Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. According to a report from think tank AI Now, this push could lead to disaster. 

“If these initiatives continue to be pursued, their lack of safety may lead not only to catastrophic nuclear consequences, but also to an irreversible distrust within public perception of nuclear technologies that may inhibit the support of the nuclear sector as part of our global decarbonization efforts in the future,” the report said.

« La vraie surprise est que beaucoup de personnes semblent ravies de se décharger du fardeau de mettre leur pensée en mots. Voilà ce qui me paraît être le fond du problème, plus que l’outil qui le permet ». Martin Lafréchoux (qui revient du futur)

Dans la dernière newsletter d’Algorithm Watch, le journaliste Nicolas Kayser-Bril revient sur la production par un magazine bulgare d’articles génératifs qui lui étaient attribués. Ce qu’il montre, c’est que les mécanismes de réclamation dysfonctionnent. Google lui a demandé de prouver qu’il ne travaillait pas pour ce magazine (!) et a refusé de désindexer les articles. L’autorité de protection des données allemande a transmis sa demande à son homologue bulgare, sans réponse. Le seul moyen pour mettre fin au problème a été de contacter un avocat pour qu’il produise une menace à l’encontre du site, ce qui n’a pas été sans frais pour le journaliste. La « législation sur la protection des données, comme le RGPD, n’a pas été d’une grande aide ».

Ceux qui pratiquent ces usurpations d’identité, qui vont devenir très facile avec l’IA générative, n’ont pour l’instant pas grand chose à craindre, constate Kayser-Bril.

« Les industriels de l’IA ont habilement orienté le débat sur l’IA générative vers leurs propres intérêts, en nous expliquant qu’elle était une technologie transformatrice qui améliore de nombreux aspects de notre société, notamment l’accès aux soins de santé et à l’éducation ». Mais plutôt que prendre au sérieux les vraies critiques (notamment le fait que ces technologies ne soient pas si transformatrices qu’annoncées et qu’elles n’amélioreront ni l’accès au soin ni l’accès à l’éducation), les géants de l’IA ont préféré imposer leur propre discours sur ses inconvénients : à savoir, celui de la menace existentielle, explique clairement Paris Marx sur son blog. Ce scénario totalement irréaliste a permis de mettre de côté les inquiétudes bien réelles qu’impliquent le déploiement sans mesure de l’IA générative aujourd’hui (comme par exemple, le fait qu’elle produise des « distorsion systémique » de l’information selon une étude de 22 producteurs d’information de services publics).

En Irlande, à quelques jours des élections présidentielles du 24 octobre, une vidéo produite avec de l’IA a été diffusée montrant Catherine Connolly, la candidate de gauche en tête des sondages, annoncer qu’elle se retirait de la course, comme si elle le faisait dans le cadre d’un reportage d’une des chaînes nationales. La vidéo avait pour but de faire croire au public que l’élection présidentielle était déjà terminée, sans qu’aucun vote n’ait été nécessaire et a été massivement visionnée avant d’être supprimée. 

Cet exemple nous montre bien que nous ne sommes pas confrontés à un risque existentiel où les machines nous subvertiraient, mais que nous sommes bel et bien confrontés aux conséquences sociales et bien réelles qu’elles produisent. L’IA générative pollue l’environnement informationnel à tel point que de nombreuses personnes ne savent plus distinguer s’il s’agit d’informations réelles ou générées. 

Les grandes entreprises de l’IA montrent bien peu de considération pour ses effets sociaux. Au lieu de cela, elles imposent leurs outils partout, quelle que soit leur fiabilité, et participent à inonder les réseaux de bidules d’IA et de papoteurs destinés à stimuler l’engagement, ce qui signifie plus de temps passé sur leurs plateformes, plus d’attention portée aux publicités et, au final, plus de profits publicitaires. 
En réponse à ces effets sociaux, les gouvernements semblent se concentrer sur la promulgation de limites d’âge afin de limiter l’exposition des plus jeunes à ces effets, sans paraître vraiment se soucier des dommages individuels que ces produits peuvent causer au reste de la population, ni des bouleversements politiques et sociétaux qu’ils peuvent engendrer. Or, il est clair que des mesures doivent être prises pour endiguer ces sources de perturbation sociale et notamment les pratiques de conception addictives qui ciblent tout le monde, alors que les chatbots et les générateurs d’images et de vidéos accélèrent les dégâts causés par les réseaux sociaux. Du fait des promesses d’investissements, de gains de productivité hypothétiques, les gouvernements sacrifient les fondements d’une société démocratique sur l’autel de la réussite économique profitant à quelques monopoles. Pour Paris Marx, l’IA générative n’est rien d’autre qu’une forme de « suicide social » qu’il faut endiguer avant qu’elle ne nous submerge. « Aucun centre de données géant ni le chiffre d’affaires d’aucune entreprise d’IA ne justifie les coûts que cette technologie est en train d’engendrer pour le public ».

En 2022, Arnaud Robert est devenu tétraplégique. Dans un podcast en 7 épisodes pour la Radio-Télévision Suisse, il raconte sa décision de participer à une étude scientifique pour laquelle il a reçu un implant cérébral afin de retrouver le contrôle d’un de ses bras. Un podcast qui décortique le rapport à la technologie de l’intérieur, au plus intime, loin des promesses transhumanistes. « Être cobaye, cʹest prêter son corps à un destin plus grand que le sien ». Mais être cobaye, c’est apprendre aussi que les miracles technologiques ne sont pas toujours au-rendez-vous. Passionnant !

Google is hosting a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) 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.

Google removed certain apps used to report sightings of ICE officials, and “then they immediately turned around and approved an app that helps the government unconstitutionally target an actual vulnerable group. That's inexcusable,” Mark, the creator of Eyes Up, an app that aims to preserve and map evidence of ICE abuses, said. 404 Media only used the creator’s first name to protect them from retaliation. Their app is currently available on the Google Play Store, but Apple removed it from the App Store.

“Google wanted to ‘not be evil’ back in the day. Well, they're evil now,” Mark added.

The CBP app, called Mobile Identify and launched last week, is for local and state law enforcement agencies that are part of an ICE program that grants them certain immigration-related powers. The 287(g) Task Force Model (TFM) program allows those local officers to make immigration arrests during routine police enforcement, and “essentially turns police officers into ICE agents,” according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). At the time of writing, ICE has TFM agreements with 596 agencies in 34 states, according to ICE’s website.

Comment répondre à la gestion algorithmique du travail ? Tel est l’ambition du rapport « Negotiating the Algorithm » publié par la Confédération européenne des syndicats sous la direction du journaliste indépendant Ben Wray, responsable du Gig Economy Project de Brave New Europe. Le rapport décrit la prédominance des logiciels managériaux au travail (qui seraient utilisés par plus de 79% des entreprises de l’Union européenne) et les abus qui en découlent et décrit les moyens de riposte mobilisables par les travailleurs en lien notamment avec la nouvelle législation européenne des travailleurs des plateformes. La gestion algorithmique confère aux employeurs des avantages informationnels considérables sur les travailleurs, leur permet de contourner les conventions collectives et de modifier les conditions de travail et les salaires de chaque travailleur voire de chaque poste. Elle leur permet d’espionner les travailleurs même en dehors de leurs heures de travail et leur offre de nombreuses possibilités de représailles. 

En regard, les travailleurs piégés par la gestion algorithmique sont privés de leur pouvoir d’action et de leurs possibilités de résolution de problèmes, et bien souvent de leurs droits de recours, tant la gestion algorithmique se déploie avec de nombreuses autres mesures autoritaires, comme le fait de ne pouvoir joindre le service RH. 

Il est donc crucial que les syndicats élaborent une stratégie pour lutter contre la gestion algorithmique. C’est là qu’intervient la directive sur le travail de plateforme qui prévoit des dispositions assez riches, mais qui ne sont pas auto-exécutoires… C’est-à-dire que les travailleurs doivent revendiquer les droits que la directive propose, au travail comme devant les tribunaux. Or, elle permet aux travailleurs et à leurs représentants d’exiger des employeurs des données exhaustives sur les décisions algorithmiques, du licenciement au calcul du salaire. 

Bien souvent ces données ne sont pas rendues dans des formats faciles à exploiter, constate Wray : le rapport encourage donc les syndicats à constituer leurs propres groupes d’analyses de données. Le rapport plaide également pour que les syndicats développent des applications capables de surveiller les applications patronales, comme l’application UberCheats, qui permettait de comparer le kilométrage payé par Uber à ses livreurs par rapport aux distances réellement parcourues (l’application a été retirée en 2021 au prétexte de son nom à la demande de la firme Uber). En investissant dans la technologie, les syndicats peuvent combler le déficit d’information des travailleurs sur les employeurs. Wray décrit comment les travailleurs indépendants ont créé des « applications de contre-mesure » ​​qui ont documenté les vols de salaires et de pourboires (voir notre article “Réguler la surveillance au travail”), permis le refus massif d’offres au rabais et aidé les travailleurs à faire valoir leurs droits devant les tribunaux. Cette capacité technologique peut également aider les organisateurs syndicaux, en fournissant une plateforme numérique unifiée pour les campagnes syndicales dans tous les types d’établissements. Wray propose que les syndicats unissent leurs forces pour créer « un atelier technologique commun » aux travailleurs, qui développerait et soutiendrait des outils pour tous les types de syndicats à travers l’Europe. 

Le RGPD confère aux travailleurs de larges pouvoirs pour lutter contre les abus liés aux logiciels de gestion, estime encore le rapport. Il leur permet d’exiger le système de notation utilisé pour évaluer leur travail et d’exiger la correction de leurs notes, et interdit les « évaluations internes cachées ». Il leur donne également le droit d’exiger une intervention humaine dans les prises de décision automatisées. Lorsque les travailleurs sont « désactivés » (éjectés de l’application), le RGPD leur permet de déposer une « demande d’accès aux données » obligeant l’entreprise à divulguer « toutes les informations personnelles relatives à cette décision », les travailleurs ayant le droit d’exiger la correction des « informations inexactes ou incomplètes ». Malgré l’étendue de ces pouvoirs, ils ont rarement été utilisés, en grande partie en raison de failles importantes du RGPD. Par exemple, les employeurs peuvent invoquer l’excuse selon laquelle la divulgation d’informations révélerait leurs secrets commerciaux et exposerait leur propriété intellectuelle. Le RGPD limite la portée de ces excuses, mais les employeurs les ignorent systématiquement. Il en va de même pour l’excuse générique selon laquelle la gestion algorithmique est assurée par un outil tiers. Cette excuse est illégale au regard du RGPD, mais les employeurs l’utilisent régulièrement (et s’en tirent impunément). 

La directive sur le travail de plateforme corrige de nombreuses failles du RGPD. Elle interdit le traitement des « données personnelles d’un travailleur relatives à : son état émotionnel ou psychologique ; l’utilisation de ses échanges privés ; la captation de données lorsqu’il n’utilise pas l’application ; concernant l’exercice de ses droits fondamentaux, y compris la syndicalisation ; les données personnelles du travailleur, y compris son orientation sexuelle et son statut migratoire ; et ses données biométriques lorsqu’elles sont utilisées pour établir son identité. » Elle étend le droit d’examiner le fonctionnement et les résultats des « systèmes décisionnels automatisés » et d’exiger que ces résultats soient exportés vers un format pouvant être envoyé au travailleur, et interdit les transferts à des tiers. Les travailleurs peuvent exiger que leurs données soient utilisées, par exemple, pour obtenir un autre emploi, et leurs employeurs doivent prendre en charge les frais associés. La directive sur le travail de plateforme exige une surveillance humaine stricte des systèmes automatisés, notamment pour des opérations telles que les désactivations. 

Le fonctionnement de leurs systèmes d’information est également soumis à l’obligation pour les employeurs d’informer les travailleurs et de les consulter sur les « modifications apportées aux systèmes automatisés de surveillance ou de prise de décision ». La directive exige également que les employeurs rémunèrent des experts (choisis par les travailleurs) pour évaluer ces changements. Ces nouvelles règles sont prometteuses, mais elles n’entreront en vigueur que si quelqu’un s’y oppose lorsqu’elles sont enfreintes. C’est là que les syndicats entrent en jeu. Si des employeurs sont pris en flagrant délit de fraude, la directive les oblige à rembourser les experts engagés par les syndicats pour lutter contre les escroqueries. 

Wray propose une série de recommandations détaillées aux syndicats concernant les éléments qu’ils devraient exiger dans leurs contrats afin de maximiser leurs chances de tirer parti des opportunités offertes par la directive sur le travail de plateforme, comme la création d’un « organe de gouvernance » au sein de l’entreprise « pour gérer la formation, le stockage, le traitement et la sécurité des données. Cet organe devrait inclure des délégués syndicaux et tous ses membres devraient recevoir une formation sur les données. » 

Il présente également des tactiques technologiques que les syndicats peuvent financer et exploiter pour optimiser l’utilisation de la directive, comme le piratage d’applications permettant aux travailleurs indépendants d’augmenter leurs revenus. Il décrit avec enthousiasme la « méthode des marionnettes à chaussettes », où de nombreux comptes tests sont utilisés pour placer et réserver du travail via des plateformes afin de surveiller leurs systèmes de tarification et de détecter les collusions et les manipulations de prix. Cette méthode a été utilisée avec succès en Espagne pour jeter les bases d’une action en justice en cours pour collusion sur les prix. 

