livestream! Grab an access ticket, donate what you're able, and watch for the link we'll send to your inbox before the event. 404 MEDIA LIVE! TICKETS HERE The next night, join us for a bash to celebrate our three year anniversary at Threes Brewing Gowanus. Have a beer, wine or seltz on us, plus light bites throughout the night. Buying a ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! gets you 50% off a ticket to the afterparty Friday night. Supporters get in to the party FREE! PARTY TICKETS HERE All of us—Sam, Emanuel, Jason, and Joseph—will be there to celebrate 404 Media growing another year. We love these parties because it's a chance to connect with the people who make all of this possible: you, our subscribers. Thank you for all the fun you've helped us have this year. Supporters, scroll to the bottom of this page to reveal your promo codes. We can't wait to celebrate with you this year. Questions? Email sam@404media.co This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

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 music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization. EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point to pull the curtain on our story selection process. Usually, we do this when we explain the reasoning behind the decision to write a story we already published, but today I want to talk about a story I didn’t write (yet). For the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media. The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest. The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security on Thursday, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows ICE fatally shooting 2 people in a week.  This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star for the first time in history, signalling a major breakthrough in the search for alien life, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.  The planet, known as LHS 1140-b, is about 5.6 times more massive than Earth and orbits a small dwarf star about 48 light years from our solar system. While scientists have discovered atmospheres around many giant gas planets in our galaxy—and even a few rocky exoplanets outside the habitable zone—the new detection of helium in the skies of LHS 1140-b marks the first direct evidence that a habitable-zone rocky world can host an atmosphere, which is a critical factor for assessing their potential to support life. “For rockier Earth-like planets, it has been a huge challenge in the field to detect any atmospheres at all,” said Collin Cherubim, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media. “This has been a huge question in the field that so much time and energy has been devoted to answering.”   The new discovery “is really the first claim ever of any rocky exoplanet atmosphere in the habitable zone that could potentially have liquid water and really support life,” added Cherubim, who conducted the research while he was a PhD student at Harvard University. “That's what sets it apart and makes it really exciting.” Scientists have previously inferred that some rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone might have atmospheres based on indirect evidence, such as measurements that show that their day and night temperatures are more moderate than expected, which could be explained either by an atmosphere, or other planet-wide effects. However, spotting an atmosphere around these rocky worlds is tricky because they tend to be so small compared to their stars, which is a challenge for precision observations. Cherubim came at the problem with a new approach: He first developed theoretical models of rocky exoplanets that focused on mass fractionation, a process by which lighter molecules and atoms in the atmosphere escape into space, while heavier ones are left behind. These simulations predicted a new type of planet with thick skies closer to the surface, and a thinner upper atmosphere that allows helium to escape to space. “Hydrogen is the lightest element and it's the easiest to blow off into space,” Cherubim explained. “My model was predicting that if your planet is in this sweet spot where you're blowing enough hydrogen away, but not too much that you're dragging helium, which is a bit heavier, along with it, then you can actually create a helium-dominated atmosphere over time.”  “This is a newly-predicted class of planets, which should have very unique chemistry,” he added.  Cherubim realized that this escaping helium might be detectable from Earth, and that the LHS 1140 system would be a prime candidate to test out the hypothesis. To that end, the team observed LHS 1140-b and another planet in the system, LHS 1140-c, over the course of 2024 and 2025 with the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile. The 2024 results revealed a strong signal of helium at LHS 1140-b, but no detection in 2025, which may mean that the helium escape varies over time. The team predicts that the planet has probably had its atmosphere for billions of years. The other planet, LHS 1140-c, did not show any signs of an atmosphere, which was also expected based on its orbit and characteristics. The momentous discovery proves that atmospheres can exist around rocky worlds, including around dwarf stars, which are far more common than more massive stars like the Sun. Cherubim and his colleagues think it’s quite likely that LHS 1140-b has large amounts of liquid water on its surface, another key ingredient for life as we know it on Earth. “When we think about habitability, we think about three high-level things,” Cherubim said. “We think the planet needs to be rocky for the most part. It can't be a gas-rich thing where the surface is molten, or like Jupiter where it's just all gas. It's got to be the right temperature to support surface liquid water, at least for Earth-like life, and it needs an atmosphere to hold that water in and to shield the surface from radiation.”  “With this discovery, we now know LHS 1140-b has all three of those things, which is really exciting,” he added. “And it just happens to be a very nearby system to Earth, so it's very accessible.” Whether alien life exists on LHS 1140-b remains an open question, but scientists have already been looking for signs of life, known as biosignatures, in its skies using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, the search hasn’t turned up any obvious signs of life, but future efforts may be able to peer at this world in more detail.  “I think this is the best place to be looking for biosignatures,” Cherubim concluded. “We're really excited to see what comes out of that.” 🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation. The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains why he bought a $3,000 suit that electrocutes your muscles. Yep. 0:00 /1:21 1× 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. ⁠We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’⁠⁠Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun⁠⁠I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back⁠

