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It's that time again: Weekly Roundup Time. On the podcast this week: A battle between a small town and the construction of a massive datacenter for America’s nuclear weapon scientists, and why people are 3D-printing whistles in Chicago. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, what librarians are seeing with AI and tech, and how that is impacting their work and knowledge more broadly. And in this week’s interview episode, a conversation with two leaders of the “Save Our Signs” effort for archiving and preserving national parks’ historical signage. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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Attack surfaces are expanding fast—driven by shadow IT, supply chains and rapid cloud adoption. Intruder’s 2025 Exposure Management Index—built from data across 3,000+ organizations—reveals how security teams are adapting to this new reality. Key findings: - AI is helping attackers weaponize the back catalog of CVEs, turning old vulnerabilities into new opportunities for exploitation.
- In a reversal from 2024, European organizations are pulling ahead of North America in critical vulnerability management, facing fewer critical issues.
- Thousands of CVEs are published each year, but only a handful truly matter. We’ve identified the five vulnerabilities that defined 2025 and what they teach defenders about real-world risk.
Discover how exposure management is evolving and where your peers stand in 2025.
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Mark your calendars for Wednesday November 19, when we’ll host our next FOIA Forum! This time we're focused on our coverage of Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and surveillance tech company. Supporters will get the details for joining us live in their email and at the bottom of this post. Not a Supporter yet? Sign up here. ‘A SACRIFICE ZONE’Ypsilanti, Michigan resident KJ Pedri doesn’t want her town to be the site of a new $1.2 billion data center, a massive collaborative project between the University of Michigan and America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in New Mexico. “My grandfather was a rocket scientist who worked on Trinity,” Pedri said at a recent Ypsilanti city council meeting, referring to the first successful detonation of a nuclear bomb. “He died a violent, lonely, alcoholic. So when I think about the jobs the data center will bring to our area, I think about the impact of introducing nuclear technology to the world and deploying it on civilians.” At the Ypsilanti city council meeting where Pedri spoke, the town voted to officially fight against the construction of the data center. WHISTLE BLOWERSChicagoans have turned to a novel piece of tech that marries the old-school with the new to warn their communities about the presence of ICE officials: 3D-printed whistles. The goal is to “prevent as many people from being kidnapped as possible,” Aaron Tsui, an activist with Chicago-based organization Cycling Solidarity, and who has been printing whistles, told 404 Media. “Whistles are an easy way to bring awareness for when ICE is in the area, printing out the whistles is something simple that I can do in order to help bring awareness.”  Image: Shared by Aaron Tsui CODE OF CONDUCTSix of the biggest porn studios in the world, including industry giant and Pornhub parent company Aylo, announced Wednesday they have formed a first-of-its-kind coalition called the Adult Studio Alliance (ASA). The alliance’s purpose is to “contribute to a safe, healthy, dignified, and respectful adult industry for performers,” the ASA told 404 Media. “This alliance is intended to unite professionals creating adult content (from studios to crews to performers) under a common set of values and guidelines. In sharing our common standards, we hope to contribute to a safe, healthy, dignified, and respectful adult industry for performers,” a spokesperson for ASA told 404 Media in an email.  Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash GOOGLE PICKED A SIDEGoogle is hosting a Customs and Border Protection app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials. ICE-spotting app developers tell 404 Media the decision to host CBP’s new app, and Google’s description of ICE officials as a vulnerable group in need of protection, shows that Google has made a choice on which side to support during the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation effort.  Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via Flickr and Google. READ MOREReplying to AI-Generated Sora Videos of ICE Raids Are Wildly Viral on Facebook, J.A. writes: "Since I was born, the world population has nearly doubled, and billions of people were introduced to the internet (more people use the internet today than the total population when I was born). In a revenue model that rewards money by the click, scraping the bottom of the barrel and slop-baiting is becoming a lucrative system. It also requires minimal effort to get started. There is no greater reward for high-brow content, and no penalty that makes sense for low-brow content (ban evasion is child's play, if it ever even comes to that). YouTube shorts are taking the place of long-form content, and I fear that seeing what sticks with AI is going to take over all feed-based apps before long. I put the blame in the owners of the systems: social platforms could better police this, but they don't properly invest in improving a slop-stopping system."
And replying to OpenAI Can’t Fix Sora’s Copyright Infringement Problem Because It Was Built With Stolen Content, Sarah Duda writes: "I can't imagine the great slop engine will be able to continue much longer. Even if they could survive numerous copyright infringement lawsuits for Sora, I don't see how they can even profit from this video generation. It takes enormous amounts of compute to generate a 10 second video, and they're basically lighting money on fire with every video generated. What a miserable waste of resources this all is."
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 getting back on our AI slop bullshit, deepfakes in schools, and epistemic virtues. JASON: I was back on my bullshit this week, by which I mean staring at some horrible AI-generated shit on Facebook. In this case, I was looking at slop of ICE raids generated using OpenAI’s Sora. I talk about this in the article but one of the many reasons why I think social media—especially Facebook and Instagram—is fucked if they continue to monetize and promote this stuff is because this specific slop page is not being pushed by anyone who seems to have any sort of ideological interest in immigration or the United States or anything like that. It’s just someone trying to make money. And it’s almost definitely one single person, with one single account, generating millions and millions and millions of views. We are very early in the horrible AI slop game, and yet we are seeing the damage that just a few people can do with industrial-grade content generation machines. Read the rest of Jason's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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