Le nouveau monde de la gestion algorithmique et la nouvelle directive sur le travail de plateforme offrent de nombreuses opportunités aux syndicats. Cependant, il existe toujours un risque qu’un employeur refuse tout simplement de respecter la loi, comme Uber, reconnu coupable de violation des règles de divulgation de données et condamné à une amende de 6 000 € par jour jusqu’à sa mise en conformité. Uber a maintenant payé 500 000 € d’amende et n’a pas divulgué les données exigées par la loi et les tribunaux. 

Grâce à la gestion algorithmique, les patrons ont trouvé de nouveaux moyens de contourner la loi et de voler les travailleurs. La directive sur le travail de plateforme offre aux travailleurs et aux syndicats toute une série de nouveaux outils pour contraindre les patrons à jouer franc jeu. « Ce ne sera pas facile, mais les capacités technologiques développées par les travailleurs et les syndicats ici peuvent être réutilisées pour mener une guerre de classes numérique totale », s’enthousiasme Cory Doctorow.

“Watch your step sir, keep moving,” a police officer with a vest that reads ICE and a patch that reads “POICE” says to a Latino-appearing man wearing a Walmart employee vest. He leads him toward a bus that reads “IMMIGRATION AND CERS.” Next to him, one of his colleagues begins walking unnaturally sideways, one leg impossibly darting through another as he heads to the back of a line of other Latino Walmart employees who are apparently being detained by ICE. Two American flag emojis are superimposed on the video, as is the text “Deportation.”

The video has 4 million views, 16,600 likes, 1,900 comments, and 2,200 shares on Facebook. It was, obviously, generated by OpenAI's Sora.

Some of the comments seem to understand this: “Why is he walking like that?” one says. “AI the guys foot goes through his leg,” another says. Many of the comments clearly do not: “Oh, you’ll find lots of them at Walmart,” another top comment reads. “Walmart doesn’t do paperwork before they hire you?” another says. “They removing zombies from Walmart before Halloween?” 

The latest trend in Facebook’s ever downward spiral down the AI slop toilet are AI deportation videos. These are posted by an account called “USA Journey 897” and have the general vibe of actual propaganda videos posted by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts. Many of the AI videos focus on workplace deportations, but some are similar to horrifying, real videos we have seen from ICE raids in Chicago and Los Angeles. The account was initially flagged to 404 Media by Chad Loder, an independent researcher.

The videos universally have text superimposed over the three areas of a video where OpenAI’s Sora video generator places watermarks. This, as well as the style of the videos being generated and tests done by 404 Media to make very similar videos, show that they were generated with Sora, highlighting how tools released by some of the richest companies in the world are being combined to generate and monetize videos that take advantage of human suffering (and how incredibly easy it is to hide a Sora watermark).

“PLEASE THAT’S MY BABY,” a dark-skinned woman screams while being restrained by an ICE officer in another video. “Ma’am stop resisting, keep moving,” an officer says back. The camera switches to an image of the baby: “YOU CAN’T TAKE ME FROM HER, PLEASE SHE’S RIGHT THERE. DON’T DO THIS, SHE’S JUST A BABY. I LOVE YOU, MAMA LOVES YOU,” the woman says. The video switches to a scene of the woman in the back of an ICE van. The video has 1,400 likes and 407 comments, which include “ Don’t separate them….take them ALL!,” “Take the baby too,” and “I think the days of use those child anchors are about over with.” 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is allocating as much as $180 million to pay bounty hunters and private investigators who verify the address and location of undocumented people ICE wishes to detain, including with physical surveillance, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents provide more details about ICE’s plan to enlist the private sector to find deportation targets. In October The Intercept reported on ICE’s intention to use bounty hunters or skip tracers—an industry that often works on insurance fraud or tries to find people who skipped bail. The new documents now put a clear dollar amount on the scheme to essentially use private investigators to find the locations of undocumented immigrants.

OpenAI’s video generator Sora 2 is still producing copyright infringing content featuring Nintendo characters and the likeness of real people, despite the company’s attempt to stop users from making such videos. OpenAI updated Sora 2 shortly after launch to detect videos featuring copyright infringing content, but 404 Media’s testing found that it’s easy to circumvent those guardrails with the same tricks that have worked on other AI generators. 

The flaw in OpenAI’s attempt to stop users from generating videos of Nintendo and popular cartoon characters exposes a fundamental problem with most generative AI tools: it is extremely difficult to completely stop users from recreating any kind of content that’s in the training data, and OpenAI can’t remove the copyrighted content from Sora 2’s training data because it couldn’t exist without it. 

Shortly after Sora 2 was released in late September, we reported about how users turned it into a copyright infringement machine with an endless stream of videos like Pikachu shoplifting from a CVS and Spongebob Squarepants at a Nazi rally. Companies like Nintendo and Paramount were obviously not thrilled seeing their beloved cartoons committing crimes and not getting paid for it, so OpenAI quickly introduced an “opt-in” policy, which prevented users from generating copyrighted material unless the copyright holder actively allowed it. Initially, OpenAI’s policy allowed users to generate copyrighted material and required the copyright holder to opt-out. The change immediately resulted in a meltdown among Sora 2 users, who complained OpenAI no longer allowed them to make fun videos featuring copyrighted characters or the likeness of some real people.   

This is why if you give Sora 2 the prompt “Animal Crossing gameplay,” it will not generate a video and instead say “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.” However, when I gave it the prompt “Title screen and gameplay of the game called ‘crossing aminal’ 2017,” it generated an accurate recreation of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS.

Sora 2 also refused to generate videos for prompts featuring the Fox cartoon American Dad, but it did generate a clip that looks like it was taken directly from the show, including their recognizable voice acting, when given this prompt: “blue suit dad big chin says ‘good morning family, I wish you a good slop’, son and daughter and grey alien say ‘slop slop’, adult animation animation American town, 2d animation.”

The same trick also appears to circumvent OpenAI’s guardrails against recreating the likeness of real people. Sora 2 refused to generate a video of “Hasan Piker on stream,” but it did generate a video of “Twitch streamer talking about politics, piker sahan.” The person in the generated video didn’t look exactly like Hasan, but he has similar hair, facial hair, the same glasses, and a similar voice and background. 

A user who flagged this bypass to me, who wished to remain anonymous because they didn’t want OpenAI to cut off their access to Sora, also shared Sora generated videos of South Park, Spongebob Squarepants, and Family Guy. 

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. 

There are several ways to moderate generative AI tools, but the simplest and cheapest method is to refuse to generate prompts that include certain keywords. For example, many AI image generators stop people from generating nonconsensual nude images by refusing to generate prompts that include the names of celebrities or certain words referencing nudity or sex acts. However, this method is prone to failure because users find prompts that allude to the image or video they want to generate without using any of those banned words. The most notable example of this made headlines in 2024 after an AI-generated nude image of Taylor Swift went viral on X. 404 Media found that the image was generated with Microsoft’s AI image generator, Designer, and that users managed to generate the image by misspelling Swift’s name or using nicknames she’s known by, and describing sex acts without using any explicit terms. 

Since then, we’ve seen example after example of users bypassing generative AI tool guardrails being circumvented with the same method. We don’t know exactly how OpenAI is moderating Sora 2, but at least for now, the world’s leading AI company’s moderating efforts are bested by a simple and well established bypass method. Like with these other tools, bypassing Sora’s content guardrails has become something of a game to people online. Many of the videos posted on the r/SoraAI subreddit are of “jailbreaks” that bypass Sora’s content filters, along with the prompts used to do so. And Sora’s “For You” algorithm is still regularly serving up content that probably should be caught by its filters; in 30 seconds of scrolling we came across many videos of Tupac, Kobe Bryant, JuiceWrld, and DMX rapping, which has become a meme on the service.

It’s possible OpenAI will get a handle on the problem soon. It can build a more comprehensive list of banned phrases and do more post generation image detection, which is a more expensive but effective method for preventing people from creating certain types of content. But all these efforts are poor attempts to distract from the massive, unprecedented amount of copyrighted content that has already been stolen, and that Sora can’t exist without. This is not an extreme AI skeptic position. The biggest AI companies in the world have admitted that they need this copyrighted content, and that they can’t pay for it.  

The reason OpenAI and other AI companies have such a hard time preventing users from generating certain types of content once users realize it’s possible is that the content already exists in the training data. An AI image generator is only able to produce a nude image because there’s a ton of nudity in its training data. It can only produce the likeness of Taylor Swift because her images are in the training data. And Sora can only make videos of Animal Crossing because there are Animal Crossing gameplay videos in its training data. 

For OpenAI to actually stop the copyright infringement it needs to make its Sora 2 model “unlearn” copyrighted content, which is incredibly expensive and complicated. It would require removing all that content from the training data and retraining the model. Even if OpenAI wanted to do that, it probably couldn’t because that content makes Sora function. OpenAI might improve its current moderation to the point where people are no longer able to generate videos of Family Guy, but the Family Guy episodes and other copyrighted content in its training data are still enabling it to produce every other generated video. Even when the generated video isn’t recognizably lifting from someone else’s work, that’s what it’s doing. There’s literally nothing else there. It’s just other people’s stuff. 

Six of the biggest porn studios in the world, including industry giant and Pornhub parent company Ayl o, 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. “As a diverse group of studios producing a large volume and variety of adult content, we believe it’s key to promote best practices on all our scenes. We all come from different studios, but we share the belief that all performers are entitled to comfort and safety on set.” 

The founding members include Aylo, Dorcel, ERIKALUST, Gamma Entertainment, Mile High Media and Ricky’s Room. Aylo owns some of the biggest platforms and porn studios in the industry, including Brazzers, Reality Kings, Digital Playground and more. 

A judge in Washington has ruled that police images taken by Flock’s AI license plate-scanning cameras are public records that can be requested as part of normal public records requests. The decision highlights the sheer volume of the technology-fueled surveillance state in the United States, and shows that at least in some cases, police cannot withhold the data collected by its surveillance systems.

In a ruling last week, Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski ruled that “the Flock images generated by the Flock cameras located in Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley [Washington] are public records under the Washington State Public Records Act,” that they are “not exempt from disclosure,” and that “an agency does not have to possess a record for that record to be subject to the Public Records Act.” 

She further found that “Flock camera images are created and used to further a governmental purpose” and that the images on them are public records because they were paid for by taxpayers. Despite this, the records that were requested as part of the case will not be released because the city automatically deleted them after 30 days. Local media in Washington first reported on the case; 404 Media bought Washington State court records to report the specifics of the case in more detail.

Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are used in thousands of communities around the United States. They passively take between six and 12 timestamped images of each car that passes by, allowing the company to make a detailed database of where certain cars (and by extension, people) are driving in those communities. 404 Media has reported extensively on Flock, and has highlighted that its cameras have been accessed by the Department of Homeland Security and by local police working with DHS on immigration cases. Last month, cops in Colorado used data from Flock cameras to incorrectly accuse an innocent woman of theft based on her car’s movements.

We start with Matthew Gault’s dive into a battle between a small town and the construction of a massive datacenter for America’s nuclear weapon scientists. After the break, Joseph explains why people are 3D-printing whistles in Chicago. In the subscribers-only section, Jason zooms out and tells us what librarians are seeing with AI and tech, and how that is impacting their work and knowledge more broadly.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

6:03 - ⁠Our New FOIA Forum! 11/19, 1PM ET⁠ 

7:50 - ⁠A Small Town Is Fighting a $1.2 Billion AI Datacenter for America's Nuclear Weapon Scientists⁠ 

12:27 - ⁠'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community⁠ 

21:09 - ⁠'House of Dynamite' Is About the Zoom Call that Ends the World⁠ 

30:35 - ⁠The Latest Defense Against ICE: 3D-Printed Whistles⁠

SUBSCRIBER'S STORY: ⁠AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge⁠

Dans une tribune pour le Guardian, les chercheuses Sacha Alanoca et Maroussia Levesque estiment que si le gouvernement américain adopte une approche non interventionniste à l’égard des applications d’IA telles que les chatbots et les générateurs d’images, il est fortement impliqué dans les composants de base de l’IA. « Les États-Unis ne déréglementent pas l’IA ; ils réglementent là où la plupart des gens ne regardent pas ». En fait, expliquent les deux chercheuses, les régulations ciblent différents composants des systèmes d’IA. « Les premiers cadres réglementaires, comme la loi européenne sur l’IA, se concentraient sur les applications à forte visibilité, interdisant les utilisations à haut risque dans les domaines de la santé, de l’emploi et de l’application de la loi afin de prévenir les préjudices sociétaux. Mais les pays ciblent désormais les éléments constitutifs de l’IA. La Chine restreint les modèles pour lutter contre les deepfakes et les contenus inauthentiques. Invoquant des risques pour la sécurité nationale, les États-Unis contrôlent les exportations des puces les plus avancées et, sous Biden, vont jusqu’à contrôler la pondération des modèles – la « recette secrète » qui transforme les requêtes des utilisateurs en résultats ». Ces réglementations sur l’IA se dissimulent dans un langage administratif technique, mais derrière ce langage complexe se cache une tendance claire : « la réglementation se déplace des applications de l’IA vers ses éléments constitutifs».

Les chercheuses dressent ainsi une taxonomie de la réglementation. « La politique américaine en matière d’IA n’est pas du laisser-faire. Il s’agit d’un choix stratégique quant à l’endroit où intervenir. Bien qu’opportun politiquement, le mythe de la déréglementation relève davantage de la fiction que de la réalité ». Pour elles, par exemple, il est difficile de justifier une attitude passive face aux préjudices sociétaux de l’IA, alors que Washington intervient volontiers sur les puces électroniques pour des raisons de sécurité nationale.