If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March. But as much as we’re enjoying it, and there are thousands of players who feel the same, Marathon so far has failed to find the audience we’d expect from the developer that made Halo, Destiny, and which a few years ago acquired by PlayStation for more than $3 billion. It’s bad news for Marathon fans and a good sign for how much the video game business has changed over the years.   I wanted to have Remap Radio host Robert Zacny on the podcast because much like me and Joe, he’s been obsessed with Marathon as well. One of Rob’s greatest skills is dissecting how and why games get their hooks into us, and what a game’s popularity, or lack thereof in Marathon’s case, might reveal about the state of the industry and culture more broadly.  404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.  Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes 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.

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?  This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially. Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.”  We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss.  Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes 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. Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly "investigated" 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen.  The news that LAPD pulled over 161 innocent people in two months because of improper tagging in the department’s system comes after several high-profile incidents in which people in other states were accosted by police because of data entry or clerical errors in ALPR systems. Joel Feder, an editor of the car journalism website The Drive, detailed a harrowing tale in which he was tracked for days and ultimately pulled over by police in Minnesota because the license plate of the car he was reviewing for the website had been entered into the Flock system as stolen by a police department in California. Monday, the website MotorBiscuit wrote about an innocent woman who was jailed for 13 days because she drove a black Dodge Durango and police searched the Flock system for a Black Dodge Durango suspected of being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.  Image: LAPD OIG A new report by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) suggests that instances of people being falsely pulled over because their license plates have shown up on an ALPR “hot list” are very common, and that the surveillance of people on hot lists that ultimately result in no action from police is staggering. Many ALPR systems have this “hot list” feature, which is where police enter a license plate and get a ping or notification about the vehicle’s whereabouts whenever it passes a connected ALPR camera. In a two-month period between August 1 and September 30, 2025, the LAPD’s cameras generated more than 210.5 million license plate reads, according to the report. “During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.” The report notes that this happened because of “inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences,” and that in many cases, license plates remained on a hot list after a stolen vehicle had already been recovered or was reported as not stolen, meaning the cops are in some cases pulling over the lawful owner of the vehicle. Notably, the report states that when police get an ALPR hot list hit, the department generally considers any subsequent action to be a “high-risk” stop, meaning the risk of confrontation or potential danger is greatly increased from routine traffic stops for running a red light or speeding.  “When a license plate matches with a vehicle of interest on a Hot List, an alert will appear on the police vehicle’s Mobile Digital Computer,” the report reads. “Often, officers will approach the vehicle with extreme caution or conduct a ‘high-risk’ stop. This involves calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle.” The report says, “department policy requires officers to attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop,” but that often does not happen. The report also states that, on the vast majority of hot list hits, no action is taken by police meaning that specific people are being subjected to tracking and surveillance for no readily discernible reason. In the two-month audit period, 5,911 different license plates were tracked. No action was taken against 4,575 of those cars. The LAPD said in response to the report that cars improperly flagged as stolen “generally result from the timing of record updates outside of the Department’s control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted.” In other words, LAPD is often relying on other police departments to remove license plates from a hot list, highlighting the problems with networking different surveillance systems together. The LAPD OIG report, which appears to have directly led the LAPD to allow its Flock contract to expire, studied the use of three different ALPR systems the department has been using, including static, pole-mounted cameras from Motorola and Flock and cameras in police cruisers made by Axon. In total, the department has nearly 2,000 ALPR cameras; LAPD accesses data for both Flock and Axon systems through Flock’s backend thanks to a data sharing partnership between Axon and Flock, according to the report. The report said the department was able to recover 337 stolen cars during the two months and that ALPR data led to 74 arrests total.  Both the OIG and the LAPD determined that the ALPR system needs to be reconsidered. The OIG suggested that the LAPD “suspend the deployment of new ALPR cameras and the execution of new ALPR-related contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices” and “strengthen oversight of ALPR data access.” The LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend, and said it would not enter into new contracts until going through a full audit process.