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Welcome back to the Friday roundup. Much to discuss, so settle in. On the podcast this week: An internal Meta message telling workers to increase their output by 5x with AI, and a catastrophic Discord breach. In the section for subscribers at the supporter level, what happened when AI came for craft beer.
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And in a special interview episode, Jason talked to Nathan Proctor about the end of Windows 10. “There’s 400 million computers that are going to enter the waste stream. That’s a disaster, just in terms of the sheer volume,” Nathan said. Catch that convo in the 404 Media Podcast feed. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Okay, here’s what you may have missed this week.  Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr. A group of hackers from the Com posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for the DHS and ICE. 404 Media reviewed multiple spreadsheets posted in the group’s Telegram channel. One contained the alleged personal information of 680 DHS officials; another contained data on more than 170 FBI email addresses and their owners; and the third contained the apparent personal information of more than 190 Department of Justice officials.  An inflatable frog with a raised fist. WCNC screengrab via YouTube. TODD THE FROGDuring a cruel presidency where many people are in desperate need of hope, the inflatable frog stepped into the breach. Everyone loves the Portland Frog. The juxtaposition of a frog (and people in other inflatable character costumes) standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd, and that’s part of why it’s hitting so hard. But the frog is also a practical piece of passive resistance protest kit in an age of mass surveillance, police brutality, and masked federal agents disappearing people off the streets.  Image: Collage by 404 Media of Cheaterbuster promotional videos. SWIPING OUT OF THIS TIMELINEA number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests. Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a specific person. Instead, Tinder provides users potential matches based on the user’s own physical location. The tools on the sites 404 Media has found allow anyone to search for someone’s profile by uploading a photo of their face.  Photo by Mick Haupt / Unsplash TOUCH GRASSOn Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they’re ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration’s rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September.  Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com / Unsplash LEAVE WIKI ALONEThe Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site. The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia. MORE, MORE, MOREReplying to Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin, Charles Markley, “Plastic Bottle Booze Sommelier,” writes: “One of the key problems with this is that there's not an objective way to identify trustworthy responses on reddit. The only feedback mechanism is the upvote. In a lot of subreddits I'm in, you quickly realize you've joined an intellectual circle-jerk when the most upvoted posts are the least helpful or maximally untrue, such as flat earth, anti-vax, or people really into black salve (don't google that).”
Well, I wasn't going to! And responding to ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras, X writes: “What a surprise, no comment from Flock. Seems like they've taken the mask off after all this attention from 404 and co's reporting. Always nice to see real-world impact even if it's something small.”
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 crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump. SAM: I don’t want to say it’s rare that we publish positive stories. We post more of those that people probably even realize, because the gnarly stories are the ones that go viral, or are talked about by your friends or aggregated by other news outlets. A “scoop” is almost never a happy story because often they’re predicated on information someone in a position of power didn’t want the world to know. But it’s definitely less common for us to report on things that makes you feel good or hopeful than things that make you go “oh shit” or “Jesus fucking Christ,” I will admit. Read the rest of Sam's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Joseph, and Emanuel's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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