Tiny remnants of long-lost continents that vanished many millions of years ago are sprinkled around the world, including on remote island chains and seamounts, a mystery that has puzzled scientists for years. 

Now, a team has discovered a mechanism that can explain how this continental detritus ends up resurfacing in unexpected places, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Geoscience.  

When continents are subducted into Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s crust, waves can form that scrape off rocky material and sweep it across hundreds of miles to new locations.  This “mantle wave” mechanism fills in a gap in our understanding of how lost continents are metabolized through our ever-shifting planet.  

“There are these seamount chains where volcanic activity has erupted in the middle of the ocean,” said Sascha Brune, a professor at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and University of Potsdam, in a call with 404 Media. “Geochemists go there, they drill, they take samples, and they do their isotope analysis, which is a very fancy geochemical analysis that gives you small elements and isotopes which come up with something like a ‘taste.’”

“Many of these ocean islands have a taste that is surprisingly similar to the continents, where the isotope ratio is similar to what you would expect from continents and sediments,” he continued. “And there has always been the question: why is this the case? Where does it come from?”

These continental sprinkles are sometimes linked to mantle plumes, which are hot columns of gooey rock that erupt from the deep mantle. Plumes bring material from ancient landmasses, which have been stuck in the mantle for eons, back to the light of day again. Mantle plumes are the source of key hot spots like Hawai’i and Iceland, but there are plenty of locations with enriched continental material that are not associated with plumes—or any other known continental recycling mechanisms. 

The idea of a mantle wave has emerged from a series of revelations made by lead author Tom Gernon, a professor at the University of Southampton, along with his colleagues at GFZ, including Brune. Gernon previously led a 2023 study that identified evidence of similar dynamics occurring within continents. By studying patterns in the distribution of diamonds across South Africa, the researchers showed that slow cyclical motions in the mantle dislodge chunks off the keel of landmasses as they plunge into the mantle. Their new study confirms that these waves can also explain how the elemental residue of the supercontinent Gondwana, which broke up over 100 million years ago, resurfaced in seamounts across the Indian Ocean and other locations. 

In other words, the ashes of dead continents are scattered across extant landmasses following long journeys through the mantle. Though it’s not possible to link these small traces back to specific past continents or time periods, Brune hopes that researchers will be able to extract new insights about Earth’s roiling past from the clues embedded in the ground under our feet.

“What we are saying now is that there is another element, with this kind of pollution of continental material in the upper mantle,” Brune said. “It is not replacing what was said before; it is just complementing it in a way where we don't need plumes everywhere. There are some regions that we know are not plume-related, because the temperatures are not high enough and the isotopes don't look like plume-affected. And for those regions, this new mechanism can explain things that we haven't explained before.”

“We have seen that there's quite a lot of evidence that supports our hypothesis, so it would be interesting to go to other places and investigate this a bit more in detail,” he concluded.

Update: This story has been update to note Tom Gernon was a lead author on the paper.

Fifty years ago—almost two decades before WIRED, seven years ahead of PCMag, just a few years after the first email ever passed through the internet and with the World Wide Web still 14 years away—there was BYTE. Now, you can see the tech magazine's entire run at once. Software engineer Hector Dearman recently released a visualizer to take in all of BYTE’s 287 issues as one giant zoomable map.

The physical BYTE magazine published monthly from September 1975 until July 1998, for $10 a month. Personal computer kits were a nascent market, with the first microcomputers having just launched a few years prior. BYTE was founded on the idea that the budding microcomputing community would be well-served by a publication that could help them through it. 

A version of this article was previously published on FOIAball, a newsletter reporting on college football and public records. You can learn more about FOIAball and subscribe here. 

Last weekend, Charleston’s tiny private military academy, the Citadel, traveled to Ole Miss.

This game didn’t have quite the same cachet as the Rebels' Week 11 opponent this time last year, when a one-loss Georgia went to Oxford. 

A showdown of ranked SEC opponents in early November 2024 had all eyes trained on Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. 

Including those of the surveillance state. 

According to documents obtained by FOIAball, the Ole Miss-Georgia matchup was one of at least two games last year where the school used a little-known Department of Homeland Security information-sharing platform to keep a watchful eye on attendees. 

The platform, called the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), is a centralized hub for the myriad law enforcement agencies involved with security at big events.

According to an Event Action Plan obtained by FOIAball, at least 11 different departments were on the ground at the Ole Miss-Georgia game, from Ole Miss campus police to a military rapid-response team.

HSINs are generally depicted as a secure channel to facilitate communication between various entities.

In a video celebrating its 20th anniversary, a former HSIN employee hammered home that stance.“When our communities are connected, our country is indeed safer," they said.

In reality HSIN is an integral part of the vast surveillance arm of the U.S. government.

Left unchecked since 9/11, supercharged by technological innovation, HSIN can subject any crowd to almost constant monitoring, looping in live footage from CCTV cameras, from drones flying overhead, and from police body cams and cell phones. 

HSIN has worked with private businesses to ensure access to cameras across cities; they collect, store, and mine vast amounts of personal data; and they have been used to facilitate facial recognition searches from companies like Clearview AI.

It’s one of the least-reported surveillance networks in the country. 

And it's been building this platform on the back of college football. 

Since 9/11, HSINs have become a widely used tool. 

A recent Inspector General report found over 55,000 active accounts using HSIN, ranging from federal employees to local police agencies to nebulous international stakeholders. 

The platforms host what’s called SBU, sensitive but unclassified information, including threat assessments culled from media monitoring.

According to a privacy impact study from 2006, HSIN was already maintaining a database of suspicious activities and mining those for patterns. 

"The HSIN Database can be mined in a manner that identifies potential threats to the homeland or trends requiring further analysis,” it noted. 

In an updated memo from 2012 discussing whose personal information HSIN can collect and disseminate, the list includes the blanket, “individuals who may pose a threat to the United States.”

A 2023 DHS “Year in Review” found that HSIN averaged over 150,000 logins per month. 

Its Connect platform, which coordinates security and responses at major events, was utilized over 500 times a day. 

HSIN operated at the Boston Marathon, Lollapalooza, the World Series, and the presidential primary debates. It has also been used at every Super Bowl for the last dozen years.

DHS is quick to tout the capabilities of HSINs in internal communications reviewed by FOIAball.  

In doing so, it reveals the growth of its surveillance scope. In documents from 2018, DHS makes no mention of live video surveillance.

But a 2019 annual review said that HSINs used private firms to help wrangle cameras at commercial businesses around Minneapolis, which hosted the Final Four that year. 

“Public safety partners use HSIN Connect to share live video streams from stationary cameras as well as from mobile phones,” it said. “[HSIN communities such as] the Minneapolis Downtown Security Executive Group works with private sector firms to share live video from commercial businesses’ security cameras, providing a more comprehensive operating picture and greater situational awareness in the downtown area.”

And the platform has made its way to college campuses.

Records obtained by FOIAball show how pervasive this technology has become on college campuses, for everything from football games to pro-Palestinian protests.

In November 2023, students at Ohio State University held several protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. At one, over 100 protesters blocked the entrance to the school president’s office. 

A report that year from DHS revealed the protesters were being watched in real-time from a central command center. 

Under the heading "Supporting Operation Excellence," DHS said the school used HSIN to surveil protesters, integrating the school’s closed-circuit cameras to live stream footage to HSIN Connect.

“Ohio State University has elevated campus security by integrating its closed-circuit camera system with HSIN Connect,” it said. “This collaboration creates a real-time Common Operating Picture for swift information sharing, enhancing OSU’s ability to monitor campus events and prioritize community safety.”

“HSIN Connect proved especially effective during on-campus protests, expanding OSU’s security capabilities,” the school’s director of emergency management told DHS. “HSIN Connect has opened new avenues for us in on-campus security.” 

While it opened new avenues, the platform already had a well-established relationship with the school. 

According to an internal DHS newsletter from January 2016, HSIN was utilized at every single Buckeyes home game in 2015. 

“HSIN was a go-to resource for game days throughout the 2015 season,” it said. 

It highlighted that data was being passed along and analyzed by DHS officials. 

The newsletter also revealed HSINs were at College Football Playoff games that year and have been in years since. There was no mention of video surveillance at Ohio State back in 2015. But in 2019, that capability was tested at Georgia Tech. 

There, police used “HSIN Connect to share live video streams with public safety partners.” 

A 2019 internal newsletter quoted a Georgia Tech police officer about the use of real-time video surveillance on game days, both from stationary cameras and cell phones.

“The mobile app for HSIN Connect also allows officials to provide multiple, simultaneous live video streams back to our Operations Center across a secure platform,” the department said.

Ohio State told FOIAball that it no longer uses HSIN for events or incidents. However, it declined to answer questions about surveilling protesters or football games.

Ohio State’s records department said that it did not have any documents relating to the use of HSIN or sharing video feeds with DHS. 

Georgia Tech’s records office told FOIAball that HSINs had not been used in years and claimed it was “only used as a tool to share screens internally." Its communications team did not respond to a request to clarify that comment.

Years later, DHS had eyes both on the ground and in the sky at college football. 

According to the 2023 annual review, HSIN Connect operated during University of Central Florida home games that season. There, both security camera and drone detection system feeds were looped into the platform in real-time.

DHS said that the "success at UCF's football games hints at a broader application in emergency management.” 

HSIN has in recent years been hooked into facial recognition systems.

A 2024 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the U.S. Marshals were granted access to HSIN, where they requested "indirect facial recognition searches through state and local entities" using Clearview AI. 

Which brings us to the Egg Bowl—the annual rivalry game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State. 

FOIAball learned about the presence of HSIN at Ole Miss through a records request to the city’s police department. It shared Event Action Plans for the Rebels’ games on Nov. 9, 2024 against Georgia and Nov. 30, 2024 against Mississippi State.

It’s unclear how these partnerships are forged. 

In videos discussing HSIN, DHS officials have highlighted their outreach to law enforcement, talking about how they want agencies onboarded and trained on the platform. No schools mentioned in this article answered questions about how their relationship with DHS started.

The Event Action Plan provides a fascinating level of detail that shows what goes into security planning for a college football game, from operations meetings that start on Tuesday to safety debriefs the following Monday. 

Its timeline of events discusses when Ole Miss’s Vaught-Hemingway Stadium is locked down and when security sweeps are conducted. Maps detail where students congregate beforehand and where security guards are posted during games. 

The document includes contingency plans for extreme heat, lightning, active threats, and protesters. It also includes specific scripts for public service announcers to read in the event of any of those incidents. 

It shows at least 11 different law enforcement agencies are on the ground on game days, from school cops to state police.

They even have the U.S. military on call. The 47th Civil Support Team, based out of Jackson Air National Guard Base, is ready to respond to a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack. 

All those agencies are steered via the document to the HSIN platform. 

Under a section on communications, it lists the HSIN Sitroom, which is “Available to all partners and stakeholders via computer & cell phone.”

The document includes a link to an HSIN Connect page.

It uses Eli Manning as an example of how to log in. 

“Ole Miss Emergency Management - Log in as a Guest and use a conventional naming convention such as: ‘Eli Manning - Athletics.’”

On the document, it notes that the HSIN hosts sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Threat Analysis Documents. 

“Access is granted on a need-to-know basis, users will need to be approved prior to entry into the SitRoom.”

“The general public and general University Community is not permitted to enter the online SitRoom,” it adds. “All SitRooms contain operationally sensitive information and PII, therefore access must be granted by the ‘Host’.”

It details what can be accessed in the HSIN, such as a chat window for relaying information.

It includes a section on Threat Analysis, which DHS says is conducted through large-scale media monitoring.

The document does not detail whether the HSIN used at Ole Miss has access to surveillance cameras across campus. 

But that may not be something explicitly stated in documents such as these. 

Like Ohio State, UCF told FOIAball that it had no memoranda of understanding or documentation about providing access to video feeds to HSINs, despite DHS acknowledging those streams were shared. Ole Miss’ records department also did not provide any documents on what campus cameras may have been shared with DHS. 

While one might assume the feeds go dark after the game is over, there exists the very real possibility that by being tapped in once, DHS can easily access them again. 

“I’m worried about mission creep,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told FOIAball. “These arrangements are made for very specific purposes. But they could become the apparatus of much greater state surveillance.” 

For Ole Miss, its game against Georgia went off without any major incidents. 

Well, save for one. 

During the second quarter, a squirrel jumped onto the field, and play had to be stopped. 

In the EAP, there was no announcer script for handling a live animal interruption.

Chicagoans 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.”

Over the last couple months ICE has especially focused on Chicago as part of Operation Midway Blitz. During that time, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel have shot a religious leader in the head, repeatedly violated court orders limiting the use of force, and even entered a daycare facility to detain someone.

3D printers have been around for years, with hobbyists using them for everything from car parts to kids’ toys. In media articles they are probably most commonly associated with 3D-printed firearms.

One of the main attractions of 3D printers is that they squarely put the means of production into the hands of essentially anyone who is able to buy or access a printer. There’s no need to set up a complex supply chain of material providers or manufacturers. No worry about a store refusing to sell you an item for whatever reason. Instead, users just print at home, and can do so very quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes. The price of printers has decreased dramatically over the last 10 years, with some costing a few hundred dollars.

People who are printing whistles in Chicago either create their own design or are given or download a design someone else made. Resident Justin Schuh made his own. That design includes instructions on how to best use the whistle—three short blasts to signal ICE is nearby, and three long ones for a “code red.” The whistle also includes the phone number for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (ICIRR) hotline, which people can call to connect with an immigration attorney or receive other assistance. Schuh said he didn’t know if anyone else had printed his design specifically, but he said he has “designed and printed some different variations, when someone local has asked for something specific to their group.” The Printables page for Schuh’s design says it has been downloaded nearly two dozen times.

