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It's Friday! Time to round up the week. On the podcast this week: How people are using tools to remove watermarks from Sora's AI-generated videos, and why Apple and Google removed various ICE-spotting apps from their app stores. In the section for subscribers at the supporter level, a big update to a story concerning Flock and Texas police tracking a woman who self-administered an abortion.
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 Just in time for fall: NEW MERCH! Preorder a cozy new 404 sweatshirt or new logo tee today and it'll ship later this month. We're also restocking beanies which fly out the door every year, so don't procrastinate on those. Alright, here's what we got into this week.  Image: Flock, Collage by 404 Media 'DEATH INVESTIGATION'In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search. EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT!Some of our more meaningful reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically about systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This week — which happens to be Banned Books Week — we are excited to announce that we will be continuing this work over the next year with the help of a grant from government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. LATE FEES The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation. “There are libraries that have our books that we've lent to them before all of this happened, and now they can't ship them back to us because their carrier either is flat out refusing to ship anything to the U.S., or they're citing not being able to handle the tariff situation,” Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told 404 Media. SOWING DISCORD A catastrophic breach impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more. The hack, carried out by a group that is attempting to extort Discord, shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ identity documents, and specifically in the context of verifying their age. Discord started asking users in the UK, for example, to upload a selfie with their ID as part of the country’s age verification law recently.  Image via Meta 4 SUREA Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media. “Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, said (AI4P is AI for Productivity). The idea is that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working—not just using it to go 5 percent more efficiently. “Our goal is simple yet audacious: make Al a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone, so that using Al becomes second nature—just like any other tool we rely on,” the message said. READ MORE404 IN THE WILDWe’re here, there and everywhere lately. In case you missed us: 🎥 Emanuel appeared in a film by filmmaker Mario Sixtus titled “AI: The death of the internet.” From the description: “During his voyage of discovery through the dying web, filmmaker Mario Sixtus encounters search engines that are losing their bearings and, out of helplessness, are working on their own abolition.” (If it’s not available in your region, try a VPN!) 🎤 Jason was on Adam Conover’s podcast! Adam wore the DOOM tank he snagged at our LA party. They chopped it up on slop. And Jason also joined What A Day to break down the incentives behind the slopification of social media. 🎙 Joseph went on Slate’s What Next: TBD podcast to talk about our lawsuit against ICE to obtain documents about a surveillance company, and Phoenix radio station KJZZ to explain the hack of Nexar’s dash cams.. 🪑 I was interviewed as part of a really excellent piece by Katie Clark Gray at Good Tape about my and several other colleagues’ approaches to reporting on AI and the wider world of technology. And at Decoder Ring by Slate, I talked about cucks as a concept. Responding to Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime, Di Williams wrote: “So impressed with the 404 Media team sticking with this story and telling the plain unvarnished truth. Thank you for this story and for all your hard work.”
Thanks Di! And axemtitanium wrote: “Never impugn the integrity of a dedicated journalist.”
Truth. And replying to People Are Crashing Out Over Sora 2’s New Guardrails, Matt observed: “Crazy that we live in a world where the objectionable part of Spongebob Hitler is Spongebob.”
And Burns Carpenter said: “Copyright Law as a leftist conspiracy? We're like two clicks away from loading Infinite Jest.”
No spoilers, I've been finishing that one for 15 years. BEHIND THE BLOGThis 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 a ransomware gang, book bans, and infrastructure. JOSEPH: I thought I’d give you something from the digital underground that happened last night. So recently a group that goes by the name Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (I know, it’s a mouthful) has been threatening to dump data from customers of Salesforce. The group’s name is an amalgamation of a bunch of other English-speaking loosely connected hacking groups: Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, Shiny Hunters, etc. This latest iteration is trying to get Salesforce to pay a ransom; Salesforce says it won’t. The group says it has data from all sorts of companies, including Disney/Hulu, FedEx, Toyota, UPS, and many more. Read the rest of Joseph's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Sam, and Emanuel's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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