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Welp! It’s Friday. On the podcast this week (which we recorded on Tuesday afternoon lol): We discuss EagleAI, a piece of software that could be used to purge voter rolls in the country, and Microsoft's mistake around gender-predicting AI, as well as an experiment to test when Instagram considers a nipple as female. In the subscribers-only section, an investigation into the infostealer industry.
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In a piece of positive news, we’re teaming up with WIRED to share a select few of our stories with their audience each month. We’re still fully independent—the 404 Media you love hasn’t changed in the slightest—but we are very excited for the opportunity to get some of our best work in front of more eyeballs through this co-publishing collab. Read more about it, here. What's Next in the New Era of Tech: Our friends over at Semafor Tech write a twice weekly newsletter on the people, the money and the ideas at the center of the new era. They keep a finger on the pulse of the shifting dynamics and the new ideas that just might be crazy enough to change the industry as we know it. You can sign up for the newsletter here. Ok, here’s what to catch up on this week: A QUICK 404 PSAWhen Donald Trump won in 2016, we weren't sure if good journalism mattered anymore. Now, we're more sure than ever it does. This is our plan for moving forward. FORGIVE US FATHERLast week, the Vatican unveiled Luce, a Japanese-style cartoon character that will serve as the Catholic Church’s mascot for its upcoming jubilee year, as well as its Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan. And this week, predictably, she’s an AI porn sensation. “...There is no clearer sign that Luce has indeed entered pop culture and is beloved by young people than the fact that there are now dozens of AI-generated hardcore pornographic images of her on the internet,” Emanuel wrote. IPHONE’S HAUNTEDLaw enforcement officers are warning other officials and forensic experts that iPhones stored securely for forensic examination are somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock, according to a law enforcement document obtained by 404 Media. “After being rebooted, iPhones are generally more secure against tools that aim to crack the password of and take data from the phone,” Joseph wrote. ‘SCARED THE LIFE OUT OF ME’Just before dawn on a Friday morning last month, millions of Texans woke up to emergency alerts blaring from their phones at around 4 a.m. Predictably, people were pissed. In the days after the alert, the Federal Communications Commission said it received more than 4,500 complaints about it. AMBER and Blue Alerts managed by the Department of Public Safety are only supposed to be sent between the hours of 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. 404 Media filed a public records request with the FCC to see what exactly these (rightfully) enraged and tired Texans said in their complaints. NOT INTERESTING, BUT FUCKEDReddit’s community for posting “anything truly interesting as fuck” has removed an AI-generated video for violating the community’s first rule: “Posts MUST be INTERESTING AS FUCK!” This is “yet another example of how AI-generated content is flooding into online spaces that were previously exclusively for sharing content made by humans, and how in some cases self-organizing moderators are better at filtering out AI-generated content than many social media and other platforms owned by big tech companies,” Emanuel wrote. DOES AI FIX THIS?At a public meeting in Columbia County, Georgia late last year, Dr. Rick Richards explained that he had run a piece of software he created called EagleAI against Georgia’s voter registration records. Richards suggested that Georgia’s eligible voter list was a mess, and had come to the meeting to pitch the EagleAI tool as something that would help election officials. Using a public records request, 404 Media has obtained and analyzed several hours of audio from Columbia County Board of Elections meetings over the past year that give a sense for how election officials in one of the most critical swing states considered using AI-powered software to assist with voter eligibility challenges. READ MOREReplying to 'The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet' Has Finally Been Identified, Miriam wrote: I love this so much. I stumbled upon the mystery a couple years back, and liked the song. Very nice to hear that it's solved now. In general I don't get why people are so fascinated with unsolved mysteries. These solved ones are much more fun! It's stories of communities coming together and working on a problem until they have a breakthrough, solving what nobody was able to solve before. Like when they found pack.png
And Sydney Schreckengost replied to Miriam: Without a bunch of people working on these unsolved ones, sometimes for years, we don't get these solved stories, which are just delightful and silly in the best ways, especially right before an election (here in the US). I do so love that there's always just someone out there who wants to find these things.
Responding to Why the Work Still Matters, Joe Cardillo wrote: “Appreciate all of your work, 404 team...the embrace of authoritarianism by Silicon Valley and Big Tech is an on-going story that requires consistent play-by-play and deeper analysis. For those of us who want a representative democracy, and the hard work of improving not just the USA but the entire world, this type of news coverage is vital. Glad to be a paid subscriber and will continue that.”
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 talk about the question "are people nutting to that?", doomscrolling on election night, and calls for Lysistrata 2024. EMANUEL: I was up a little later than usual on Monday desperately looking for something to write on Tuesday knowing that, like most election days, it would be a pretty difficult day to be productive. I have a few leads I need to pick up but they require exactly the kind of focus I knew I wouldn’t have, and everything in the news was understandably about the election. There have been years at Motherboard where we’ve tried some counter-programming around elections and other all consuming news events, but these only work when they come about organically. You can’t force it. We’ve talked here a few times in various ways about how we find stories. There are online communities we’re embedded in, experts we check in with, and many times our best tips come from you, the reader. Sometimes, however, I find stories by asking myself: wait, are people nutting to this? And, of course, the answer is often yes, they are. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam, Jason and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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