In a landmark case for Danish courts and internationally, a man was sentenced to seven months’ suspended imprisonment and 120 hours of community service for posting nude scenes from copyrighted films.

He’s convicted of “gross violations of copyright, including violating the right of publicity of more than 100 aggrieved female actors relating to their artistic integrity,” Danish police reported Monday.

The man, a 40-year-old from Denmark who was a prolific Redditor under the username “KlammereFyr” (which translates to “NastierGuy”) was arrested and charged with copyright infringement in September 2024 by Denmark’s National Unit for Serious Crime (NSK). 

It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Wednesday, November 19th at 1 PM Eastern. That's in just over a week away! Add it to your calendar! 

This time we're focused on our coverage of Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and surveillance tech company. Earlier this year anonymous researchers had the great idea of asking agencies for the network audit which shows why cops were using these cameras. Following that, we did a bunch of coverage, including showing that local police were performing lookups for ICE in Flock's nationwide network of cameras, and that a cop in Texas searched the country for a woman who self-administered an abortion. We'll tell you how all of this came about, what other requests people did after, and what requests we're exploring at the moment with Flock.

If this will be your first FOIA Forum, don’t worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too.

Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join.

We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along!

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. And the impact that that had on my family, the impact on the health and well-being of my family from living next to a nuclear test site and the spiritual impact that it had on my family for generations. This project is furthering inhumanity, this project is furthering destruction, and we don’t need more nuclear weapons built by our citizens.”

At the Ypsilanti city council meeting where Pedri spoke, the town voted to officially fight against the construction of the data center. The University of Michigan says the project is not a data center, but a “high-performance computing facility” and it promises it won’t be used to “manufacture nuclear weapons.” The distinction and assertion are ringing hollow for Ypsilanti residents who oppose construction of the data center, have questions about what it would mean for the environment and the power grid, and want to know why a nuclear weapons lab 24 hours away by car wants to build an AI facility in their small town.

“What I think galls me the most is that this major institution in our community, which has done numerous wonderful things, is making decisions with—as I can tell—no consideration for its host community and no consideration for its neighboring jurisdictions,” Ypsilanti councilman Patrick McLean said during a recent council meeting. “I think the process of siting this facility stinks.”

For others on the council, the fight is more personal.

“I’m a Japanese American with strong ties to my family in Japan and the existential threat of nuclear weapons is not lost on me, as my family has been directly impacted,” Amber Fellows, a Ypsilanti city councilmember who led the charge in opposition to the data center, told 404 Media. “The thing that is most troubling about this is that the nuclear weapons that we, as Americans, witnessed 80 years ago are still being proliferated and modernized without question.”

It’s a classic David and Goliath story. On one side is Ypsilanti (called Ypsi by its residents), which has a population just north of 20,000 and situated about 40 minutes outside of Detroit. On the other is the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), American scientists famous for nuclear weapons and, lately, pushing the boundaries of AI.

The University of Michigan first announced the Los Alamos data center, what it called an “AI research facility,” last year. According to a press release from the university, the data center will cost $1.25 billion and take up between 220,000 to 240,000 square feet. “The university is currently assessing the viability of locating the facility in Ypsilanti Township,” the press release said.

On October 21, the Ypsilanti City Council considered a proposal to officially oppose the data center and the people of the area explained why they wanted it passed. One woman cited environmental and ethical concerns. “Third is the moral problem of having our city resources towards aiding the development of nuclear arms,” she said. “The city of Ypsilanti has a good track record of being on the right side of history and, more often than not, does the right thing. If this resolution passed, it would be a continuation of that tradition.”

A man worried about what the facility would do to the physical health of citizens and talked about what happened in other communities where data centers were built. “People have poisoned air and poisoned water and are getting headaches from the generators,” he said. “There’s also reports around the country of energy bills skyrocketing when data centers come in. There’s also reports around the country of local grids becoming much less reliable when the data centers come in…we don’t need to see what it’s like to have a data center in Ypsi. We could just not do that.”

The resolution passed. “The Ypsilanti City Council strongly opposes the Los Alamos-University of Michigan data center due to its connections to nuclear weapons modernization and potential environmental harms and calls for a complete and permanent cessation of all efforts to build this data center in any form,” the resolution said.

Ypsi has a lot of reasons to be concerned. Data centers tend to bring rising power bills, horrible noise, and dwindling drinking water to every community they touch. “The fact that U of M is using Ypsilanti as a dumping ground, a sacrifice zone, is unacceptable,” Fellows said.

Ypsi’s resolution focused on a different angle though: nuclear weapons. “The Ypsilanti City Council strongly opposes the Los Alamos-University of Michigan data center due to its connections to nuclear weapons modernization and potential environmental harms and calls for a complete and permanent cessation of all efforts to build this data center in any form,” the resolution said.

As part of the resolution, Ypsilanti is applying to join the Mayors for Peace initiative, an international organization of cities opposed to nuclear weapons and founded by the former mayor of Hiroshima. Fellows learned about Mayors for Peace when she visited Hiroshima last year.

Both LANL and the University of Michigan have been vague about what the data center will be used for, but have said it will include one facility for classified federal research and another for non-classified research which students and faculty will have access to. “Applications include the discovery and design of new materials, calculations on climate preparedness and sustainability,” it said in an FAQ about the data center. “Industries such as mobility, national security, aerospace, life sciences and finance can benefit from advanced modeling and simulation capabilities.”

The university FAQ said that the data center will not be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. “Manufacturing” nuclear weapons specifically refers to their creation, something that’s hard to do and only occurs at a handful of specialized facilities across America. I asked both LANL and the University of Michigan if the data generated by the facility would be used in nuclear weapons science in any way. Neither answered the question.

“The federal facility is for research and high-performance computing,” the FAQ said. “It will focus on scientific computation to address various national challenges, including cybersecurity, nuclear and other emerging threats, biohazards, and clean energy solutions.”

LANL is going all in on AI. It partnered with OpenAI to use the company’s frontier models in research and recently announced a partnership with NVIDIA to build two new super computers named “Mission” and “Vision.” It’s true that LANL’s scientific output covers a range of issues but its overwhelming focus, and budget allocation, is nuclear weapons. LANL requested a budget of $5.79 billion in 2026. 84 percent of that is earmarked for nuclear weapons. Only $40 million of the LANL budget is set aside for “science,” according to government documents. 

“The fact is we don’t really know because Los Alamos and U of M are unwilling to spell out exactly what’s going to happen,” Fellows said. When LANL declined to comment for this story, it told 404 Media to direct its question to the University of Michigan.

The university pointed 404 Media to the FAQ page about the project. “You'll see in the FAQs that the locations being considered are not within the city of Ypsilanti,” it said.

It’s an odd statement given that this is what’s in the FAQ: “The university is currently assessing the viability of locating the facility in Ypsilanti Township on the north side of Textile Road, directly across the street from the Ford Rawsonville Components plant and adjacent to the LG Energy Solutions plant.”

It’s true that this is not technically in the city of Ypsilanti but rather Ypsilanti Township, a collection of communities that almost entirely surrounds the city itself. For Fellows, it’s a distinction without a difference. “[Univeristy of Michigan] can build it in Barton Hills and see how the city of Ann Arbor feels about it,” she said, referencing a village that borders the township where the university's home city of Ann Arbor.

“The university has, and will continue to, explore other sites if they are viable in the timeframe needed for successful completion of the project,” Kay Jarvis, the university’s director of public affairs, told 404 Media.

Fellows said that Ypsilanti will fight the data center with everything it has. “We’re putting pressure on the Ypsi township board to use whatever tools they have to deny permits…and to stand up for their community,” she said. “We’re also putting pressure on the U of M board of trustees, the county, our state legislature that approved these projects and funded them with public funds. We’re identifying all the different entities that have made this project possible so far and putting pressure on them to reverse action.”

For Fellows, the fight is existential. It’s not just about the environmental concerns around the construction project. “I was under the belief that the prevailing consensus was that nuclear weapons are wrong and they should be drawn down as fast as possible. I’m trying to use what little power I have to work towards that goal,” she said.

If you’ve been to a national park in the U.S. recently, you might have noticed some odd new signs about “beauty” and “grandeur.” Or, some signs you were used to seeing might now be missing completely. An executive order issued earlier this year put the history and educational aspects of the parks system under threat–but a group of librarians stepped in to save it. 

This week we have a conversation between Sam and two of the leaders of the independent volunteer archiving project Save Our Signs, an effort to archive national park signs and monument placards. It’s a community collaboration project co-founded by a group of librarians, public historians, and data experts in partnership with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research & Culture. 

Lynda Kellam leads the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is a founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project. Jenny McBurney is the Government Publications Librarian and Regional Depository Coordinator at the University of Minnesota Libraries. In this episode, they discuss turning “frustration, dismay and disbelief” at parks history under threat into action: compiling more than 10,000 images from over 300 national parks into a database to be preserved for the people.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ‘Save Our Signs’ Archive and Submission Site
• 'Save Our Signs' Wants to Save the Real History of National Parks Before Trump Erases It
• ‘Save Our Signs’ Preservation Project Launches Archive of 10,000 National Park Signs
• Archivists Work to Identify and Save the Thousands of Datasets Disappearing From Data.gov

Pour Jacobin, l’économiste britannique Giorgos Galanis convoque le récent livre de l’économiste Maximilian Kasy, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) (Les moyens de prédictions : comment l’IA fonctionne vraiment (et qui en bénéficie), University of Chicago Press, 2025, non traduit), pour rappeler l’importance du contrôle démocratique de la technologie. Lorsqu’un algorithme prédictif a refusé des milliers de prêts hypothécaires à des demandeurs noirs en 2019, il ne s’agissait pas d’un dysfonctionnement, mais d’un choix délibéré, reflétant les priorités des géants de la tech, guidés par le profit. Pour Maximilian Kasy de tels résultats ne sont pas des accidents technologiques, mais les conséquences prévisibles de ceux qui contrôlent l’IA. « De même que Karl Marx identifiait le contrôle des moyens de production comme le fondement du pouvoir de classe, Kasy identifie les « moyens de prédiction » (données, infrastructure informatique, expertise technique et énergie) comme le socle du pouvoir à l’ère de l’IA ». « La thèse provocatrice de Kasy révèle que les objectifs de l’IA sont des choix délibérés, programmés par ceux qui contrôlent ses ressources pour privilégier le profit au détriment du bien commun. Seule une prise de contrôle démocratique des moyens de prédiction permettra de garantir que l’IA serve la société dans son ensemble et non les profits des géants de la tech ». 

Les algorithmes ne sont pas programmés pour prédire n’importe quels résultats. Les  plateformes de médias sociaux, par exemple, collectent d’énormes quantités de données utilisateur pour prédire quelles publicités maximisent les clics, et donc les profits attendus. En quête d’engagement, les algorithmes ont appris que l’indignation, l’insécurité et l’envie incitent les utilisateurs à faire défiler les publications. D’où l’envolée de la polarisation, des troubles anxieux et la dégradation du débat… « Les outils prédictifs utilisés dans le domaine de l’aide sociale ou du recrutement produisent des effets similaires. Les systèmes conçus pour identifier les candidats « à risque » s’appuient sur des données historiques biaisées, automatisant de fait la discrimination en privant de prestations ou d’entretiens d’embauche des groupes déjà marginalisés. Même lorsque l’IA semble promouvoir la diversité, c’est généralement parce que l’inclusion améliore la rentabilité, par exemple en optimisant les performances d’une équipe ou la réputation d’une marque. Dans ce cas, il existe un niveau de diversité « optimal » : celui qui maximise les profits escomptés ». 

Les systèmes d’IA reflètent en fin de compte les priorités de ceux qui contrôlent les « moyens de prédiction ». Si les travailleurs et les usagers, plutôt que les propriétaires d’entreprises, orientaient le développement technologique, suggère Kasy, les algorithmes pourraient privilégier des salaires équitables, la sécurité de l’emploi et le bien-être public au détriment du profit. Mais comment parvenir à un contrôle démocratique des moyens de prédiction ? Kasy préconise un ensemble d’actions complémentaires comme la taxation des entreprises d’IA pour couvrir les coûts sociaux, la réglementation pour interdire les pratiques néfastes en matière de données et la création de fiducies de données, c’est-à-dire la création d’institutions collectives pour gérer les données pour le compte des communautés à des fins d’intérêt public. 

Ces algorithmes décident qui est embauché, qui reçoit des soins médicaux ou qui a accès à l’information, privilégiant souvent le profit au détriment du bien-être social. Il compare la privatisation des données à l’accaparement historique des biens communs, arguant que le contrôle exercé par les géants de la tech sur les moyens de prédiction concentre le pouvoir, sape la démocratie et creuse les inégalités. Des algorithmes utilisés dans les tribunaux aux flux des réseaux sociaux, les systèmes d’IA façonnent de plus en plus nos vies selon les priorités privées de leurs créateurs. Pour Kasy, il ne faut pas les considérer comme de simples merveilles technologiques neutres, mais comme des systèmes façonnés par des forces sociales et économiques. L’avenir de l’IA ne dépend pas de la technologie elle-même, mais de notre capacité collective à bâtir des institutions telles que des fiducies de données pour gouverner démocratiquement les systèmes. Kasy nous rappelle que l’IA n’est pas une force autonome, mais une relation sociale, un instrument de pouvoir de classe qui peut être réorienté à des fins collectives. La question est de savoir si nous avons la volonté politique de nous en emparer.

