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It's Friday, this week flew by, and we were blogging through it all. Let's catch up with the weekly roundup. This week on the 404 Media podcast: We discuss Telegram’s massive policy shift that says it will now process valid legal requests from law enforcement for user data, and how the walls are closing in on one of the most disruptive hackers in recent memory. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about why Nintendo will probably win a lawsuit against Palworld, and why that’s not good for games.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube. Here’s what else you’ll want to catch up on from the week:  Unsplash CALLING THE COPSTelegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order. Joseph wrote about how this marks a significant shift in Telegram’s policies on providing data to law enforcement, after French authorities arrested Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part due to Telegram’s refusal to hand over data in response to lawful orders.  Images via Michael Straight on Facebook THE FUTURE WE GOTAfter a horseback riding accident left him paralyzed from the waist down in 2009, former jockey Michael Straight learned to walk again with the help of a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton. Jason wrote about how that exoskeleton broke because of a malfunctioning piece of wiring in an accompanying watch that makes the exoskeleton work and the manufacturer refused to fix it, saying the machine was now too old to be serviced. It’s a dystopian nightmare — but after our story, the company said they reached out to Straight and made it right. HATE WHEN THAT HAPPENSOn Thursday, authorities indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams with five federal public corruption charges, including bribery and wire fraud. The newly unsealed indictment shows that Adams allegedly changed his phone password while he was under investigation, and then told investigators he had forgotten the password and so would be unable to provide it to the FBI.  Left: A photograph of the 'Shaggy Mane' mushroom in its inky phase sourced from Wikipedia. Right: the AI-generated image Google was showing users. AI FUNGUS AMONG USGoogle is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat. A Reddit moderator, who goes by MycoMutant, noticed that when they searched for the Coprinus comatus, a fungus commonly known as shaggy ink cap or shaggy mane, the first image in the Google snippet, which is featured above the search results, was an AI-generated image that looked nothing like a real Coprinus comatus, Emanuel reported.  Unsplash LESSONS NOT LEARNEDA new report surveying thousands of teachers, parents, and students found that schools are majorly dropping the ball when it comes to preventing non-consensually sexually explicit material from spreading throughout their communities. According to the report, 40 percent of students and 29 percent of teachers said they know of an explicit deepfake depicting people associated with their school being shared in the past school year.  Unsplash In this interview sponsored by DeleteMe, Rachel Tobac, a white hat hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, talks about how hard it is to get your personal info off the internet and away from bad actors’ hands. “DeleteMe takes a lot of the hard work away from the individual and puts it on DeleteMe’s plate,” she said. “They’re the ones that have to whack-a-mole this every single month for you.” DeleteMe is an expert in getting information delisted: it scans the internet and data broker databases for the sensitive information your company needs deleted, and makes sure it is taken down and stays down. Learn more, here. MORE GOOD POSTSReplying to AI Avatars Are Doing Job Interviews Now, Andrew Trettel writes, “After reading this, all that I can think is why hold an ‘interview’ at all? Just make the candidate fill out a questionnaire or maybe even talk to a chatbot if you really want something interactive. I find this to be a rather disturbing skeuomorphism imposed on the problem. It is not an interview anymore and candidates should not pretend it is.”
And in response to Privacy Service Optery Faces Backlash After Plan to Send OpenAI User Data, Jakob Hunter writes, “It’s so tiresome to have to constantly keep up with TOS’s especially when dealing with a business that claims to Do something like respect your data or minimize the presence online.”
We read terms of services so you don’t have to! (But you should.) 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 being taken seriously, the Secret Service being secretive, and doing business while doing journalism. JASON: Earlier this week, I spoke to a group of Norwegian journalists at the press club in Oslo. The talk was about how to report on big tech and crime on the internet. It was actually two talks—the first was basically an overview of this topic to a larger group of journalists and the general public, and then afterward there was a smaller seminar that was basically like a mini, IRL FOIA Forum where I showed them how to pull US court records, file FOIAs, and various tools we use to do our investigations. This was a really cool experience for me, and it’s one of the really amazing things that cofounding 404 Media has allowed me to do. Since we’ve started the company, it feels like more people are interested in what we have to say, how we do our journalism, and our general theory of how smaller newsrooms can operate on the internet. Read the rest of Jason's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam, Joseph, and Emanuel's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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