Dans une tribune pour le New York Times, Maximilian Kasy explique que la protection des données personnelles n’est plus opérante dans un monde où l’IA est partout. « Car l’IA n’a pas besoin de savoir ce que vous avez fait ; elle a seulement besoin de savoir ce que des personnes comme vous ont fait auparavant ». Confier à l’IA la tâche de prendre des décisions à partir de ces données transforme la société. 

« Pour nous prémunir contre ce préjudice collectif, nous devons créer des institutions et adopter des lois qui donnent aux personnes concernées par les algorithmes d’IA la possibilité de s’exprimer sur leur conception et leurs objectifs. Pour y parvenir, la première étape est la transparence. À l’instar des obligations de transparence financière des entreprises, les sociétés et les organismes qui utilisent l’IA devraient être tenus de divulguer leurs objectifs et ce que leurs algorithmes cherchent à maximiser : clics publicitaires sur les réseaux sociaux, embauche de travailleurs non syndiqués ou nombre total d’expulsions », explique Kasy. Pas sûr pourtant que cette transparence des objectifs suffise, si nous n’imposons pas aux entreprises de publier des données sur leurs orientations. 

« La deuxième étape est la participation. Les personnes dont les données servent à entraîner les algorithmes – et dont la vie est influencée par ces derniers – doivent être consultées. Il faudrait que des citoyens contribuent à définir les objectifs des algorithmes. À l’instar d’un jury composé de pairs qui instruisent une affaire civile ou pénale et rendent un verdict collectivement, nous pourrions créer des assemblées citoyennes où un groupe représentatif de personnes choisies au hasard délibère et décide des objectifs appropriés pour les algorithmes. Cela pourrait se traduire par des employés d’une entreprise délibérant sur l’utilisation de l’IA sur leur lieu de travail, ou par une assemblée citoyenne examinant les objectifs des outils de police prédictive avant leur déploiement par les agences gouvernementales. Ce sont ces types de contre-pouvoirs démocratiques qui permettraient d’aligner l’IA sur le bien commun, et non sur le seul intérêt privé. L’avenir de l’IA ne dépendra pas d’algorithmes plus intelligents ou de puces plus rapides. Il dépendra de qui contrôle les données et de quelles valeurs et intérêts guident les machines. Si nous voulons une IA au service du public, c’est au public de décider de ce qu’elle doit servir ».

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that took a bite out of life, appealed to the death drive, gave a yellow light to the universe, and produced hitherto unknown levels of cute.

First, it’s the most epic ocean battle: orcas versus sharks (pro tip: you don’t want to be sharks). Then, a scientific approach to apocalyptic ideation; curbing cosmic enthusiasm; and last, the wonderful world of tadpole-less toads.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

Now, to the feast! 

I guess that’s why they call them killer whales

Higuera-Rivas, Jesús Erick et al. “Novel evidence of interaction between killer whales (Orcinus orca) and juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the Gulf of California, Mexico.” Frontiers in Marine Science.

Orcas kill young great white sharks by flipping them upside down and tearing their livers out of their bellies, which they then eat family-style, according to a new study that includes new footage of these Promethean interactions in Mexican waters.

“Here we document novel repeated predations by killer whales on juvenile white sharks in the Gulf of California,” said researchers led by Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas of the non-profit Pelagic Protection and Conservation AC. 

“Aerial videos indicate consistency in killer whales’ repeated assaults and strikes on the sharks,” the team added. “Once extirpated from the prey body, the target organ is shared between the members of the pods including calves.”

I’ll give you a beat to let that sink in, like orca teeth on the belly of a shark. While it's well-established that orcas are the only known predator of great white sharks aside from humans, the new study is only the second glimpse of killer whales targeting juvenile sharks. 

This group of orcas, known as Moctezuma’s pod, has developed an effective strategy of working together to flip the sharks over, which interrupts the sharks’ sensory system and puts them into a state called tonic immobility. The authors describe the pod’s work as methodical and well coordinated.

“Our evidence undoubtedly shows consistency in the repeated assaults and strikes, indicating efficient maneuvering ability by the killer whales in attempting to turn the shark upside down, likely to induce tonic immobility and allow uninterrupted access to the organs for consumption, " the team said. Previous reports suggest that “the lack of bite marks or injuries anywhere other than the pectoral fins shows a novel and specialized technique of accessing the liver of the shark with minimal handling of each individual.”  

An orca attacking a juvenile great white shark. Image: Marco Villegas 

Sharks, by the way, do not attack orcas. Just the opposite. As you can imagine based on the horrors you have just read, sharks are so petrified of killer whales that they book it whenever they sense a nearby pod.

“Adult white sharks exhibit a memory and previous knowledge about killer whales, which enables them to activate an avoidance mechanism through behavioral risk effects; a ‘fear’- induced mass exodus from aggregations sites,” the team said. “This response may preclude repeated successful predation on adult white sharks by killer whales.”

In other words, if you’re a shark, one encounter with orcas is enough to make you watch your dorsal side for life—assuming you were lucky enough to escape with it. 

In other news…

Apocalypse now plz

Albrecht, Rudolf et al. “Geopolitical, Socio-Economic and Legal Aspects of the 2024PDC25 Event.” Acta Astronautica.

You may have seen the doomer humor meme to “send the asteroid already,” a plea for sweet cosmic relief that fits our beleaguered times. As it turns out, some scientists engage in this type of apocalyptic wish fulfillment professionally. 

Planetary defense experts often participate in drills involving fictional hazardous asteroids, such as the 2024PDC25, a virtual object “discovered” at the 2025 Planetary Defense Conference. In that simulation, 2024PDC25 had a possible impact date in 2041.

Now a team has used that exercise as a jumping off point to explore what might happen if it hit even earlier, channeling that “send the asteroid already” energy.. The researchers used this time-crunched scenario to speculate about the effect on geopolitics and pivotal events, such as the 2028 US Presidential elections.

“As it is very difficult to extrapolate from 2025 across 16 years in this ‘what-if’ exercise, we decided to bring the scenario forward to 2031 and examine it with today’s global background,” Rudolf Albrecht of the Austrian Space Forum. “Today would be T-6 years and the threat is becoming immediate.”

As the astro-doomers would say: Finally some good news.

Big dark energy

Son, Junhyuk et al. “Strong progenitor age bias in supernova cosmology – II. Alignment with DESI BAO and signs of a non-accelerating universe.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

First, we discovered the universe was expanding. Then, we discovered it was expanding at an accelerating rate. Now, a new study suggests that this acceleration might be slowing down. Universe, make up your mind!

But seriously, the possibility that the rate of cosmic expansion is slowing is a big deal, because dark energy—the term for whatever is making the universe expand—was assumed to be a constant for decades. But this consensus has been challenged by observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, which became operational in 2021. In its first surveys, DESI’s observations have pointed to an expansion rate that is not fixed, but in flux.

Together with past results, the study “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and “our analysis raises the possibility that the present universe is no longer in a state of accelerated expansion,” said researchers led by Junhyuk Son of Yonsei University. “This provides a fundamentally new perspective that challenges the two central pillars of the [cold dark matter] standard cosmological model proposed 27 years ago.”

It will take more research to constrain this mystery, but for now it’s a reminder that the universe loves to surprise.

And the award for most squee goes to…

Thrane, Christian et al. “Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae).” Vertebrate Zoology

We’ll end, as all things should, with toadlets. Most frogs and toads reproduce by laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles, but scientists have discovered three new species of toad in Tanzania that give birth to live young—a very rare adaptation for any amphibian, known as ovoviviparity. The scientific term for these youngsters is in fact “toadlet.” Gods be good.

“We describe three new species from the Nectophrynoides viviparus species complex, covering the southern Eastern Arc Mountains populations,” said researchers led by Christian Thrane of the University of Copenhagen. One of the new species included “the observation of toadlets, suggesting that this species is ovoviviparous.”

Note to Nintendo: please make a very tiny Toadlet into a Mario Kart racer.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

This 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 archiving to get around paywalls, hating on smart glasses, and more.

JASON: I was going to try to twist myself into knots attempting to explain the throughline between my articles this week, and about how I’ve been thinking about the news and our coverage more broadly. This was going to be something about trying to promote analog media and distinctly human ways of communicating (like film photography), while highlighting the very bad economic and political incentives pushing us toward fundamentally dehumanizing, anti-human methods of communicating. Like fully automated, highly customized and targeted AI ads, automated library software, and I guess whatever Nancy Pelosi has been doing with her stock portfolio. But then I remembered that I blogged about the FBI’s subpoena against archive.is, a website I feel very ambivalent about and one that is the subject of perhaps my most cringe blog of all time.

So let’s revisit that cringe blog, which was called “Dear GamerGate: Please Stop Stealing Our Shit.” I wrote this article in 2014, which was fully 11 years ago, which is alarming to me. First things first: They were not stealing from me they were stealing from VICE, a company that I did not actually experience financial gains from related to people reading articles; it was good if people read my articles and traffic was very important, and getting traffic over time led to me getting raises and promotions and stuff, but the company made very, very clear that we did not “own” the articles and therefore they were not “mine” in the way that they are now. With that out of the way, the reporting and general reason for the article was I think good but the tone of it is kind of wildly off, and, as I mentioned, over the course of many years I have now come to regard archive.is as sort of an integral archiving tool. If you are unfamiliar with archive.is, it’s a site that takes snapshots of any URL and creates a new link for them which, notably, does not go to the original website. Archive.is is extremely well known for bypassing the paywalls on many sites, 404 Media sometimes but not usually among them. 

Social media accounts on TikTok and X are posting AI-generated videos of women and girls being strangled, showing yet another example of generative AI companies failing to prevent users from creating media that violates their own policies against violent content. 

One account on X has been posting dozens of AI-generated strangulation videos starting in mid-October. The videos are usually 10 seconds long and mostly feature a “teenage girl” being strangled, crying, and struggling to resist until her eyes close and she falls to the ground. Some titles for the videos include: “A Teenage Girl Cheerleader Was Strangled As She Was Distressed,” “Prep School Girls Were Strangled By The Murderer!” and “man strangled a high school cheerleader with a purse strap which is crazy.”

After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated tool use may have originated much earlier than previously known, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

The discovery of nearly 1,300 artifacts—with ages that span 2.44 to 2.75 million years old—reveals that the influential Oldowan tool-making tradition existed across at least 300,000 years of turbulent environmental shifts. The wealth of new tools from Kenya’s Namorotukunan site suggest that their makers adapted to major environmental changes in part by passing technological knowledge down through the ages.

“The question was: did they generally just reinvent the [Oldowan tradition] over and over again? That made a lot of sense when you had a record that was kind of sporadic,” said David R. Braun, a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. 

“But the fact that we see so much similarity between 2.4 and 2.75 [million years ago] suggests that this is generally something that they do,” he continued. “Some of it may be passed down through social learning, like observation of others doing it. There’s some kind of tradition that continues on for this timeframe that would argue against this idea of just constantly reinventing the wheel.”

Oldowan tools, which date back at least 2.75 million years, are distinct from earlier traditions in part because hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, specifically sought out high-quality materials such as chert and quartz to craft sharp-edged cutting and digging tools. This advancement allowed them to butcher large animals, like hippos, and possibly dig for underground food sources.

When Braun and his colleagues began excavating at Namorotukunan in 2013, they found many artifacts made of chalcedony, a fine-grained rock that is typically associated with much later tool-making traditions. To the team’s surprise, the rocks were dated to periods as early as 2.75 million years ago, making them among the oldest artifacts in the Oldowan record. 

“Even though Oldowan technology is really just hitting one rock against the other, there's good and bad ways of doing it,” Braun explained. “So even though it's pretty simple, what they seem to be figuring out is where to hit the rock, and which angles to select. They seem to be getting a grip on that—not as well as later in time—but they're definitely getting an understanding at this timeframe.”

The excavation was difficult as it takes several days just to reach the remote offroad site, while much of the work involved tiptoing along steep outcrops. Braun joked that their auto mechanic lined up all the vehicle shocks that had been broken during the drive each season, as a testament to the challenge. 

But by the time the project finally concluded in 2022, the researchers had established that Oldowan tools were made at this site over the course of 300,000 years. During this span, the landscape of Namorotukunan shifted from lush humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again. Despite these destabilizing shifts in their climate and biome, the hominins that made these tools endured in part because this technology opened up new food sources to them, such as the carcasses of large animals. 

“The whole landscape really shifts,” Braun said. “But hominins are able to basically ameliorate those rapid changes in the amount of rainfall and the vegetation around by using tools to adapt to what’s happening.”

“That's a human superpower—it’s that ability we have to keep this information stored in our collective heads, so that when new challenges show up, there's somebody in our group that remembers how to deal with this particular adaptation,” he added.

It’s not clear exactly which species of hominin made the tools at Namorotukunan; it may have been early members of our own genus Homo, or other relatives, like Australopithecus afarensis, that later went extinct. Regardless, the discovery of such a long-lived and continuous assemblage may hint that the origins of these tools are much older than we currently know.

“I think that we're going to start to find tool use much earlier” perhaps “going back five, six, or seven million years,” Braun said. “That’s total speculation. I've got no evidence that that's the case. But judging from what primates do, I don't really understand why we wouldn't see it.” 

To that end, the researchers plan to continue excavating these bygone landscapes to search for more artifacts and hominin remains that could shed light on the identity of these tool makers, probing the origins of these early technologies that eventually led to humanity’s dominance on the planet.

“It's possible that this tool use is so diverse and so different from our expectations that we have blinders on,” Braun concluded. “We have to open our search for what tool use looks like, and then we might start to see that they're actually doing a lot more of it than we thought they were.”

Le slop est déjà partout, constate, à nouveau, désabusé, Charlie Warzel dans The Atlantic. Nous sommes en train de disparaître sous la distorsion des déchets de l’IA générative. Le nombre d’articles créés par l’IA serait même passé devant celui des articles créés par des humains. Le designer Angelos Arnis parle même d’« infrastructure du non-sens ». Dans la Harvard Business Review, les chercheurs estiment que le travail de remplissage (workslop) généré par l’IA et en train de coloniser le monde du travail sans produire grand chose d’utile. 

« L’IA a créé une véritable infrastructure d’absurdité et de désorientation », explique Warzel. Pire, la perte de sens « rend l’acte même de créer quelque chose de significatif presque insignifiant ». Et perdre l’envie de créer, « je le crains, revient à capituler sur notre humanité même ».

En Californie, quatrième économie mondiale, le gouverneur Newsom vient de promulguer la loi AB325, interdisant les cabinets de conseil en tarification, permettant de surveiller les tarifs et plus encore de les augmenter, nous apprend Cory Doctorow. La loi interdit « l’utilisation ou la diffusion d’un algorithme de tarification commun si cette personne contraint une autre personne à fixer ou à adopter un prix ou une condition commerciale recommandés par l’algorithme pour des produits ou services identiques ou similaires » (voir notre dossier “Du marketing à l’économie numérique : une boucle de prédation”). Pour Matt Stoller, cette législation peut paraître insignifiante, mais il s’agit d’une immense victoire interdisant la coercition des prix. La loi AB325 dit qu’il est désormais illégal de contraindre quelqu’un à utiliser un algorithme de tarification basé sur des données non publiques.

26-27 novembre, Paris. Numérique en lumière : 2 jours de festival documentaire consacré aux droits humains bafoués par le numérique.

« La surveillance biométrique à distance ne sert pas à assurer la sécurité (elle ne le permet pas) ou à empêcher les rassemblements (elle ne le peut pas). C’est le seul moyen de contrôle qui reste lorsque la confiance envers la population est ébranlée. » Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Passionnant article de recherche qui montre que le développement de l’internet des objets dans l’espace domestique n’est pas sans créer des tensions entre les habitants. Les chercheurs parlent de « résistance banale » pour montrer que ces outils, comme les dispositifs vocaux de type Alexa ou domotiques, finissent par être peu à peu rejetés du fait des tensions familiales que leur usage génère. Le capitalisme de surveillance est moins panoptique que myope, ironisent les chercheurs Murray Goulden et Lewis Cameron. Via Algorithm Watch.

Nancy Pelosi, one of Wall Street’s all time great investors, announced her retirement Thursday.

Pelosi, so known for her ability to outpace the S&P 500 that dozens of websites and apps spawned to track her seeming preternatural ability to make smart stock trades, said she will retire after the 2024-2026 season. Pelosi’s trades over the years, many done through her husband and investing partner Paul Pelosi, have been so good that an entire startup, called Autopilot, was started to allow investors to directly mirror Pelosi’s portfolio. 

According to the site, more than 3 million people have invested more than $1 billion using the app. After 38 years, Pelosi will retire from the league—a somewhat normal career length as investors, especially on Pelosi’s team, have decided to stretch their careers later and later into their lives. 

The numbers put up by Pelosi in her Hall of Fame career are undeniable. Over the last decade, Pelosi’s portfolio returned an incredible 816 percent, according to public disclosure records. The S&P 500, meanwhile, has returned roughly 229 percent. Awe-inspired fans and analysts theorized that her almost omniscient ability to make correct, seemingly high-risk stock decisions may have stemmed from decades spent analyzing and perhaps even predicting decisions that would be made by the federal government that could impact companies’ stock prices. For example, Paul Pelosi sold $500,000 worth of Visa stock in July, weeks before the U.S. government announced a civil lawsuit against the company, causing its stock price to decrease.  

Besides Autopilot and numerous Pelosi stock trade trackers, there have also been several exchange traded funds (ETFs) set up that allow investors to directly copy their portfolio on Pelosi and her trades. Related funds, such as The Subversive Democratic Trading ETF (NANC, for Nancy), set up by the Unusual Whales investment news Twitter account, seek to allow investors to diversify their portfolios by tracking the trades of not just Pelosi but also some of her colleagues, including those on the other team, who have also proven to be highly gifted stock traders.

Fans of Pelosi spent much of Thursday admiring her career, and wondering what comes next: “Farewell to one of the greatest investors of all time,” the top post on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets community reads. The sentiment has more than 24,000 upvotes at the time of publication. Fans will spend years debating in bars whether Pelosi was the GOAT; some investors have noted that in recent years, some of her contemporaries, like Marjorie Taylor-Green, Ro Khanna, and Michael McCaul, have put up gaudier numbers. There are others who say the league needs reformation, with some of Pelosi’s colleagues saying they should stop playing at all, and many fans agreeing with that sentiment. Despite the controversy, many of her colleagues have committed to continue playing the game.

Pelosi said Thursday that this season would be her last, but like other legends who have gone out on top, it seems she is giving it her all until the end. Just weeks ago, she sold between $100,000 and $250,000 of Apple stock, according to a public box score.

“We can be proud of what we have accomplished,” Pelosi said in a video announcing her retirement. “But there’s always much more work to be done.”

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock Foundation.

Last month, a company called the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database announced a new version of a product called Class-Shelf Plus. The software, which is used by school libraries to keep track of which books are in their catalog, added several new features including “AI-driven automation and contextual risk analysis,” which includes an AI-powered “sensitive material marker” and a “traffic-light risk ratings” system. The company says that it believes this software will streamline the arduous task school libraries face when trying to comply with legislation that bans certain books and curricula: “Districts using Class-Shelf Plus v3 may reduce manual review workloads by more than 80%, empowering media specialists and administrators to devote more time to instructional priorities rather than compliance checks,” it said in a press release.

In a white paper published by CLCD, it gave a “real-world example: the role of CLCD in overcoming a book ban.” The paper then describes something that does not sound like “overcoming” a book ban at all. CLCD’s software simply suggested other books “without the contested content.” 

Ajay Gupte, the president of CLCD, told 404 Media the software is simply being piloted at the moment, but that it  “allows districts to make the majority of their classroom collections publicly visible—supporting transparency and access—while helping them identify a small subset of titles that might require review under state guidelines.” He added that “This process is designed to assist districts in meeting legislative requirements and protect teachers and librarians from accusations of bias or non-compliance [...] It is purpose-built to help educators defend their collections with clear, data-driven evidence rather than subjective opinion.”

Librarians told 404 Media that AI library software like this is just the tip of the iceberg; they are being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books that they need to wade through. But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

CLCD and Class Shelf Plus is a small but instructive example of something that librarians and educators have been telling me: The boosting of artificial intelligence by big technology firms, big financial firms, and government agencies is not separate from book bans, educational censorship efforts, and the war on education, libraries, and government workers being pushed by groups like the Heritage Foundation and any number of MAGA groups across the United States. This long-running war on knowledge and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of “efficiency.” With AI, there is no need for human expertise because anything can be learned, approximated, or created in seconds. And with AI, there is less room for nuance in things like classifying or tagging books to comply with laws; an LLM or a machine algorithm can decide whether content is “sensitive.”

“I see something like this, and it’s presented as very value neutral, like, ‘Here’s something that is going to make life easier for you because you have all these books you need to review,’” Jaime Taylor, discovery & resource management systems coordinator for the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts told me in a phone call. “And I look at this and immediately I am seeing a tool that’s going to be used for censorship because this large language model is ingesting all the titles you have, evaluating them somehow, and then it might spit out an inaccurate evaluation. Or it might spit out an accurate evaluation and then a strapped-for-time librarian or teacher will take whatever it spits out and weed their collections based on it. It’s going to be used to remove books from collections that are about queerness or sexuality or race or history. But institutions are going to buy this product because they have a mandate from state legislatures to do this, or maybe they want to do this, right?”

The resurgent war on knowledge, academics, expertise, and critical thinking that AI is currently supercharging has its roots in the hugely successful recent war on “critical race theory,” “diversity equity and inclusion,” and LGBTQ+ rights that painted librarians, teachers, scientists, and public workers as untrustworthy. This has played out across the board, with a seemingly endless number of ways in which the AI boom directly intersects with the right’s war on libraries, schools, academics, and government workers. There are DOGE’s mass layoffs of “woke” government workers, and the plan to replace them with AI agents and supposed AI-powered efficiencies. There are “parents rights” groups that pushed to ban books and curricula that deal with the teaching of slavery, systemic racism, and LGBTQ+ issues and attempted to replace them with homogenous curricula and “approved” books that teach one specific type of American history and American values; and there are the AI tools that have been altered to not be “woke” and to reenforce the types of things the administration wants you to think. Many teachers feel they are not allowed to teach about slavery or racism and increasingly spend their days grading student essays that were actually written by robots.

“One thing that I try to make clear any time I talk about book bans is that it’s not about the books, it’s about deputizing bigots to do the ugly work of defunding all of our public institutions of learning,” Maggie Tokuda-Hall, a cofounder of Authors Against Book Bans, told me. “The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would not be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it. They are very comfortable bedfellows because once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.”

Justin, a cohost of the podcast librarypunk, told me that the project of offloading cognitive capacity to AI continues apace: “Part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking, especially the reflective kind of thinking that reading, study, and community engagement provide,” Justin said. “That kind of thinking cultivates empathy and challenges your assumptions. It's also something you have to practice. If we can offload that cognitive work, it's far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”

These two forces—the war on libraries, classrooms, and academics and AI boosterism—are not working in a vacuum. The Heritage Foundation’s right-wing agenda for remaking the federal government, Project 2025, talks about criminalizing teachers and librarians who “poison our own children” and pushing artificial intelligence into every corner of the government for data analysis and “waste, fraud, and abuse” detection. 

Librarians, teachers, and government workers have had to spend an increasing amount of their time and emotional bandwidth defending the work that they do, fighting against censorship efforts and dealing with the associated stress, harassment, and threats that come from fighting educational censorship. Meanwhile, they are separately dealing with an onslaught of AI slop and the top-down mandated AI-ification of their jobs; there are simply fewer and fewer hours to do what they actually want to be doing, which is helping patrons and students.

“The last five years of library work, of public service work has been a nightmare, with ongoing harassment and censorship efforts that you’re either experiencing directly or that you’re hearing from your other colleagues,” Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told me in a phone interview. “And then in the last year-and-a-half or so, you add to it this enormous push for the AIfication of your library, and the enormous demands on your time. Now you have these already overworked public servants who are being expected to do even more because there’s an expectation to use AI, or that AI will do it for you. But they’re dealing with things like the influx of AI-generated books and other materials that are being pushed by vendors.” 

The future being pushed by both AI boosters and educational censors is one where access to information is tightly controlled. Children will not be allowed to read certain books or learn certain narratives. “Research” will be performed only through one of a select few artificial intelligence tools owned by AI giants which are uniformly aligned behind the Trump administration and which have gone to the ends of the earth to prevent their black box machines from spitting out “woke” answers lest they catch the ire of the administration. School boards and library boards, forced to comply with increasingly restrictive laws, funding cuts, and the threat of being defunded entirely, leap at the chance to be considered forward looking by embracing AI tools, or apply for grants from government groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is increasingly giving out grants specifically to AI projects.

We previously reported that the ebook service Hoopla, used by many libraries, has been flooded with AI-generated books (the company has said it is trying to cull these from its catalog). In a recent survey of librarians, Macrina’s organization found that librarians are getting inundated with pitches from AI companies and are being pushed by their superiors to adopt AI: “People in the survey results kept talking about, like, I get 10 aggressive, pushy emails a day from vendors demanding that I implement their new AI product or try it, jump on a call. I mean, the burdens have become so much, I don’t even know how to summarize them.”

“Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another"

Macrina said that in response to Library Freedom Project’s recent survey, librarians said that misinformation and disinformation was their biggest concern. This came not just in the form of book bans and censorship but also in efforts to proactively put disinformation and right-wing talking points into libraries: “It’s not just about book bans, and library board takeovers, and the existing reactionary attacks on libraries. It’s also the effort to push more far-right material into libraries,” she said. “And then you have librarians who are experiencing a real existential crisis because they are getting asked by their jobs to promote [AI] tools that produce more misinformation. It's the most, like, emperor-has-no-clothes-type situation that I have ever witnessed.” 

Each person I spoke to for this article told me they could talk about the right-wing project to erode trust in expertise, and the way AI has amplified this effort, for hours. In writing this article, I realized that I could endlessly tie much of our reporting on attacks on civil society and human knowledge to the force multiplier that is AI and the AI maximalist political and economic project. One need look no further than Grokipedia as one of the many recent reminders of this effort—a project by the world’s richest man and perhaps its most powerful right-wing political figure to replace a crowdsourced, meticulously edited fount of human knowledge with a robotic imitation built to further his political project. 

Much of what we write about touches on this: The plan to replace government workers with AI, the general erosion of truth on social media, the rise of AI slop that “feels” true because it reinforces a particular political narrative but is not true, the fact that teachers feel like they are forced to allow their students to use AI. Justin, from librarypunk, said AI has given people “absolute impunity to ignore reality […] AI is a direct attack on the way we verify information: AI both creates fake sources and obscures its actual sources.”

That is the opposite of what librarians do, and teachers do, and scientists do, and experts do. But the political project to devalue the work these professionals do, and the incredible amount of money invested in pushing AI as a replacement for that human expertise, have worked in tandem to create a horrible situation for all of us.

“AI is an agreement machine, which is anathema to learning and critical thinking,” Tokuda-Hall said. Previously we have had experts like librarians and teachers to help them do these things, but they have been hamstrung and they’ve been attacked and kneecapped and we’ve created a culture in which their contribution is completely erased from society, which makes something like AI seem really appealing. It’s filling that vacuum.”

“Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another,” she added.

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is asking Automatic.CSS—a company that provides a CSS framework for WordPress page builders—to change its name amid public spats between Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and Automatic.CSS creator Kevin Geary. Automattic has two T’s as a nod to Matt.

“As you know, our client owns and operates a wide range of software brands and services, including the very popular web building and hosting platform WordPress.com,” Jim Davis, an intellectual property attorney representing Automattic, wrote in a letter dated Oct. 30. 

The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated. Archive.today is also popularly known by several of its mirrors, including archive.is and archive.ph.

On se souvient, avec entrain, des 19 petits Exercices d’observations (Premier Parallèle, 2022) de Nicolas Nova : invitations à nous jouer du monde, à aiguiser nos capacités d’observations en apprenant à décaler son regard sur le monde qui nous entoure. Matthieu Raffard et Mathilde Roussel les mettent en pratique et les prolongent, dans A contre-emploi : manuel expérimental pour réveiller notre curiosité technologique (Premier Parallèle, 2025). Les deux artistes et enseignants-chercheurs nous invitent à nous intéresser aux objets techniques qui nous entourent, à les observer pour nous libérer de leur autorité. Ces 11 nouveaux exercices d’observation active nous montrent que comprendre la technique nécessite, plus que jamais, de chercher à l’observer autrement que la manière dont elle nous est présentée. 

A contre-emploi commence par un moulin à café qui tombe en panne et continue en explorant des machines qui dysfonctionnent… Dans ce monde à réparer, nous avons « à remettre du je » dans le lien que nous entretenons avec les machines. Que ce soit en explorant les controverses situées des trottinettes en libre accès ou les rapports difficiles que nous avons à nos imprimantes, les deux artistes nous invitent au glanage pour ré-armer notre sensibilité technique. Ils nous invitent à ré-observer notre rapport aux objets techniques, pour mieux le caractériser, en s’inspirant des travaux d’observations typologiques réalisés par Bernd et Hilla Becher ou par Marianne Wex par exemple. Pour Raffard et Roussel, à la suite des travaux du psychologue James Gibson dans Approche écologique de la perception visuelle (1979, éditions du Dehors, 2014), c’est en se déplaçant dans notre environnement visuel qu’on peut voir émerger d’autres catégories. C’est le mouvement qui nous permet de voir autrement, rappellent-ils Pour les deux artistes : « c’est la fixité de notre position d’observateur qui rend notre lecture des environnements technologiques compliquée ». 

Pour changer de regard sur la technologie, nous avons besoin d’une « nouvelle écologie de la perception ». Pour cela, ils nous invitent donc à démonter nos objets pour mieux les comprendre, pour mieux les cartographier, pour mieux saisir les choix socio-économiques qui y sont inscrits et déplacer ainsi leur cadre symbolique. Ils nous invitent également à lire ce qu’on y trouve, comme les inscriptions écrites sur les circuits électroniques, d’une manière quasi-automatique, comme quand Kenneth Goldsmith avait recopié un exemplaire du New York Times pour mieux se sentir concerné par tout ce qui y était inscrit – voir notre lecture de L’écriture sans écriture (Jean Boîte éditions, 2018). Raffard et Roussel rappellent que jusqu’en 1970, jusqu’à ce qu’Intel mette au point le processeur 4004, tout le monde pouvait réencoder une puce électronique, comme l’explique le théoricien des médias Friedrich Kittler dans Mode protégé (Presses du réel, 2015). Cet accès a été refermé depuis, nous plongeant dans le « paradoxe de l’accessibilité » qui veut que « plus un objet devient universel et limpide en surface, plus il devient opaque et hermétique en profondeur. Autrement dit, ce que l’on gagne en confort d’expérience, on le perd en capacité de compréhension – et d’action ». Pour le géographe Nigel Thrift, nos objets technologiques nous empêchent d’avoir pleinement conscience de leur réalité. Et c’est dans cet « inconscient technologique », comme il l’appelait, que les forces économiques prennent l’ascendant sur nos choix. « Dans les sociétés technocapitalistes, nous sommes lus davantage que nous ne pouvons lire ».

Ils nous invitent à extraire les mécanismes que les objets assemblent, comme nous y invitait déjà le philosophe Gilbert Simondon quand il évoquait l’assemblage de « schèmes techniques », c’est-à-dire l’assemblage de mécanismes existants permettant de produire des machines toujours plus complexes. Ils nous invitent bien sûr à représenter et schématiser les artefacts à l’image des vues éclatées, diffractées que proposent les dessins techniques, tout en constatant que la complexité technologique les a fait disparaître. On pense bien sûr au travail de Kate Crawford  (Anatomy of AI, Calculating Empires) et son « geste stratégique », ou établir une carte permet de se réapproprier le monde. On pense également au Handbook of Tyranny (Lars Müller Publishers,  2018) de l’architecte Theo Deutinger ou les topographies de pouvoir de l’artiste Mark Lombardi ou encore au Stack (UGA éditions, 2019) du designer Benjamin Bratton qui nous aident à visualiser et donc à comprendre la complexité à laquelle nous sommes confrontés. La cartographie aide à produire des représentations qui permettent de comprendre les points faibles des technologies, plaident les artistes. Elle nous aide à comprendre comment les technologies peuvent être neutralisées, comme quand Extinction Rébellion a proposé de neutraliser les trottinettes électriques urbaines en barrant à l’aide d’un marqueur indélébile, les QR codes pour les rendre inutilisables. Ces formes de neutralisations, comme on les trouve dans le travail de Simon Weckert et son hack de Google Maps en 2020, permettent de faire dérailler la machine, de trouver ses faiblesses, de contourner leur emprise, de « s’immiscer dans l’espace que contrôlent les technologies », de contourner ou détourner leurs assignations, de détourner leurs usages, c’est-à-dire de nous extraire nous-mêmes des scénarios d’usages dans lesquels les objets technologiques nous enferment, c’est-à-dire de réécrire les « scripts normatifs » que les technologies, par leur pouvoir, nous assignent, de comprendre leur « toxicité relationnelle ». 

Ils nous invitent enfin à construire nos machines, bien plus modestement qu’elles n’existent, bien sûr. Les machines que nous sommes capables de refaçonner, seuls, ne peuvent répondre à la toute-puissance des technologies modernes, rappellent-ils en évoquant leur tentative de reconstruire une imprimante à jet d’encre. Raffard et Roussel ont reconstruit une imprimante encombrante et peu performante, tout comme Thomas Thwaites avait reconstruit un grille-pain défaillant (The Toaster Project, Princeton, 2011). Cette bricologie a néanmoins des vertus, rappellent les artistes. Elle nous rappelle qu’à la toute puissance répond la vulnérabilité, à la high tech, la low tech. Et que ce changement même de regard, cette réappropriation, permet au moins de modifier le système cognitif des utilisateurs. Comme quand les manifestes cyberféministes nous invitent à regarder le monde autrement (souvenez-vous de Data Feminism). Pour Raffard et Roussel, créer des situations de vulnérabilité permet de changer la relation que nous avons avec les objets techniques. De nous réinterroger, pour savoir si nous sommes satisfaits de la direction dans laquelle les objets technologiques et nous-mêmes évoluons. En nous invitant à décider de ce que nous voulons faire de nos technologies et de ce que nous acceptons qu’elles nous fassent, ils militent pour une éducation à l’expérimentation technologique, qui fait peut-être la part un peu trop belle à notre rapport aux technologies, plutôt qu’à notre liberté à ne pas s’y intéresser. 

Le manuel pour réveiller notre curiosité technologique oublie peut-être que nous aurions aussi envie de les éteindre, de nous en détourner, de nous y opposer. Car le constat qu’ils dressent, à savoir celui que nous ne sommes pas capables de reproduire la puissance des machines contemporaines par nous-mêmes, risque d’être perçu comme un aveu d’impuissance. C’est peut-être là, la grande limite au démontage qu’ils proposent. Renforcer notre impuissance, plutôt que de nous aider à prendre le contrôle des systèmes, à peser de nos moyens d’actions collectifs contre eux, comme le peuvent la démocratie technique et la législation. Nous pouvons aussi parfois vouloir que la technologie ne nous saisisse pas… Et prendre le contrôle des systèmes pour que cela n’arrive pas, les réguler, nous y opposer, refuser de les comprendre, de les faire entrer là où nous ne voulons pas qu’ils interviennent est aussi un levier pour nous saisir des objets qui s’imposent autour de nous.

Hubert Guillaud

MAJ du 7/11/2025 : Signalons que Matthieu Raffard et Mathilde Roussel publient un autre livre, directement issu de leur thèse, Bourrage papier : leçons politiques d’une imprimante (Les liens qui libèrent, 2025).

A US Army website for its bases in Bavaria, Germany published a list of food banks in the area that could help soldiers and staff as part of its “Shutdown Guidance,” the subtext being that soldiers and base employees might need to obtain free food from German government services during the government shutdown.

Over the last few months 404 Media has covered some concerning but predictable uses for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are equipped with a built-in camera, and for some models, AI. Aftermarket hobbyists have modified the glasses to add a facial recognition feature that could quietly dox whatever face a user is looking at, and they have been worn by CBP agents during the immigration raids that have come to define a new low for human rights in the United States. Most recently, exploitative Instagram users filmed themselves asking workers at massage parlors for sex and shared those videos online, a practice that experts told us put those workers’ lives at risk. 

404 Media reached out to Meta for comment for each of these stories, and in each case Meta’s rebuttal was a mind-bending argument: What is the difference between Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and an iPhone, really, when you think about it?

“Curious, would this have been a story had they used the new iPhone?” a Meta spokesperson asked me in an email when I reached out for comment about the massage parlor story. 

Meta’s argument is that our recent stories about its glasses are not newsworthy because we wouldn’t bother writing them if the videos in question were filmed with an iPhone as opposed to a pair of smart glasses. Let’s ignore the fact that I would definitely still write my story about the massage parlor videos if they were filmed with an iPhone and “steelman” Meta’s provocative argument that glasses and a phone are essentially not meaningfully different objects. 

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and an iPhone are both equipped with a small camera that can record someone secretly. If anything, the iPhone can record more discreetly because unlike Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses it’s not equipped with an LED that lights up to indicate that it’s recording. This, Meta would argue, means that the glasses are by design more respectful of people’s privacy than an iPhone. 

Both are small electronic devices. Both can include various implementations of AI tools. Both are often black, and are made by one of the FAANG companies. Both items can be bought at a Best Buy. You get the point: There are too many similarities between the iPhone and Meta’s glasses to name them all here, just as one could strain to name infinite similarities between a table and an elephant if we chose to ignore the context that actually matters to a human being. 

Whenever we published one of these stories the response from commenters and on social media has been primarily anger and disgust with Meta’s glasses enabling the behavior we reported on and a rejection of the device as a concept entirely. This is not surprising to anyone who has covered technology long enough to remember the launch and quick collapse of Google Glass, so-called “glassholes,” and the device being banned from bars. 

There are two things Meta’s glasses have in common with Google Glass which also make it meaningfully different from an iPhone. The first is that the iPhone might not have a recording light, but in order to record something or take a picture, a user has to take it out of their pocket and hold it out, an awkward gesture all of us have come to recognize in the almost two decades since the launch of the first iPhone. It is an unmistakable signal that someone is recording. That is not the case with Meta’s glasses, which are meant to be worn as a normal pair of glasses, and are always pointing at something or someone if you see someone wearing them in public. 

In fact, the entire motivation for building these glasses is that they are discreet and seamlessly integrate into your life. The point of putting a camera in the glasses is that it eliminates the need to take an iPhone out of your pocket. People working in the augmented reality and virtual reality space have talked about this for decades. In Meta’s own promotional video for the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, titled “10 years in the making,” the company shows Mark Zuckerberg on stage in 2016 saying that “over the next 10 years, the form factor is just going to keep getting smaller and smaller until, and eventually we’re going to have what looks like normal looking glasses.” And in 2020, “you see something awesome and you want to be able to share it without taking out your phone.” Meta's Ray-Ban glasses have not achieved their final form, but one thing that makes them different from Google Glass is that they are designed to look exactly like an iconic pair of glasses that people immediately recognize. People will probably notice the camera in the glasses, but they have been specifically designed to look like "normal” glasses.

Again, Meta would argue that the LED light solves this problem, but that leads me to the next important difference: Unlike the iPhone and other smartphones, one of the most widely adopted electronics in human history, only a tiny portion of the population has any idea what the fuck these glasses are. I have watched dozens of videos in which someone wearing Meta glasses is recording themselves harassing random people to boost engagement on Instagram or TikTok. Rarely do the people in the videos say anything about being recorded, and it’s very clear the women working at these massage parlors have no idea they’re being recorded. The Meta glasses have an LED light, sure, but these glasses are new, rare, and it’s not safe to assume everyone knows what that light means. 

As Joseph and Jason recently reported, there are also cheap ways to modify Meta glasses to prevent the recording light from turning on. Search results, Reddit discussions, and a number of products for sale on Amazon all show that many Meta glasses customers are searching for a way to circumvent the recording light, meaning that many people are buying them to do exactly what Meta claims is not a real issue. 

It is possible that in the future Meta glasses and similar devices will become so common that most people will understand that if they see them, they would assume they are being recorded, though that is not a future I hope for. Until then, if it is all helpful to the public relations team at Meta, these are what the glasses look like:

And this is what an iPhone looks like:

Feel free to refer to this handy guide when needed. 

We have something of a Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses bumper episode this week. We start with Joseph and Jason’s piece on a $60 mod that disables the privacy-protecting recording light in the smart glasses. After the break, Emanuel tells us how some people are abusing the glasses to film massage workers, and he explains the difference between a phone and a pair of smartglasses, if you need that spelled out for you. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us about the future of advertising: AI-generated ads personalized directly to you.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light
• Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Users Film and Harass Massage Parlor Workers
• The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You

Les cartes de fidélité ne sont plus ce qu’elles étaient, explique le Washington Post. « Les entreprises prétendent récompenser votre fidélité par des points, des réductions et des avantages. Mais en coulisses, elles utilisent de plus en plus ces programmes pour surveiller votre comportement et créer un profil, puis vous facturer le prix qu’elles pensent que vous paierez ». Le journaliste tech Geoffrey Fowler a demandé à Starbuck les données relatives à son profil lié à sa carte de fidélité. En les analysant, il a constaté que plus il achetait de café, moins il recevait de promotions : « plus j’étais fidèle, moins je bénéficiais de réductions ». Pour les commissaires du bureau de la protection des consommateurs à la Federal Trade Commission, Samuel Levine et Stephanie Nguyen, les programmes de fidélité se sont transformé en moteurs de « tarification de surveillance » : les entreprises utilisent l’IA et les données personnelles pour fixer des prix individualisés, autrement dit des marges personnalisées. Dans un rapport publié avec le Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator consacré au « piège de la loyauté », ils affirment que les programmes de fidélité ont inversé le concept de fidélité : au lieu de récompenser les clients réguliers, les entreprises pourraient en réalité facturer davantage à leurs clients fidèles. En fait, les clients réguliers bénéficient de moins de réduction que les clients occasionnels et finissent donc par payer plus cher du fait de leur loyauté. Les entreprises utilisent les données de consommation pour déterminer votre sensibilité au prix et votre capacité à payer. Starbuck n’est pas la seule entreprise à utiliser ses programmes de fidélité pour optimiser ses profits. 

Une enquête menée par Consumer Reports a révélé que Kroger, l’une des grandes enseignes de la grande distribution aux Etats-Unis, utilise des données clients détaillées, notamment des estimations de revenus, pour personnaliser les remises via son programme de fidélité. Pour Levine et Nguyen, les programmes de fidélité sont devenus une mauvaise affaire pour les consommateurs.

Via ces programmes, les entreprises attirent les clients avec des remises importantes, puis réduisent discrètement ces avantages au fil du temps. Les compagnies aériennes en sont l’exemple le plus flagrant : obtenir un vol gratuit nécessite de collecter de plus en plus de points avec le temps. Les points se déprécient, les dates d’effets se réduisent… bref, l’utilisation du programme de fidélité se complexifie. Désormais, toutes les entreprises vous poussent à passer par leur application pour surveiller vos achats. Même les programmes gratuits s’y mettent. « Les entreprises ne disent pas la vérité sur la quantité de données qu’elles collectent et sur ce qu’elles en font », explique Samuel Levine. Reste qu’abandonner les programmes de fidélité n’est pas si simple, car sans eux, impossible d’obtenir les premières réductions alléchantes qu’ils proposent. « Nous ne devrions pas être obligés de choisir entre payer nos courses et protéger notre vie privée », conclut Levine. 

Les lois des États sur la protection de la vie privée obligent déjà les entreprises à minimiser la quantité de données qu’elles collectent, mais ces lois ne sont pas appliquées aux programmes de fidélité, affirment Levine et Nguyen, qui militent également pour améliorer la surveillance des prix, comme le proposait leur rapport pour la FTC. Ils invitent les consommateurs à être moins fidèles, à supprimer régulièrement leurs applications, à s’inscrire sous différents mails. « J’entends souvent des lecteurs me demander pourquoi ils devraient se soucier de la surveillance. Voici une réponse : ce n’est pas seulement votre vie privée qui est en jeu. C’est votre portefeuille », conclut le journaliste.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has publicly released an app that Sheriff Offices, police departments, and other local or regional law enforcement can use to scan someone’s face as part of immigration enforcement, 404 Media has learned.

The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) app called Mobile Fortify that uses facial recognition to nearly instantly bring up someone’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. The new local law enforcement-focused app, called Mobile Identify, crystallizes one of the exact criticisms of DHS’s facial recognition app from privacy and surveillance experts: that this sort of powerful technology would trickle down to local enforcement, some of which have a history of making anti-immigrant comments or supporting inhumane treatment of detainees.

Handing “this powerful tech to police is like asking a 16-year old who just failed their drivers exams to pick a dozen classmates to hand car keys to,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media. “These careless and cavalier uses of facial recognition are going to lead to U.S. citizens and lawful residents being grabbed off the street and placed in ICE detention.”

Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government can search without a warrant or court order. The data broker is called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), and, as 404 Media has shown, it sells flight data to multiple parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a host of other government agencies, while contractually demanding those agencies not reveal where the data came from.

It turns out, it is possible to opt-out of this data selling, including to government agencies. At least, that’s what I found when I ran through the steps to tell ARC to stop selling my personal data. Here’s how I did that:

1. I emailed privacy@arccorp.com and, not yet knowing the details of the process, simply said I wish to delete my personal data held by ARC.
2. A few hours later the company replied with some information and what I needed to do. ARC said it needed my full name (including middle name if applicable), the last four digits of the credit card number used to purchase air travel, and my residential address. 
3. I provided that information. The following month, ARC said it was unable to delete my data because “we and our service providers require it for legitimate business purposes.” The company did say it would not sell my data to any third parties, though. “However, even though we cannot delete your data, we can confirm that we will not sell your personal data to any third party for any reason, including, but not limited to, for profiling, direct marketing, statistical, scientific, or historical research purposes,” ARC said in an email.
4. I then followed up with ARC to ask specifically whether this included selling my travel data to the government. “Does the not selling of my data include not selling to government agencies as part of ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program or any other forms?” I wrote. The Travel Intelligence Program, or TIP, is the program ARC launched to sell data to the government. ARC updates it every day with the previous day’s ticket sales and it can show a person’s paid intent to travel.
5. A few days later, ARC replied. “Yes, we can confirm that not selling your data includes not selling to any third party, including, but not limited to, any government agency as part of ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program,” the company said.

Honestly, I was quite surprised at how smooth and clear this process was. ARC only registered as a data broker with the state of California—a legal requirement—in June, despite selling data for years. 

What I did was not a formal request under a specific piece of privacy legislation, such as the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Maybe a request to delete information under the CCPA would have more success; that law says California residents have the legal right to ask to have their personal data deleted “subject to certain exceptions (such as if the business is legally required to keep the information),” according to the California Department of Justice’s website.

ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, according to publicly released documents. Its board includes representatives from Delta, United, American Airlines, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines, Canada’s Air Canada, and European airlines Air France and Lufthansa. 

Public procurement records show agencies such as ICE, CBP, ATF, TSA, the SEC, the Secret Service, the State Department, the U.S. Marshals, and the IRS have purchased ARC data. Agencies have given no indication they use a search warrant or other legal mechanism to search the data. In response to inquiries from 404 Media, ATF said it follows “DOJ policy and appropriate legal processes” and the Secret Service declined to answer.

An ARC spokesperson previously told 404 Media in an email that TIP “was established by ARC after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has since been used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community to support national security and prevent criminal activity with bipartisan support. Over the years, TIP has likely contributed to the prevention and apprehension of criminals involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, sex trafficking, national security threats, terrorism and other imminent threats of harm to the United States.” At the time, the spokesperson added “Pursuant to ARC’s privacy policy, consumers may ask ARC to refrain from selling their personal data.”

Sur Fake Tech, en 4 billets fleuves, Christophe Le Boucher dresse une histoire de la Silicon Valley qui vaut vraiment le déplacement. S’inspirant de la somme de Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto : A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little Brown and company, 2023, non traduit) Le Boucher rappelle combien la Valley relève du colonialisme et d’une privatisation par le capitalisme. Et montre que la conquête du monde repose sur une radicalisation du modèle économique et politique des ingénieurs et entrepreneurs qui la façonnent. Les articles sont longs et riches, mais vous ne regretterez pas votre lecture. Ca commence par là.

« Le fait d’avoir un super assistant doit surtout nous rappeler qu’il s’agit avant tout de nous placer en situation de super assistés ». Olivier Ertzscheid – Affordance

Très belle série du Monde en 6 articles sur l’ogre Airbnb, la solution de rentabilisation immédiate et maximale de l’immobilier privé. La série commence par décrire son emprise en quelques années et termine en montrant comment la ville de New York a réussi à endiguer le fléau en créant de la complexité administrative, plus encore en obligeant les propriétaires à être présents pendant le séjour des locataires et en renforçant les contrôles.

Kodak quietly acknowledged Monday that it will begin selling two famous types of film stock—Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ultramax 400—directly to retailers and distributors in the U.S., another indication that the historic company is taking back control over how people buy its film.

The release comes on the heels of Kodak announcing that it would make and sell two new stocks of film called Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200 in October. On Monday, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax showed back up on Kodak’s website as film stocks that it makes and sells. When asked by 404 Media, a company spokesperson said that it has “launched” these film stocks and will begin to “sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market.”

Unlike Kodacolor, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax have been widely available to consumers for years, but the way it was distributed made little sense and was an artifact of its 2012 bankruptcy. Coming out of that bankruptcy, Eastman Kodak (the 133-year-old company) would continue to make film, but the exclusive rights to distribute and sell it were owned by a completely separate, UK-based company called Kodak Alaris. For the last decade, Kodak Alaris has sold Kodak Gold and Ultramax (as well as Portra, and a few other film stocks made by Eastman Kodak). This setup has been confusing for consumers and perhaps served as an incentive for Eastman Kodak to not experiment as much with the types of films it makes, considering that it would have to license distribution out to another company.

That all seemed to have changed with the recent announcement of Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200, Kodak’s first new still film stocks in many years. Monday’s acknowledgement that both Kodak Gold and Ultramax would be sold directly by Eastman Kodak, and which come with a rebranded and redesigned box, suggests that the company has figured out how to wrest some control of its distribution away from Kodak Alaris. Eastman Kodak told 404 Media in a statement that it has “launched” these films and that they are “Kodak-marketed versions of existing films.”

 "Kodak will sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market,” a Kodak spokesperson said in an email. “This direct channel will provide distributors, retailers and consumers with a broader, more reliable supply and help create greater stability in a market where prices have often fluctuated.”

 The company called it an “extension of Kodak’s film portfolio,” which it said “is made possible by our recent investments that increased our film manufacturing capacity and, along with the introduction of our KODAK Super 8 Camera and KODAK EKTACHROME 100D Color Reversal Film, reflects Kodak’s ongoing commitment to meeting growing demand and supporting the long-term health of the film industry.”

It is probably too soon to say how big of a deal this is, but it is at least exciting for people who are in the resurgent film photography hobby, who are desperate for any sign that companies are interested in launching new products, creating new types of film, or building more production capacity in an industry where film shortages and price increases have been the norm for a few years.

Lawmakers have called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Flock for allegedly violating federal law by not enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), according to a letter shared with 404 Media. The demand comes as a security researcher found Flock accounts for sale on a Russian cybercrime forum, and 404 Media found multiple instances of Flock-related credentials for government users in infostealer infections, potentially providing hackers or other third parties with access to at least parts of Flock’s surveillance network.

arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues,” according to a press release about the change.

arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it’s become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don’t pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.

Review articles are overviews of a given topic that tend to be a summary of current research. Position papers are the academic equivalent of an opinion piece. It’s these two types of articles that arXiv is cracking down on.

Because of an onslaught of AI-generated research, specifically in the computer science (CS) section, arXiv is going to limit which papers can be published. “In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers,” arXiv said in a press release. “Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write.”

The site noted that this was less a policy change and more about stepping up enforcement of old rules. “When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration,” it said. “Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.”

According to the press release, arXiv has been inundated by articles but that CS was the worst category. “We now receive hundreds of review articles every month,” arXiv said. “The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand.

The plan is to enforce a blanket ban on review articles and positions papers in the CS category and free the moderators to look at more substantive submissions. arXiv stressed that it does not often accept review articles, but had been doing so when it was of academic interest and from a known researcher. “If other categories see a similar rise in LLM-written review articles and position papers, they may choose to change their moderation practices in a similar manner to better serve arXiv authors and readers,” arXiv said.

AI-generated research articles are a pressing problem in the scientific community. Scam academic journals that run pay-to-publish schemes are an issue that plagued academic publishing long before AI, but the advent of LLMs has supercharged it. But scam journals aren’t the only ones affected. Last year, a serious scientific journal had to retract a paper that included an AI-generated image of a giant rat penis. Peer reviewers, the people who are supposed to vet scientific papers for accuracy, have also been caught cutting corners using ChatGPT in part because of the large demands placed on their time.

Update: The original version of this article made it appear that arXiv had stopped accepting CS articles that were under peer review. It's a narrow ban on article reviews and position papers. We've updated the story and subtitle to reflect this and regret the error.